In this episode, I discuss what death is, arguing that it is the cessation of one's existence and not necessarily one's life, I discuss the difference between death, dying and the condition of being a corpse, whether death must be permanent, whether one can have an exit from life without dying, and what implications gappy existence has for a proper definition of death.
In this episode, I discuss what death is, arguing that it is the cessation of one's existence and not necessarily one's life, I discuss the difference between death, dying and the condition of being a corpse, whether death must be permanent, whether one can have an exit from life without dying, and what implications gappy existence has for a proper definition of death.
Welcome to Mortality Matters, a podcast about conceptual issues in the philosophy of death and the meaning of life. I am your host, Matthew Sternberg. What is death anyway? Is it temporary or permanent? Does death consist in some form of experiential blank? Or when we die, do we transition to some afterlife in which we continue to accrue experiences of some sort or another though perhaps without the benefit of our flesh? And furthermore, what properly should we contrast death with? So in this episode, I'm going to be covering the first half of chapter two of John Martin Fisher's book, death Immortality and Meaning in Life in which he focuses, at least in the first half, that chapter on the meaning of death. Fisher advances the view that death consists in the permanent cessation of life with a few notable exceptions. However, in this episode, I would like to give you some reasons to prefer what I might describe as a metaphysical conception of death according to which death consists not in the cessation of life, according to which you'd be a biological concept, but rather death consists in the cessation of existence. Which importantly is not quite the same as life, although when we are alive, we exist. The question remains open at the moment, whether we exist without being alive or whether that's even possible. Fisher's project is to try to understand how or or why death is normally bad for the one who dies. And to do that, he sets up some preliminary distinctions and clarifications. So for instance, it shouldn't be altogether puzzling. Why dying is typically bad for you because it typically correlates with quite a lot of pain and suffering, and pain and suffering are bad for you. So therefore dying is so that is not altogether mysterious. Now what Fisher is attempting to vindicate is what he describes as the common sense view, which is a secular one. That death consists in a kind of experiential blank, and nevertheless is still not only bad for you and harmful, it harms you to die, but is sufficient to be afraid of it. There's sufficient reason to fear death and avoid it whenever possible. All things considered, of course, because there are some notable exceptions. So for instance, if you are at the end stages of your life and you're in terrible, unrelenting pain without reasonable prospect for recovery, then perhaps in under those circumstances or similar circumstances, then death might actually be good for you or at least the lesser evil in comparison to the continuation of the suffering, depending on the severity. With those kinds of caveats, kind of just out of the way. Then you might ask yourself, well, how is this possible? Well, we'll consider challenges to the possibility of the harm of death in another episode. But there's a prior question here that must be tackled with first, which is just what does it mean to die at all? Furthermore, the goal here hopefully should be to try to have a unified account, or at least at some suitable level of generality. Some definition of what death consists in, which could be agreed to by both religious and non-religious people who disagree about the particulars, about what the nature of the afterlife is or particular doctrines, but nevertheless, they still can agree at some level of generality what death is to begin with or what it means to die. It would be desirable to have an account of this that gives conditions that are individually necessary and jointly sufficient. That describes not just when the conditions are met for humans to die, but for any kind of organism to die. Cats, dogs, ameba, maybe even bacteria. If bacteria are alive, then presumably they die as well. Furthermore, there's other, perhaps non-biological forums of existence that we should probably examine. So having a general account of death might, it might be too big of a task. So what Fisher does is he focuses predominantly on the human case, cuz we're humans, right? We have a, we have an interest at stake in trying to figure this out. Nevertheless, generality is always desirable, especially when giving an analysis of a concept like death. So with that, we come to the first fork in the road, which is to try to decide whether to adopt a secular or religious approach to the nature of the subject, and perhaps the manner in which you would approach the subject might differ depending on which approach you take. Fisher takes a secular approach where he presumes for the moment that death is a experiential blank, that this is not something anyone indeed does experience, but there's nothing it's like to be dead because there's no such person. The person no longer exists, right? So we'll adopt that framework along with Fisher for now to see where it leads. And depending on where it leads, we may or may not abandon that framework. For the moment we can take it on board. However, let's just keep in mind the caveat that it's desirable to have a suitably general view of the matter. So the next fork in the road we come to is whether or not we should consider death to be temporary or permanent. And there are some good reasons to prefer the permanent view, which is what Fisher ultimately agrees with. But before we get into what his reasons are, for preferring to think of death as a permanent condition, once it occurs, it occurs permanently or irreversibly. He regards those as the same. I think we should first introduce another distinction, which is a trifold distinction between the process leading up to death, known as dying, and the condition that someone is in after it occurred, namely being dead. Now, you might argue with the way I phrased that, but the thought is we have corpses, at least in the human case, these corpses used to be people. They are dead, and there's this transition state. There's this moment between life and death. And so if you were to put on a timeline, you have some period of time in which the person is dying, then you have the moment at which they die, and after that you have the condition of being dead. Now I put it in terms of a moment, but I, I don't think we need to assume that although some in the literature think this, that death must be instantaneous in order to be a transition between life and the condition of being dead at all. I don't see a strong argument for that, especially if you might be skeptical about the existence of instantaneous events. You might think that in order for something to be an event at all, it must take time, must have a duration of some positive sort and not be infinitesimal in duration. However, What the duration of the event consisting of death itself consist in, or what that duration is, isn't altogether important or relevant to this discussion because you need not accept that death must be instantaneous in order for there to be a division between the process of dying, the event consisting of death, and then the state of affairs consisting the person being dead. And that's how I like to describe it in terms of a process which finalizes into an event of death, after which there are some state of affairs which obtains in which the person can rightly be described as dead. But I usually put it that latter part in terms of, of a description of what the person is like, only because there's no such person I. If it turns out that death or what I call the metaphysical conception of death, according to which death sus sustains the existence of the thing in question, because properly speaking, once something has died, it ceases to exist. There is no such thing that you can even refer to. I'll