Question

1. Is death reversible?

2. If this situation happened to you, how would you want your family to care for you? How would it be different if it was your child or one of your parents?

3. Death has very different significance between cultures and communities. Much like in the Dennis case, in this complicated situation, how do we balance respect for persons and minimize harms, as well as a limited amount of resources (like hospital beds, for example)?

Answer 1

1. As reported in 1968 by the Ad Hoc Committee of the Harvard Medical School, brain death is the legal and irreversible definition of death till date. However, many science fictions have claimed death to be reversible, or even simulating a dead person into a living machine.

2. If my death were to be reversible, I wouldn't primarily be concerned about the inevitable imbalance of the mass created w.r.t. the mass destroyed. I would probably be happy at first. However, as existential anxiety kicks in, it becomes important for a person to be aware of the fundamentality of life which exists in eath; which is to say, death gives life meaning. It gives you an urgency to do things, to explore - to keep you motivated. I would request my family to thus, maintain the understood philosophy of death and keep me dead. In case it's inevitanle irreversal, I could either be a good citizen and request confinement, or I can be a free bird and go about doing what would normally be considered unnatural, since I am omnipotent. If I were a parent, I would request the same for my child. Being a socially responsible citizen comes first.

3.