this is something that really bothers me. i’m wondering if others have the same annoyance:
whenever i hear about people who supposedly died and came back and reported seeing and experiencing an afterlife, all i can think about is how death is irreversible. quite literally nobody has ever died and then resurrected. reanimation hasn’t been observed a single time throughout all of human history. what happened instead is they were actively dying and their brain was reacting to shutting down. “of course,” you say reading this. but so many people accept the premise that this is remotely possible by not rejecting it immediately and that is the most frustrating part about all of this.
it confirms and demonstrates to me that humans are resistant to being fundamentally challenged even in the face of absolute certainty. most things in the universe are not absolutely known, but death is the rare, and perhaps only, exception. death is permanent in its natural occurrence. there is no 99.9% of the time, there aren’t any other ways to be dead (literal death), every single living thing will die. period. …unless humans figure something out.
so yeah it bugs me when people even entertain the idea that there’s something worth discussing or listening to regarding claims of “coming back from death.” like there are skeptics and people who are willing to listen to these assertions. …why? there is, literally, no chance they are describing an existence after death. death can’t be reversed. when a person appears clinically dead and then regains consciousness, guess what, they weren’t dead regardless of medical technology saying they were lol. we just aren’t able to detect the smallest indications of life.
/rant
Your argument is based on a false premise — there are absolutely documented cases of people being dead in hospital settings who were revived.
This is completely false.
The difficulty is in correctly determining death, not that death has occurred and then was reversed. One of the causes is even “missing weak vital signs”, so the error is human.
Cool. I hope you understand I’m going to rely on the NIH’s definition of death more than some rando on Lemmy.
Dude you are still missing the basic philosophical premise of OP’s post regardless of how you want to define “death”. Also, I’m not sure if you’re trolling or what’s going on, but let me try to explain a thought I had prompted by this post also: For a religious person who claims to see God briefly after they “die” seems strange to me simply because their god would already know that they were going to be revived in mere seconds. Feels like these people think that they unlocked a hack or a way to cheat the system into seeing the afterlife, and obtaining evidence of god existence, in a way that goes around god’s big plan or whatever. Almost seems sacrilegious to suggest if you are a believer, right?
okay well i suggest you reread that article because it talks about limitations being able to detect death lol. it even mentions early that modern tech has reduced errors but not completely eliminated them.
Yes. And these are definitions and words. They get defined for various applications. I don’t think there’s a single “true” definition of “death”, not by the NHS, nor by anyone else. Someone can be dead per law, someone can be dead enough but you’ll still perform CPR on them. Or their head is missing and they’re really dead and you don’t do CPR. Other people still have vital signs and they’re so dead the doctors will remove their liver, kidneys and heart and transplant it to somebody else… There’s just several definitions of the word. So yes. Sure, per some definition people can be dead and then be resurrected. But that’s just a definition thing, not a real concept. It’s a bit weird to have non-permanent death, if you ask me. It’s useful for certain things to phrase it like that. But how a word is being used doesn’t tell us a lot here.
biological death exists regardless of our medical and legal terms.
Does it, though? All I can find is descriptions like this one: “Biological death marks the definitive endpoint of an organism’s life, representing the irreversible cessation of all biological functions. This profound transition signifies a state where […]”
Which leads me to believe it’s a point in time. Not a “thing” that “exists”. All I can see is how life exists. And we can’t really talk just about the absence of life as per your initial post. Because we all transitioned from not being alive to living. That happens when we’re born. I think what you were referring to is more an abstract process within a complex biological organism. And the specific effects on one particular organ. That of course exists. But even that is more of an abstract concept, made up of a plethora of real things happen.
i apologize but i’m not following. a biological organism will eventually cease to exist regardless of our medical and legal terms or our abstract and subjective beliefs. we did transition from not being alive to being alive, but never being alive to not being alive. you can come into existence in a different way you go out and the processes can be different as well. non-existence isn’t death. death is the process of transitioning from existence to non-existence.
I think so as well. I guess I’m more reluctant to accept how people casually talk about “death” as if it was clear what that means. When reality it’s many processes simultaneously in a complex organism. I don’t think “near-death experience” is anything meaningful to begin with, since we’re talking about a broad, abstract concept of dying. We’d need to talk specifics, like visual hallucinations on cell death in brain tissue. Or when it’s deprived of oxygen. We can talk about if this vague process can be interrupted, but details really matter. And we can’t confuse the process with the result. I think some people confuse these things.
no there isn’t lol. death is irreversible in all circumstances as we currently understand it and without human intervention. you are describing what i already mentioned—us not having the ability to medically detect the smallest traces of what makes life function. clearly, death did not occur or the heart could not be restored.
Death isn’t an abstract concept or religious rite, it’s a very real legal state that a human can be in, with a formal definition is something that has been minutely debated through centuries of medicine, law, and legislation. It has very real effects on humans, like who is allowed to make legal decisions on behalf of the human in question, or where that human’s body is allowed to be. To me, it seems you have decided that you have a new standard for death you would like to propose that better aligns with your religious beliefs, but I think it would be impractical to reorganize hospitals, law offices, courts, case law, medical research and so on because it advances your point that death is final.
And candidly, I think it is much more challenging to a theistic worldview to argue that raising people from the dead isn’t miraculous because it coming back from the dead happens quite often, than it is to argue that it isn’t miraculous because it doesn’t ever happen. The Fatimah Sun miracle doesn’t matter, because that’s what everyone experiences when they stare at the sun too long; you just shouldn’t do it because it’s super bad for you.
Being an atheist means choosing your beliefs as a logical extension of reality as we observe it, rather than choosing a set of beliefs and reinterpreting reality to match our beliefs. The science says people die and come back to life. We should update our beliefs to match that.
what the actual hell are you talking about lol
you are comparing the legal and medical definition of death to the actual biological experience of death. i know a formal definition is challenging to establish, do you know why??? because we can’t 100% guarantee death has occurred when we’ve determined it has happened. the physical cessation of all function is not reversible nor has it ever been documented to be such, and the Lazarus effect does not establish or even suggest that. the study you are citing uses phrasings like “after death” and “upon death” because it’s clinically relevant. they were clinically dead, not biologically. science is unable to guarantee death has occurred when physical cessation is observed.