leave it at that. But that itself is a puzzle. How is it possible to refer to things that do not exist, which is a, a general puzzle in the philosophy of language? So Jora has a whole book on the matter called Death and Non-Existence wonderful book that I may record episodes about in another occasion. Okay, so it's important to have this division between dying death and being dead in mind, even though however padania can seem, partly because it's quite important to notice the difference. So I think it was Woody Allen who said that he wasn't really afraid of being dead. He was just afraid of dying. Uh, partly because I think he was afraid of pain and and suffering, although perhaps he has some more existential reasons to be afraid of the nothingness of in existence. Even if you were to take a extreme dose of opioids in your final days and you don't actually end up feeling any pain, you still might have reasons to fear what awaits you. So Fisher notes this distinction, and he does think of death as this kind of transitory event that occurs between the last part of life and the first part of the condition of being dead, that you might call it corpse hood. I think it needs to be a little sharper than that. However, so he characterizes dying as the last part of living. Right, and so in order to understand death or if we're trying to define what death is or what we first do is try to understand life, right? As kind of the flip side of the coin. Once we can understand what it means to be alive, then the absence of that is what it is to be dead. Seems like a reasonable approach. However, we need to sharpen up what it is to be dying, because on the one hand, you might think of the last part of living, but that itself might be a fairly instantaneous process. So the very last part of your life may be just the last few seconds or the last second. Even clearly, when people are on their deathbed and they're dying in, let's say a late stage cancer untreatable, or perhaps it wasn't responsive to chemotherapy, it's metastasized. It's riddled throughout the body. The body is decaying. The person's lucidity has slipped and we're in the final stages of of hospice care. In those kinds of cases, presumably the person started to die does to say they were dying hours, days, weeks, even before the eventual death occurs. And then there are other cases, I mean, it's easy to imagine simple cases. The, you know, person gets hit by lightning or a bus or something, where in fact there may be no moment of time prior to the death in which the person was dying, except for perhaps very small amounts. Maybe once the lightning. Damages the tissues for all of a split second, the person you could say is dying. But it seems the, the boundary between when the person was dying and when the person dies is so sudden that it, it may be difficult to distinguish the process from the event of death itself. However, in the terminal cancer case, you know, dying may be a process which could stretch out for months or perhaps even years. It just depends on what one means. The semantics should be taken a little bit seriously here because we're just trying to understand, okay, when do people start to die on fisher's characterization? It, it's too short to say that, well, it's the last part of your life. Whatever the last part of your life was, that's when you were dying. That's too short. That could be a few seconds or something. It doesn't adequately capture many cases of these chronic yet terminal illnesses that many people in developed nations at least die from, like light stage cancer. You can also discover something. So you might, for instance, think that you're very optimistic about the chemotherapy upon your diagnosis. You think that the chemotherapy is gonna be successful, turns out not to be, and as a result of the lack of success, turns out perhaps you started dying months before you knew it, and it's a discovery to your, it turns out in fact that you were dying all along. You just didn't know. Now, I think this can be taken to the extreme a bit too far into the past, right? So some people think, for instance, you start dying as soon as you exist. Like babies. They're dying. Everyone's dying. And I think that's too long. I mean, especially with children who are healthy, have no diseases, their biology seems to be functioning very well. They maturate, they grow. They have not even peaked in terms of their health. In the early stages of life when babies are maturing and growing and are healthy and then they continue to grow and they peak, presumably sometime in their twenties, they're no longer babies, but once they're adults, before you physically peak in terms of your health. I think it's just inappropriate to say, it's inapplicable to say that, well, these children are dying even though they're growing and are healthy and have no diseases, yet, they're still dying for these metaphysical reasons or existential reasons. Well, I'm not sure there's any good reason to believe that. Just as Fisher here holds that dying consists in something that's too short. I think Sylvia Plath or, or whomever, should be a little bit shorter. I mean, their, their conception of when it is that you start dying is way too young and seems to not respect the phenomenon of health and maturation and growth, which occurs in all children. And I think that's a better way, a more moderate way of thinking about what dying is, as distinct from what death is. That dying is a process, if otherwise, uninterrupted results in death. This is what you might call like a causal view of dying, where someone begins to die when the causal process terminates in their death. Now that definition is also not really sharp enough because you might also. Argue yes. But if it turns out that causation is transitive and that any event in your life is partly what causes any future event of your life, then your birth is an event that happens to you, which eventually results in your death. So therefore, Sylvia Plath is right. You do start to die as soon as you exist or as soon as you are born. So I think some further sharpening has to be made because I think we can individuate different causal processes. Yes. If you trace the sequence of causes back far enough, any event that happens in your life is a part of the chain which eventuates in any further event in your life. It's not altogether what we might properly describe as the cause. And certainly if somebody had died from the terminal cancer or at the age of 80 or something, the mortician would not write on the death certificate that the person's cause of death was being born in 1950 or whatever. When it comes to how we distinguish one cause from another, or one sequence of causes from a different sequence, we have some contextual matters which determine what it is that we're talking about. But what I have in mind is something like once the cancer metastasized to a certain point, at which point it became lethal. Okay? That was the relevant causal process that began with that metastasis or something like that, and that was the relevant chain from the sequence. So now of course I don't have a general formula to determine and individuate one sequence of causes from another in any given context. It may even be somewhat indeterminate as to what sequence of causes we might be referring to, but I think that's the better way of thinking about it. Even though it's a bit rough and it's a bit vague, I think it gets that sweet spot right in the middle. Right. We're thinking about what actually caused the person's death in the actual sequence of events, and we can just trace it back and we might only be able to discover this in hindsight, but still there's some fact of the matter, even if it's only discoverable. In hindsight, it may have been true all along, at which point the person did begin to die, say at 77, and then died eventually from cancer at 80. Now, if it turned out there was some medical intervention which saved the person's life, then I think it's reasonable to say that while the person wasn't dying all along, in hindsight, however, absent the medical intervention, they were dying all along. So I think it's perfectly fine having causal sequences of dying or as a process, which is contingent. Upon certain interventions