What is death?

What is death? I would like to see your opinions.

hermaneutics, I think your opinion points out the great problem raised by a definition of death. We only know what belongs to our empirical experience. But with death, we must deal with a situation where experience is, by definition, impossible. No one can experience his own death. We can only experience other people death. But, what do we experience? The ceasing of all body functions. But death is not only that. It is the dissappearance of an identity. When I say "I" I'm referring to something that belongs to my inner experience, and you are not able to understand it. Only by making a transposition to your inner experience of your "self", but then the experience is about you, not me.
In fact, this topic had the intention of search an understanding of death as the lost of the identity. I ask myself if it is possible to reach that understanding.

That's actually a really good guess, Cavfancier, but no. It's from Neil Gaiman's The Sandman, where Death is an actual character; I'd highly recommend it, especially for this topic, but also just for a good read. It has large amounts of discussions about why Death exists and how it relates to Life. I agree with him that Death is what gives Life meaning; if we lived forever, there would be no motivation to grow or change; we could just exist forever and not really get much done.

Death is nothing to fear!

val wrote:

What is death? I would like to see your opinions.

Death is the end of life for a vessel made of cell(s). That vessel may be me or you, or a cat, dog, aphid, rose, cactus, bacteria, or virus etc. Heart activity controls oxygen flow but plants and virus don't have hearts. Brain activity controls the non-autonomous functions that support life but as near as we can tell neither an apple nor a potato have a brain. So whatever life and death are they do not require a brain nor a heart.

For mammals among other living creature the brain and the heart work together to send oxygen and nutrients to every cell in your vessel. In a plant, photosynthesis and chemical processes and some internal variation of veins and arteries move nutrients around. An apple falls from the tree and metaphorically its brain and heart have stopped. It is still alive though. Just like you or I would be with no brain and no heart activity.

As nutrients, water, oxygen, or other molecules stop arriving at the cells that need those types of molecules the individual cells begin to die off. The more cells that die off the closer the vessel is to being dead. Your heart and brain could cease and until enough cells die off you may still be resuscitated. Too many brain cells die off and even resuscitation won't return you back to your normal self. As time goes on the cells that make up the apple die off and the apple rots just like your corpse would in the ground or any food you leave in the fridge too long.

So How's about this for a concept. Life dies at different rates. Some life like a cell or bacteria could die almost instantly but the life energy in something like an apple fallen from a tree may take longer to dissipate than the life energy of a decomposing raccoon on the side of the road. But 1, 2, or 3 weeks will all produce similar types of effects on that apple and raccoon. Cells will die.

We have found that colder temperatures slow the process and warmer temperatures speed up the process. And we have also found that the less number of live cells in something the less appetizing it is as well as the less number of beneficial nutrients that we would get from ingesting this vessel of cells. Rotten food is rotten for a reason whether it is meat, dairy, fruit, or vegetable, the more life energy left in what we eat, the better it tastes and the healthier it is for us.

So life is the process of ingesting other life or simulating the ingesting of life by transferring another form of energy into nutrients. Plant live through water and sun. Some need more sun, others more water. When your vessel can no longer ingest life energy it can no longer produce life energy and the cells that make up your vessel will perish one by one then two by two. What happens after this we can only speculate.

JL says there is no self to die. This is true, of course...

coluber2001 wrote:

JL says there is no self to die. This is true, of course...

It certainly is true that JL says there is no self to die...but I suspect that is not what you meant here. If I am correct that you were saying that you agree "there is no self to die"...then I would ask you what I have asked JL often: How do you know that...or is it just a guess?

Same question goes for all that "illusion" stuff that followed this comment.

Why are you folks so sure your guesses are REALITY...that you would actually write: "This is true, of course...?"

Nipok, I agree with you. I think you made a bright synthesis of a process of gradual dissipation applied to the different levels of organization.
But death is not only that. It is also the lost of the identity, as I pointed in a previous reply. And I don't see identity as a biological system with plural levels of organization. Identity is what you mean when you say "I". But I will never be able to understand what is your "I".
If identity is an inner experience of the subject, and death being exactly the destruction of that identity, how can I understand someones else's death?
At the biological level we can perceive the death of the others. But how can we know what is the death of their identity?

Frank Apisa wrote:

coluber2001 wrote:

JL says there is no self to die. This is true, of course...

It certainly is true that JL says there is no self to die...but I suspect that is not what you meant here. If I am correct that you were saying that you agree "there is no self to die"...then I would ask you what I have asked JL often: How do you know that...or is it just a guess?

Same question goes for all that "illusion" stuff that followed this comment.

Why are you folks so sure your guesses are REALITY...that you would actually write: "This is true, of course...?"

Not to change the subject but does religion have ANY REAL benefits as far as you can see Frank ?