8.18.01. 2.20am.
death; a semantic consideration.
a woman died in front of me on wednesday.
my, that would be a dramatic way to being a journal entry, wouldn't it? what i must say instead, though, is this:
a woman may have died in front of me on wednesday.
it's not that i'm unclear on the events that transpired on the street thursday afternoon (approximately 4:45 pm, wednesday august 15th 2001, at the corner of pine and battery, san francisco). i came upon a small crowd surrounding an old woman (65, maybe 70) who had collapsed on the street. it was a short, helpless wait until the paramedics arrived, during which she twitched and gasped twice. about ten paramedics participated in the efforts to revive her. they did CPR, gave her shots of epi (whatever that is), and defibrillated half a dozen times, before finally putting her on a stretcher and taking her off to, one assumes, a hospital. she was not breathing when they took her away.
and i got to thinking: god, i'll never know if she lived or not. and then i got to thinking, well, if in five minutes she starts breathing and just gets back to normal, then she'll be alive, right? but then could she really have been dead? the idea of bringing someone back from the dead really struck me as weird, though i know technically doctors do it all the time. and then i thought, well, if they could theoretically still save her, but for one reason or another don't, well, then could you say she was dead then? because she could have been brought back to life, you see. and thus am i led to consider the semantic (and semi-philosophical) meaning of death.
first of all, as i said, i have a problem with the idea of taking something and bringing it back to life, and saying that what it was was dead. i mean, there's alive, and there's dead. s morgenstern aside ("mostly dead!"), there aren't any degrees of death. you're dead, or you're not. (hm... slight tangent - i am only using "dead" to denote something formerly alive. rocks, for instance, do not count as dead, for the moment at least). if you get brought back to life, well, in my opinion you just weren't dead to begin with. you thought you were, but hey, we all make mistakes.
but aha! you exlaim. and rightly so. for let us take the example of the woman on the street. at t=0, she is not breathing, her heart is not beating, she is dead (for the sake of argument). suddenly, at t=3 seconds, the universe splits into two parallel universes. in Universe Bob, the paramedics show up, yell "stat!" and "clear!" a lot, and she starts breathing again. in Universe Fred, the paramedics hit traffic, and they're just to late to save her. she is dead. so the question is, was she dead at t=1, when there was only one version, and no one could say whether or not she would be saved, but the potential to save her was there? if she could be brought back to life, then i say she's not dead. but if she's not brought back to life, well, where do you draw the line?
and i suppose where i'm running into a problem is with drawing a line across the point of death. is it when breathing stops? when the heart stops? when brain activity ceases? when every cell in the organism stops metabolizing? because, from a cellular point of view, one cell can be dead and the one next to it alive, in the very same body! (sorry, i got a little excited). do you say, "when your cells are, on average, dead, then you're dead"? when is a cell even dead? it's hard to define what's alive about a cell. i mean, stuff is moving inside of it, but that's true of a car, too. it's just a bunch of little molecules, each doing their little molecule thing, and when they're all mostly working, we call it "alive." but what the hell does that mean?
you could just do it by probability. ie, "this person's bones have begun to turn to dust, she's probably not coming back to life, let's call her dead." which is how physics works, really. there's no reason that, the next time my thumb reaches for the space bar, all the atoms couldn't just happen to miss and i'd go straight through the hard drive - but it's so unlikely we just say it's impossible... sorry, dork physics tangent coming to a close.
the other thing that keeps this all from being really academic and dumb, is that whole bugaboo with the soul. (no disrespect to the soul intended - i just like saying "bugaboo"). if you believe in the immortal soul, then i suppose death is when the soul leaves the body, and doesn't leave a forwarding address. if you're not into the afterlife idea, then it'd be when that little spark goes out that you're dead. either way, it gets around the problems of this biological semantic crap - there's a lot of leeway for not knowing at the time whether to call something/someone dead or alive, but dead and alive still aren't utterly meaningless.
so there, we've solved it, haven't we? if the concepts of death and life are to have any practical meaning, they have to be tied in with the idea of the soul or whatever. and really, the whole thing is for practicality in the first place. so hah! logic wins again! and therefore, in the case of the woman on wednesday, she was clearly... um... hold on, er... well, maybe "practical" wasn't quite apropos...
tune in next week, for the Meaning of Life!