such that if the intervention didn't occur or doesn't occur, then the person is dying all along, but set upon intervention the person who's no longer dying. Or another way of putting it is they were dying, but then when the intervention, let's say chemotherapy sent the cancer into remission, it stopped the process of them dying. So what made it a dying process instead of some other horrible disease was that it was fatal and it would've been fatal had the intervention not occurred. All right, so now that we have some under, hopefully a better understanding, if I didn't muddy the waters too much about the nature of dying as distinct from death, I think we need to think about, okay, so we're not talking about the process that leads to death or eventuates in death or causes death. Instead, we're thinking about death itself, which does not overlap in time with dying. Now while you are dying, you're alive. And it seems right to say that what was never alive cannot die. In order to die, at least at some point in time, you have to be alive. But I think Fisher is right when he says that death does not include any part of life as to say, in some sense, it's the liminal point of life. It's not like going to a ballgame where there's an event that occurs during your life that overlaps with you being alive, that death and life are mutually exclusive. Nothing is both dead and alive. Of course, we're putting zombies and undead creatures aside for the moment. I think in some ways the so-called undead of fiction, whether that's uh, movies or dungeons and dragons or fantasy literature, those creatures seem alive. They just used to be dead. There's some other creature there now. So the next fork in the road to ask yourself is whether death is a biological concept or whether it's what I would describe as a metaphysical concept tonight earlier made this distinction between thinking of death as the cessation of life, which is what I would describe as a biological concept, as opposed to thinking of it as the cessation of existence. Why does this matter? Well, you think it might matter because of the possibility of artificial life or artificial intelligence. So if sometime in the future we manage to create a robot with general artificial intelligence, which is perhaps even smarter than human beings. These seems to exhibit from the outside a sense of phenomenology, a kind of conscious experience of what it's like to be something and further, to seem to exhibit choices that it can make freely and have other markers. The things that we tend to think are in the domain of agency or for human beings, but these robots can do all of those things and perhaps more. So can they die? Well, if death is a biological concept and these are not biological beings in some sense, then no. Now you might think that these beings are alive, but they're silicon based beings. They're, they're just not carbon based life forms the way that we are. So I do think it's important to keep in mind other kinds of organisms, not just humans or even cats and dogs, but also things that aren't even real yet. Things that perhaps could be real in the future. Because if we're trying to give a general analysis, Or a general definition of death, we have to consider not just the things that actually exist, we also have to consider hypotheticals, maybe fantasy and fiction and or things that may be fiction today, but may not be fiction in the far future. So I think this is one reason to favor what I might describe as my metaphysical approach to thinking about death, where it's the cessation of existence. So an artificially intelligent robot is not alive, and yet when you destroy it, you can make it cease to exist. At some point, you destroy the robot. It's functionality can no longer support its artificial intelligence. So that's destroyed and that destruction consists in killing it. How do you kill it? It ceases to exist. Now, this may not be fully in line with common usage. I think our usage of talking about death and killing is equivocal between thinking of, of how you might kill a machine versus might kill a human being or animal of some kind. When we describe pulling the plug on a computer, uh, let's say a pc, which is hooked up to, uh, socket. So you pull the plug on it and it kills the computer. Now that's kind of a metaphorical usage of the word kill. Right to kill is to cause something to die. You're not murdering something, right? It's just a computer. It ceases to function. The cessation of its function, consistent it turning off and powering down. But that doesn't kill the thing cuz it, you might think it's not alive and that's the reason because killing and death are biological concepts. But there's a fundamental difference though between just a general computer, which is not a thinking thing, and a general artificial intelligence, which is a thinking thing and does have some capacity for making free choices. Now we could argue about whether or not it can have free will or whether or not an AI could ever make free choices, or if there's anything it's like to be this thing. Perhaps there isn't. Perhaps it can't make choices freely and there's further implications, which would be interesting. However, if that's the case, then it would be no different in kind than just pulling the plug on a regular pc, at which point you're not really killing the thing when it ceases to exist. Perhaps it's possible. Perhaps it's possible for there to be something. It's like to be a, a artificially intelligent being, at which point having it ceased to exist or making it ceased to exist, arguably would be a way of killing it. And if that's so, that's another reason to prefer death as the cessation of existence and not merely the cessation of life. Now, you might argue, for instance, that, well, it's alive in a different way, and I think I mentioned silicone life. But again, I think that might be stretching the concept of life. And I think it's more plausible to me at least to stretch the concept of death than stretching the concept of life, or at least if you tend to think of being alive as a positive phenomenon where there's certain processes which are necessary for the. Continuance of, of one's life. Then you might also think of death as a kind of negative condition as the absence of those process, at which point, okay, there may be some beings, which, well, they're not alive because they don't have a brain that functions, or a heartbeat that flows blood, but they nevertheless can die because they cease to exist. So this is where Fisher thinks that well, life is a biological concept. That what is necessary or sufficient for something to be alive may actually differ. Because when I was mentioning there being a brain or a heart, I was thinking about human beings, right? But you might think about some organisms which don't have hearts or don't have brains, and yet are alive. Like mini bacteria, for instance, are alive. And of course they have neither, but there may even be some animals you might think of, or plants definitely, or fungi, which have neither hearts nor brains and yet are alive. So the details matter, but they would differ depending on the different species that we're discussing, what they all have in common. Well, perhaps they all metabolize. That might be one way they might extract nutrients for growth or to eliminate waste. I'm not entirely sure if we need to actually come up with a, a list of the essential properties for all and only those things which are alive in order to at least give a few examples. Perhaps this waves a hand a little too much, but this is what Fisher does. He says, at least with human beings, life seems to require the beating of a heart for the circulation of blood and the functioning of a brain to direct metabolism and cellular repair and so forth. The beating of a heart could cease for a short while, and the person could be resuscitated and still be the same person. As to say there was no point in time in which the person died and then was brought back to life. Rather, they continued to live throughout that whole process of their heart stopping, but then coming back. But perhaps there are other vital processes. For instance, the complete lack of function of the brain, which would result in the person's