[extropy-chat] Thoughts on Schiavo

[Damien Broderick]

At 03:40 PM 3/27/2005 -0800, Mike Lorrey wrote:

> > For what purpose?  She is not here.  She has been gone a long time
> > now.
>
>How do you know this? Has any attempt ever been made to repair? No. Has
>any attempt been made with monitors of brain wave activity? I have not
>seen such online.

Did you not read the NEJM piece Rafal posted a link to?

<Computed tomographic scans
of her brain eventually showed severe atrophy of
her cerebral hemispheres, and her electroencephalograms
have been flat, indicating no functional activity
of the cerebral cortex.>

Flat EEG. Nothing happening. Nothing for it to happen to.

>My mother was in a coma for a month and a half, and when she came out
>of it she was in similar condition: she could not speak, could barely
>move, she had almost entirely lost her memory of her life since
>childhood and when she was able to speak after several months of
>intensive speech therapy and round the clock attention, was convinced
>she was married to a different man named "Frank" and that we were not
>her 'real' children, and when she came home she was convinced it was
>not her home. It took an immense amount of work to bring her back to
>her normal self.

Okay, that explains your strange take on this sad story. But you do agree 
that there's a difference between coma with brain damage, and flatline EEG 
with loss of most or all cortex?

I can understand some Xians getting all worked up about this case, since 
they might believe that the living, thinking, feeling identity of Terry S. 
resides in her inviolate non-material soul, which is presumably still 
hovering around her brain stem. Few on this list would accept such an 
understanding.

Of course there is no valid comparison with a cryonically suspended human, 
although that comparison has sometimes been drawn (but not, I feel sure, by 
the weeping faithful keeping vigil). Such a dead body is also flatlined, 
but the brain has not been significantly eaten away, just stopped. Future 
science might revive those frozen neurons, but they have to be there in the 
first place. Someone might eventually clone a Terri twin, but her history 
would of course be utterly different.

Damien Broderick