[extropy-chat] "Dead Time" of the Brain.

[Heartland]

Jeffrey:
>  "How did you arrive at the "death happens often" conclusion?"

Heartland:
>  "Check my response to Eugen Leitl."

Jeffrey:
"Well, I did check your response to Eugen Leitl. That's not really an explanation.
Saying that you will die when you die doesn't really explain anything."

That's not what I said. What I said was that the state of subjective experience
that might occur during a lifetime of mind type (general anesthesia) would be 
functionally equivalent to state of subjective experience before conception and the
state when the brain rots in the grave. What all these 3 states have in common is
an absence of the part of mind process that creates subjective experience.

But to realize that death should always be defined only as the absence of
subjective experience, one must first understand that the essence of life is the
presence of subjective experience.

If all of this doesn't ring true intuitively, think about this. Let's say you are
under general anesthesia, but not just for few hours, but forever. From perspective
of life, wouldn't that be equivalent to a situation where the brain disintegrates
in the grave or where the brain never existed at all?

S.