death. And notice also that consciousness is not unnecessary condition. Right? So, There may be certain times in your life where you certainly go to sleep each night, and there's certain forms of consciousness. You may or may not have all sleep, but you're certainly not as awake as you are during the day. That's not the kind I think that Fisher has in mind though. I mean, he's thinking about any form of consciousness whatsoever and perhaps fetuses or perhaps human beings that sometimes in their lives without the capacity for any form of consciousness and yet are still alive. It seems as if the times at which you are alive are. A super set of the times at which you're conscious in any form of consciousness, however you specify what that means. I mentioned that if only because the word consciousness is such a, it's a big word that packs a lot of different distinctions in it. So you might think of the feeling of what it's like to undergo an experience as a kind of, of consciousness. You're like conscious of the color, uh, red when you look at a certain balloon or something. There's also the kind of awareness or self-awareness versus awareness of others or awareness of other things, which is what you might have in mind. There's also a certain forms of thinking which may actually be quite complicated, which are another form of, of cogitation you could say. So however we specify the kind of consciousness that we have under consideration, it seems like for any of those different distinctions or for different forms of consciousness, for any human being, there could be some time. In that human being's life, where that being lacks that form of consciousness and yet is still alive. Furthermore, whichever processes are going on, which may be sufficient to keep us alive, may not be exactly necessary, at least not at all times and places. So, for instance, the beating of your heart, this could s I mean, in some people they, it does stop, and they're resuscitated and they're still alive. They didn't die on the table, so to speak. However, there are certain changes you don't survive from. So for instance, when the brains completely ceases to function and is not capable of resuscitation, so it's a permanent dysfunctionality that could correlate with somebody dying, and in fact, that may be what it means to die, although this is sometimes criticized as So the brain standard of death is one that is utilized for diagnostic purposes in the United States. Among healthcare practitioners. However, there may be some reasons to doubt it, I'm not sure, but whichever it is, it's one thing to consider which biological phenomenon correlate with death and which constitute what it means to die or the, the absence of which or which constitute what it means to be alive. I might say on the flip side, so to put the point a little bit more clearly, if we think for instance, brain functionality is both necessary and sufficient in order for human beings to be alive, then the absence of that presumably would be what it means to be dead. One problem with that is we have thereby given a definition of death that's peculiar to human beings or perhaps anything with a brain. And thereby we, we have only given one example of death for human beings without giving a general account of what it means for anything to die, whether. It has a brain or not. So perhaps we should try to generalize a little bit more beyond the particular bodily organs under consideration, whether it's the heart or the lungs, or the brain, and consider the cessation of life as such. Now, one mistake we probably shouldn't make is kind of circularity worry. So do we have a good enough understanding of what it means to be alive that does not rely, perhaps, implicitly on a prior conception of death? If we think of life as the continued functioning of an organism that is not dead yet, then that last part, that last caveat, would render the account circular as to say, in order to understand what, when something is alive, we have to rely on some independent understanding of when something is dead. But if in turn, in order to understand what it means for something to be dead is well, it's the absence of life there. Thereby we have, uh, just gone around in a circle. So that's not very helpful. And I would say something similar about trying to give a characterization of life in terms of metabolism. So if we define metabolism as a chemical process that occurs within a living organism in order to maintain life, well, that on its own terms, may work well as a general definition of what it means to metabolize what it doesn't illuminate what it means to be alive. So if what we mean by life is the going on of a certain form of metabolism, We can't thereby define metabolism in, in the terms of life or else we would be back to this problem of circularity. We must have some prior independent understanding of what it means to be alive other than metabolism, in order to define metabolism in terms of that, or alternatively, we need a new or better definition of metabolism that does not rely on an understanding of what life is. And of course perhaps there is no general account, but perhaps there's certain characteristic markers which would specify most or almost all things which are alive, even if there could be possible counter examples. We need and essentialize the concept of life in order to come up with a general characterization of it. Perhaps writing a prototypical list of corresponding characteristics for those things which are alive would be sufficient for almost all practical purposes. But I don't think that approach, which would reject the notion that there's some essence to life would be very helpful in trying to understand the nature of death. If only for Fisher's purposes, he wishes to figure out the essence of death. He really thinks that we can essentialize this and that a general definition given in both necessary and sufficient conditions is possible. If Fisher is right, and if this is a desirable goal for our theorizing about the nature of death, then this would perhaps give us more reason to think that death is not a biological category. If it turns out that there's no such thing or could be no such thing as the essence of life itself, but there could be for death, then well, perhaps death is not biological or has biological implications, but those implications may not be applicable in every possible case. So that was my point about thinking not of the nature of the absence of life or the cessation of life, but rather the absence or cessation of existence or existence is a metaphysical question with logical implications, which goes beyond the scope of mere biology. So far, we've been thinking of death as the cessation of life, but we haven't yet explored why we should think of it as the permanent cessation of life and not just a temporary one. So to this end, Fisher considers cases of suspended animation, for example, although he doesn't go into this example, in in vitro fertilization, at least some of the time, fertilized eggs are frozen and preserved for later use. So in cases of fertilized eggs, which are frozen and preserved, the freezing is a way of preserving it, right? So if it turns out that freezing is just killing that particular organism, which is then resurrected and brought to life later, then I think our attitudes about the matter would change a little bit. However, the thought is that freezing is a way of preserving the life of these things. Now if that's true, then you might actually think there's three possible states. Any biological organism could be in the freezing, presumably doesn't kill the fertilized egg, and yet the fertilized egg is not alive. If it were alive, it would grow if in a suitable environment like implanted in uterine lining, and yet the whole point of freezing the um, fertilized egg for IPF F is to prevent it from growing. Insofar as its vital processes are temporarily suspended, then it's in a kind of suspended animation, and this state of being in suspended animation means that the embryo is not alive, but it's also not dead. It's in some third condition, which is neither. It's neither alive nor dead. It's its own condition of suspended animation. You might say. It has stopped living without dying. And