Comment on Does Consciousness Disappear in Dreamless Sleep?
pjhenry1216@kbin.social 9 months agoI mean, without defining what the self is and consciousness, it's difficult to even define what death is from a consciousness point of view. A living meat bag doesn't require brain activity either. There's a whole range of things. So even assuming we have a good meaning of "death" is oversimplifying things.
jarfil@lemmy.world 9 months ago
We have a good definition of “death”, it’s the irreversible stop of some activity. For a brain, that’s neuronal depolarization; for a body organ or cell, it’s destruction past its ability to regenerate.
The self, is a snapshot of a brain state at a certain moment, which is technically irreversibly disappearing 30 times a second, but we like to think of it as just “changing” and forming a causal sequence we call “consciousness”.
pjhenry1216@kbin.social 9 months ago
This threshold has changed over time. So I don't think it's a good definition of it hasn't always been the same point.
And the rest of your comment is just philosophy. You're neither wrong nor right. Definition of self is not a concept there's really any consensus over.
jarfil@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Threshold has changed, the definition is still the same, we’re just getting better at reverting the stop of some activities, like breathing or heartbeat. If we someday could revert neuronal depolarization, that would be great, but it seems difficult to achieve.
The other part is not just philosophy, it’s the best we can do to define a “self”. The philosophical part is only whether we can consider them a continuum, or whether we have to see them as usually similar but separate (there are reasons to support both versions).
pjhenry1216@kbin.social 9 months ago
If the threshold changed, the actual definition changed. The same words to describe a different point. If the definition described two different things, its changed. That's basic and simple reasoning. If a definition no longer describes the same thing, it's because it's actual meaning has changed.