One crazy thing is, by being a descendant of the original life form, in a huge chain of reproduction relationships, all the information we have in our DNA about death in the form of autonomous fear responses come from beings that essentially never experienced death themselves.
close04•50m ago
Interesting point. But I don’t think you must experience something to be afraid of it, even as a population. Nobody experienced the terror of a world ending nuclear war, large asteroid strike, or solar flare (alien invasion if you want to go that far), etc. and they still terrify a lot of people. Sometimes even more than death itself.
To be more pragmatic, it’s now pretty common today for people to die and modern medicine brings them back. For practical purposes the person was dead, by some other interpretations they weren’t, if you consider the only “real” death to be the permanent one.
cobbzilla•32m ago
it’s fairly simple:
clinical death = heart stops = reversible, depends on circumstances
brain death = irreversible = perma-dead. no one’s ever come back.
legal death = brain dead (not clinical) or court order (missing for X years/etc)
close04•3m ago
I’m putting the current medical definition aside, we’ve been pushing the boundaries of what’s possible and who knows what the next centuries redefine. For the longest time in human history “clinical death” was almost always followed by permadeath.
As the person doing the dying you can’t rationalize it as “no worries, it’s just clinical, I’ll be back”. You die, it’s light out, later on you recover and are told “you were clinically dead”.
guelo•34m ago
That is a cool thought, though you meant to say never experienced death themselves before reproducing. The fear response allowed individuals to statistically reproduce more often. Evolution works at the population level not the individual.
jwrallie•1h ago
close04•50m ago
To be more pragmatic, it’s now pretty common today for people to die and modern medicine brings them back. For practical purposes the person was dead, by some other interpretations they weren’t, if you consider the only “real” death to be the permanent one.
cobbzilla•32m ago
clinical death = heart stops = reversible, depends on circumstances
brain death = irreversible = perma-dead. no one’s ever come back.
legal death = brain dead (not clinical) or court order (missing for X years/etc)
close04•3m ago
As the person doing the dying you can’t rationalize it as “no worries, it’s just clinical, I’ll be back”. You die, it’s light out, later on you recover and are told “you were clinically dead”.
guelo•34m ago
fxtentacle•14m ago
And, FWIW, Jesus with an after-death erection was popular enough a motive to officially get banned by the church: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostentatio_genitalium
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_erection#cite_ref-Steinb...
NooneAtAll3•12m ago