perhaps in the future it may be possible to cryogenically freeze full grown adults. Who knows? Maybe, maybe not, I don't know. But if we can think about the conditions in which microorganisms die, or the conditions in which a fertilized embryo dies, then that would help us try to figure out the general nature of death, not just for adult humans, but for all forms of life or even non-life like ai, as I mentioned earlier. And you might say, coming back to the AI case, you might think that these are beings which are not alive, but they're not dead, so perhaps they're in the neither category either. Although I did mention the possibility of thinking of a general artificial intelligent robot or some other being as having a non. Carbon-based form of life, but it's still being alive is perhaps it's vital processes just being radically different than biological beings like human beings. So the cases of suspended animation are sort of in their own category here. If you buy into this, what reason is there to motivate this view? You could say that there's only two possible states for it being to be in, for it to be alive or dead, and cryogenically freezing. Something doesn't really preserve it. It actually kills the thing, but then it kills it in such a way that it's brought back to life later. When you unfreeze the fertilized embryo, it resurrects the dead organism. You could say that. In which case, why would you say that? Well, you would say that if you think that death consists in any. Cessation of life, any whatsoever, even as a temporary one, as long as all of the vital processes are suspended, perhaps for some suitable amount of time that organism has died. And if you're sympathetic with this kind of two-state view, then you would say, you would have to say that these cases of suspended animation are not suspension whatsoever, a preservation whatsoever. They're just killing, but killing in a, in a way that allows for resurrection. And perhaps if you believe that well, resurrection is possible in other kinds of cases, then you might be sympathetic with this two-state view instead of a three-state view. If you're not, if you think that resurrection is impossible, then you might think that, well, a three state view would be a better way of describing what's going on in I V F, or any case of suspended animation for that matter. Which is what partly motivates Fisher's view as we come to Fisher's view here. He thinks that death consists in the permanent cessation of life, which by permanent he means irreversible, does to say. It's not merely that the organism that has its life suspended just so happens to never be resurrected in to the indefinite future, but rather that it cannot be resurrected. That is, it cannot be brought back to have its vital processes resumed. So this is maybe what motivates the three state view, because the things that are in suspended animation are in that condition only temporarily. Yes, they, they're no longer alive for some temporary period of time, but then they're brought back, at which point they continue to live. Their life is preserved. That's the thought. So they never die because, well, it's not permanent. But the difference between the cases of a frozen embryo and a case of somebody freezing to death in the Arctic pole is that person who freezes to death is never gonna be able to come back alive. So the freezing damages his tissues in such a way that it's irreversible now. The irreversibility of his condition is what made it the case that he died. His life processes were suspended permanently. His heart stopped, his brain ceased to function, and they were damaged beyond the ability to come back. Whereas that's not the case with the frozen embryos, which freezing them the much simpler organisms than a full adult. Well, it doesn't damage them to the point of no return. And because they can return and in fact do sometimes return, they have not died. Now, you might think this is kind of unusual because in many cases of IVF, you freeze more embryos than you need. Only a few of them actually come back to life. The others are disposed of when no longer needed. But when do the disposed ones actually die? According to Fisher's view, they don't die when they're disposed of. They die when they're frozen. The freezing kills them. Why does the freezing kill them? Well, because it's permanent. Why is it permanent? Because there's no point in time at which they are in the actual sequence of events that carries on into the future. There's no point in time at which the frozen embryos are brought back to life. Only some of them are. So that seems a bit weird, that one in the same type of act, the freezing kills some, but not others, depending on what happens in the future. But I think Fisher could possibly respond to this objection by thinking, well, you know, whether a freezing is a killing or not is not contingent on such future events. Because in some cases, in, in fact, all the cases of suitable freezings, any one of those embryos could be brought back to life. That is, it's possible. So it's the freezing is not irreversible, and irreversibility is the marker of killing in this case, or the marker of death. So that's how a fisher could respond to that. But I'm not sure he gets the timing of the killing right, or the timing of the death. Right. If instead of being disposed of these embryos are just maintained in that condition, then according to his account they never actually died. But Bunyon, perhaps he thinks that's not a, uh, problem though. But it is, I think, important to at least identify the timing of the death, especially if what makes it the case that the freezing was a killing or not is entirely dependent on extrinsic matters on the future and not what happens simultaneous with the freezing itself. So another problem for Fisher's view of death as a permanent cessation of life is that it seems to conflict with religious conceptions of death. So earlier I mentioned a fork in the road in between taking a secular and a religious approach. And, uh, so far we've been thinking about death in from a secular approach, which is what Fisher does. Now, instead of thinking of death as a, uh, or the condition of being dead as a kind of experiential blank, you could think of an instead or the event consisting of death itself as a, as a kind of transition into some sort of afterlife in which you're transitioning. Out of your biological body into some non-biological form of existence. I'm not really sure what it would be. Well, maybe it depends on the view. So for instance, if you are reincarnated, then well insofar as the reincarnation, if it were say instantaneous, then you would still be within the realm of the biological. It just would be a different body. And something may be true for resurrection as well. So if Jesus actually was resurrected even after some time, you might think that the body that got resurrected might be a different body, even if it was the same. Jesus. Why? Because, well, his former body died and then was miraculously brought back to life. Did Jesus maintain the same body? I'm not sure. Depends on what it means for it to be the same body. All right, Fisher regards himself. He wants to find a common definition of death that can be shared between both religious and secular people at some suitable level of generality. Even if they disagree about the details for what happens to you after you die, they should at least agree about what it means to die. And if instead a religious person were to think that, no, of course when you die, you continue to live perhaps in heaven or hell, even though your heart stopped beating and even though your brain stopped functioning. You're still somehow alive now. I think this is kind of, um, strawman or it's not exactly the right way to characterize religious views of death, only because according to Fisher religious folks, at least of a certain sort, who believe that when we die, we continue to live. I don't think this is the right way of characterizing it live in a, a third realm or, or in heaven or in hell or some other place other than Earth. Now, I don't think that's the right way to characterize it. I think it's better to characterize instead of being alive, characterize it in as existence as a form of existence. Whether biological or not. So the thought is if death is a transition not from being a living homo sapien to being a corpse, but instead it's a transition from being a living homo sapien to some non-physical form of existence, then it seems to me on the religious view, the one who dies persists through the death. That death is a transition as a kind of change. In which that which changes persists through the change. That's not the case for the secular view of death, or at least what I would describe as a metaphysical conception, which is sympathetic to the secular view, which is, if I'm right and that death consists in one's annihilation as to say the cessation of existence, then it's not a transition in which the subject would persist through the change that which changes would cease to exist by that cha, by ipso facto of that very change itself. So the disagreement I think, between the secular and the religious is whether surviving death is possible. And I think secular people would say no, and religious people would say yes. Now, of course, I know that this thesis sometimes called the termination thesis that death makes one cease to exist, or annihilates one, it's another way of describing it. This thesis has been disputed by people who are not religious. Uh, Fred Feldman, for instance, rejects this thesis, uh, argues that we exist as corpses for some period of time. But I find that those views implausible, they tend to be motivated by linguistic considerations about Who are you referring to when you say, say Sam died, and you say, well, Sam still owes me a beer. We made a gentleman's agreement. He lost and he owes me a beer. Who are you speaking about? One way of characterizing that is you're speaking about the past person who was still alive and the implications of the bet, which occurred when the person was alive into the present. Another way of thinking about it is to think about Sam in the present as the corpse. The corpse owes you a beer, which, uh, it may, uh, have the virtue of grounding what it is that you're referring to As a present person, you're certainly speaking in the present tense. After all, you're not using the past tense. So in that sense, Feldman or those who reject the termination thesis seem to do justice to the tents in which we speak or how we speak about the dead. But we shouldn't put too much weight on our modes of speech when it comes to metaphysical questions. Sometimes if they yield these, what I regard as wildly unintuitive results, human beings have a tendency to anthropomorphize things. We get angry at our computers when they cease to function well as if they're somehow responsible for their mistakes. As if they made mistakes at all when they're just not functioning. So I think something similar is going on with thinking of corpses as still owing favors or owing deaths that need to be paid in some ways, this is a, there's a kind of deprecated way of speaking about it. We haven't come to grips with the fact that the person doesn't exist anymore. And we have these remnants of positive affection or resentment or e even any kind of attitude we have treating the person as if they were still alive when they in infect or not. And I see that as a form of anthropomorphization. We simply haven't come to grips with the person's death yet. And to put too much weight on that theoretically, I think would be a mistake. So Fisher kind of mischaracterizes the religious view. I think it's better to think of, and I'm not sure this captures all religious views or every theistic way of thinking about. Death. But if you think that death is a transition to some form of afterlife, whatever that afterlife might be, that you persist through the death, or at least some people survive death, then I think the better way of thinking about that is not that you continue to be alive biologically speaking, but rather you continue to exist. And I would distinguish life from existence in this case. And that would be an example where those two would come apart. That you are alive temporarily. So the analogy here for a religious person would be thinking of life like childhood. It's a phase you eventually grow out of. It doesn't encompass the entirety of your existence. At some points in time, you are alive and at others you're not. And so a religious person could say, well, of course I can agree with the secular person, that death is a cessation of one's vital processes, but you don't continue to live into the afterlife. Well, that's what makes it the afterlife, right? It's. After life. It's not just more life. So I think that would be a less conceptually confused way of, of going. I think that would be a better way of characterizing this religious view that Fisher seems to have in mind. And I think that would help clarify some confusion. So, uh, Fisher introduces this distinction between bodily death and real death or some other form of death. He thinks this distinction would be applicable for the religious folks who think that death is a transition to an afterlife, and it'd be helpful in so far, as you say, well, the religious folks could agree with Fisher that the permanent cessation of life does to say of the relevant biological functions like the beating of the heart or the functioning of the brain. Okay. That useful characterizes what it means to die bodily, to have a bodily death. And when does your body die? It dies when the relevant biological functions. Cease permanently. Right? So they could agree with Fisher on that, but then disagree with him about when you really die, if ever. I think that's not that useful of a distinction because if you think about death as annihilation, then the religious folks may think, well, no one really dies because the soul is immortal. I mean, that's the whole point as partly what motivates the positing of a soul to begin with. Furthermore, there may be some religious people who think that while some may be saved as to say there may be some people perhaps in virtue of their good works on earth, never die as to say there is no point in time at which they cease to exist, that this courtesy is not extended to all beings. The thought would be some beings, perhaps wicked people do cease to exist upon the death of their bodies. How? Because they themselves cease to exist because they're not saved. Right. So that would be another possible view. And I think one virtue of characterizing or having a metaphysical conception of death as the cessation of existence, is that it does unify the religious with the secular conceptions of what death is. That is to say, I think both religious folks and non-religious folks can agree that death consists. In the cessation of existence, and then they disagree about what the relationship is between being alive and existing. So the secular will say that if one exists, one is either alive or perhaps in a state of suspended animation. While the religious folks may say that one can exist without being alive, or even after one dies. Now the religious could say that there's three possible conditions, but I don't see the need to say that. If you are religious, then chances are you probably already believe in the possibility of resurrection. So I don't see why you couldn't also say that. Beings in a state of suspended animation are resurrected upon being brought back to life. There seems to be at least no inconsistency in that view. Now, perhaps, depending on the particulars of your view, you might think resurrection requires a miracle that doesn't occur in in vitro fertilization. So perhaps you would still abide by a three state view that any biological being could be either alive, dead, or in a third state, which is neither. Let's go back to the secular view. So if you think that death is a experiential blank and that there's no afterlife, and there's three possible conditions for anything to be in life, death, and neither, but death itself consists in the permanent cessation of life, well then you're on board with Fisher, but there are still some potential objections to this view. Consider an ameba. Let's give him a name. Alvin. Alvin was a fat and healthy ameba, and he was so fat and healthy that while he underwent fission and became two. ABAs, which we describe, we give them names as well, Amos and Ambrose. So at first there's Alvin. He splits into two. Two only distinct Amebas, Amos and Ambrose. So what happened? So you might think this is a case where Alvin ceases to exist permanently because he becomes two distinct things, which are not the same organism as Alvin. They're different organisms. Amos and Ambrose, that Alvin was replaced by two descendants of his. This is what Derek Parit calls a branch line case where you have a case of what appears to be a single organism that splits into two. How does one become two things? Seems impossible. Right? But you might think, well, it's because Alvin died, right? I mean, you might say that, but that's not the lesson. Fisher takes away from this. In fact, he thinks Alvin no longer is alive, but he didn't really die either. He just kind of split into two. He was quite healthy. That was one of the descriptions of the case. He just split into two beings. He reproduced, you might call it that, and there's Amos and Ambrose now. So that form of reproduction doesn't kill Alvin. You might think, but it also, he's no longer alive, if that's true. Well then this would be a counter example to Fisher's general view that death consists in the permanent cessation of life. Because Alvin, when he splits, he's no longer alive as Alvin. He doesn't die cuz he splits into two. He undergoes fission and yet it's also permanent. So Alvin has permanently gone out of existence, permanently ceased to be alive, and yet has not died. Therefore, death cannot be the permanent cessation of life. So that's the thought. That's why this branch line case is a counter example to Fisher's view. And you could make a very similar case instead of one becoming two things, you could have two things becoming one, which you might describe as fusion, where you have, say, ammos and Ambrose, where to combine into a fourth amba. Now, I don't know, call it Bob. And Bob is some fourth thing that's not the same as Ammos and not the same as Ambrose or Alvin. And yet neither Ammos nor Ambrose died, you might think, but instead was fused into a single thing. They're no longer alive. And yet it's permanent, so neither of them died. So it cannot be the permanent cessation of life. Neither Ammos nor Ambrose are alive, and that's a permanent condition anyway. So you might think of these as deathless exits. Just to confess my view of the matter, I mean I, I seem to think at least intuitively for me, well, this annihilates, both of them we're operating under the presumption here that Alvin ceases to exist when he undergoes fission. That's true. Then it seems to me arguably that Alvin died. Another possible view that I don't find altogether persuasive, but you might think that Ammos and Ambrose were there all along when Alvin existed, but Alvin ceased to exist upon undergoing fission, at which point arose and Ambrose emerged, so to speak. That's another possible view. There's many possible views to take on the matters. You might think, for instance, that Alvin does continue to exist, but in two different forms you might think that he's just multiply located. Perhaps part of them. Part of Alvin is now Ammos, and the other part is Ambrose. That's one way of putting it. I think there was a movie which had a very similar premise at the beginning of the movie, the Prestige. In any event, even if Ammos and Ambrose were there all along from the beginning of Alvin's life, It wouldn't dispute that this is a potential counter example to Fisher's view, if only because Alvin ceases to exist upon fission, at least under this way of thinking about it, and Ams and Ambrose don't. So Alvin would have a deathless exit of all the different options available to think about Ams and Ambrose. You might think, well, perhaps they just die. But it's definitely worth arguing about and thinking about it as to what you might think, what happens to Alvin in both the fission and the Fusion case. So Fisher takes this as an objection, significant enough to have to modify his view. So he does kind of what Derek Parit does when it comes to personal identity. He just makes the view somewhat more complex, and obviously you can't just say, well, Death is the permanent cessation of life, except in cases de fission or fusion. Cuz that would just, it would just seem to be too ad hoc. Right? So here's what happens. So Fisher presents this view of death as, oh, it's, it's when you stop living permanently. Okay? That's what it means for your life to cease permanently. Okay? What about these cases? De fission infusion? Okay. Well, except for those, right? So that the, if you just say, well, I, I don't like your counter example. So instead I'm just gonna make an exception for that. It would seem to be a two ad hoc. We're trying to get a general view of the matter, and as a maneuver, usually it makes most sense to think that we need to reconsider what we think of the nature of death if these cases are possible. So I suppose you could dispute the possibility of such cases arguing that yes, these are grammatically well-formed sentences, but not every grammatically well-formed sentence picks out a genuine possibility that what's being described as a genuine impossibility. You could say that for instance, you just need to motivate that response though a little bit more to explain why you think it's impossible for some independent reason, hopefully. But what Fisher ends up doing is he says, well, okay, now we can kind of summarize his thoughts into a general account of when something dies, an individual dies, if an only, if it permanently ceases living and it doesn't become at least one other living being, which is what seems to happen with Alvin. He becomes two living things. I don't think that's the right way of thinking about it. Cuz if Vin ceases to exist by the fission, then Alvin does not become anything. Alvin just ceases to exist. And furthermore, this additional clause where we say death consists in permanently ceasing to be alive except when the thing becomes other living beings, it's just eScribing the exceptional clause. And so it's no more or less ad hoc than just writing, in the exception into the general definition. So if the first was supposed to be too ad hoc, then this is just as ad hoc and is no better. Fisher also considers the relationship between caterpillars and butterflies. Once the caterpillar enters its cocoon, it goes through a process where it ceases to be alive and then emerges later as a, as a butterfly. And you might think that could also be a deathless exit from life. And you might be right. Once inside the cocoon, caterpillars release enzymes, it dissolves almost all of its body. It turns into basically this like soup, right? There's a certain core of a certain specialized cells that don't dissolve in the cocoon, and those persist. And then when the whole soup reconstitutes into a butterfly, hick grows wings and carries on. So I think a different way of thinking about the relationship between a caterpillar and a butterfly is we need to reconsider what this organism even is to begin with. Perhaps it's just the specialized group of cells that's the core of, of what it is. That's one, maybe one way of thinking about it, but another way of thinking about it, it's just a phase transition. So it's a more radical example of a phase transition than what we undergo in our childhood when we slowly maturate from children into adults. But in principle, it's just a difference of degree of how much of our bodies. Radically transform. Not really that much of a difference in kind. It's just when we maturate as children through our adolescence, we are undergoing slower transitions of a less radical degree, but it's a kind of phase transition. That's to say the child that was our past self doesn't die, except in a metaphorical sense that being is still alive. I mean, you. Presuming you're not a child, presuming you're an adult, whoever's listening to this as an adult, then you didn't die when you cease to be a child, so too, you might think that caterpillars don't die when they become butterflies. Not only do they not die, there's never a point at which they cease to be alive. Their shape changes, their composition changes significantly. But if the cocoon dies, well, no butterfly comes out of it. Right? There's a difference between the caterpillars that die in the cocoon and the caterpillars that don't die in the cocoon. And similarly, there's a difference between caterpillars that cease to be alive in the cocoon and those which continue to live perhaps in a different form. This is a phase transition, not a deathless exit from life. The mistake is to think that what it means to be a caterpillar is of a certain kind of thing, like what it is to be a homo sapien, what it is to be a dog or a cat or something. Instead of thinking of, of a, as a name, as a kind of name of a phase, or like being a child. Children are not a different species than human beings. There's just a phase of life. However, that particular example of butterflies and caterpillars is just one example. The defender of thinking of death as the cessation of life, whether a permanent or temporary cessation still has to grapple with these hard cases of fission and fusion From Derek Parit. To my mind, it always seemed plausible to me to think that these are temporary deaths. If that's so then you might think that death is not the permanent cessation, but any cessation, and I think a better way of thinking about what gets CSED is not life but existence. And that's how you can make sense, for instance, of suspended animation cases where the fertilized embryo that's cryogenically preserved. Well, the reason it's preserved is because it continues to exist even though it is no longer living. Right? So the reason the frozen embryo does not die is because there's no point in time at which it ceases to exist. However, unlike the frozen embryo with the branch line cases, Alvin does cease to exist when he undergoes fission, and hence, fission kills Alvin and Fusion kills Ammos and Ambrose because they cease to exist. And there you have it. There are some pretty good reasons to believe that death consists in the cessation of existence. And subsequently, death is a metaphysical concept, not a biological concept. Now, at least not exclusively a biological concept. Although for all practical purposes in ordinary life, it corresponds with the biological conception of death is the cessation of life, at least from a secular point of view. However, in some far out cases of mere possibilities, such as in pars fission infusion case, these cases illustrate why death is not a biological concept. So for the annihilationist about death, I think it makes most sense to adopt a kind of two-state view where either you exist or you don't. If you do exist, you may be alive or not alive, like in a state of suspended animation. Now, Fisher could object that any kind of two-state view is going to have problems explaining why a near-death experience was actually a near death experience instead of an actual death experience. So in the last section I'm going to be focusing on from the first half of chapter two. Fisher focuses on Sam Barney's account where he says, well, he thinks that an individual dies if and only if he sees his living, and instead focuses on resuscitation science, where medical doctors nowadays are able to resuscitate people whose hearts and brains have stopped functioning for hours. So Parnia contends that in these kinds of cases, people have literally died and come back to life. Fisher, of course, denies this because it was temporary, right? So in order for those people to have died according to Fisher, well, it had to be permanent. And since it was only temporary, they didn't die to begin with. The debate between Parnia and Fisher might be mere semantics, but it's not mere semantics if something more hangs on it. And I think Fisher contends that his way of thinking about death as permanent cessation of life makes most sense of why a near death experience is actually near death, where people come close to dying but don't actually die because it wasn't permanent. So on party's view, it would be a misnomer to describe them like this. It would be to say, when people come close to death by having a near death experience in which their heart stops beating and perhaps their brain even stops functioning, and yet are still somehow resuscitated hours later sometimes that these people didn't come close to death, they just died. It would do violence to our way of describing the case. At the very least, a certain way of thinking about it. Perhaps that's the right way of thinking about it. However, or perhaps Parnia is simply being sloppy about his definitions. Alternatively, you might wonder why not hold that those who were resuscitated were simply neither alive nor dead, that they were in some kind of condition of suspended animation, much like the frozen embryo cases. If so, then you might be partial to Fisher's view, but to my mind, such people continue to exist. Even if it was in a suspended state or if they did not continue to exist, if they ceased to exist, then they thereby would die and the resuscitation wouldn't bring them back to life. It would in fact bring some new being into existence, much like, uh, how Alvin ceased to exist and Ammos and Ambrose took his place, except in this kind of case of resuscitation, it wouldn't be two beings that replaced the former being. It would simply be one being. For simple cases of resuscitation, even at the forefront of medical technology, I think it's safe to say that the people persisted through the change from losing their heartbeat and losing certain functionality of, of parts of their brain, if not the whole of their brain. I'm not sure about the details of the case. I think it makes most sense to say of those cases that the people continued to exist, perhaps, you know, as vegetables or something, but not as people perhaps. But they were brought back into a kind of vitality. They were resuscitated, they managed to have a gap in their lives, but not a gap in their existence. Now, if we change the case a little bit, if perhaps we had super duper technology of the far future such that we could cut these people up into a thousand little parts, scatter them all about and put'em back together again after many years. This kind of scattering of the parts of things at some point, it seems no matter how miraculous the technology, the person doesn't survive this scattering that they cease to exist and when reassembled some new being comes into existence. So, and I think part of what's driving our judgment there is this notion of not wanting to have gaps in your existence. If there are gaps in your existence and those gaps are, let's say, too big or something, then this is an intuition which generates in us this judgment that well, the, the thing cease to exist. At least when it comes to biological beings as complex as persons. So what's going on in these resuscitation cases is the body maintains enough cohesion that it's one in the same person who is resuscitated, that their life is preserved, their existence is preserved when they come back to life, so to speak, when resuscitated. But not all such changes would preserve the person's life, let alone even their existence. And so some scatterings of the parts of people would kill them. All right, so that concludes my discussion of this first half of chapter two, on The Meaning of Death by John Martin Fisher. Just to quickly summarize, so we covered what Fisher's account was, how he favored a permanent view of death being the permanent cessation of life over a temporary view. However, when faced with a complication of dealing with visions, infusion cases, he tried to complicated view by simply adding an exception, which I still find a two ad hoc and that's partly what motivates what I consider to be a simpler view that of Annihilation, where you think of death, not as the. Cessation of life, but the cessation of existence. And further, there's no further caveat as to whether such a cessation needs to be permanent or temporary. And now that we have a working definition of death, which has the virtue of being sharable among not just fission infusion cases, but among any form of being that's alive, that it dies when it ceases to exist. Now we can kind of move on to a more evaluative question as to whether death is bad or not, which is the second half of chapter two in which Fisher poses a challenge from Epicurus that death does not harm the one who ties.