One of the flaws in this approach is that there are many organisms that are alive but probably not conscious (for example, single-celled organisms). When consciousness ceases, an organism can be said to have died. It is possible to define life in terms of consciousness. This is difficult, due to there being little consensus on how to define life. Such determination, therefore, requires drawing precise conceptual boundaries between life and death. Determining when death has occurred is difficult, as cessation of life functions is often not simultaneous across organ systems. As a point in time, death would seem to refer to the moment at which life ends. One of the challenges in defining death is in distinguishing it from life. Additionally, the advent of life-sustaining therapy and the numerous criteria for defining death from both a medical and legal standpoint, have made it difficult to create a single unifying definition. There are many scientific approaches and various interpretations of the concept. The concept of death is a key to human understanding of the phenomenon. Many cultures and religions have the idea of an afterlife, and also may hold the idea of judgement of good and bad deeds in one's life ( heaven, hell, karma).įrench – 16th-/17th-century ivory pendant, Monk and Death, recalling mortality and the certainty of death ( Walters Art Museum) As of the early 21st century, over 150,000 humans die each day, with ageing being by far the most common cause of death. Something that is not considered an organism, such as a virus, can be physically destroyed, but is not said to die. Death is an inevitable process that eventually occurs in almost all organisms.ĭeath is generally applied to whole organisms the similar process seen in individual components of an organism, such as cells or tissues, is necrosis. The remains of a former organism normally begin to decompose shortly after death. For organisms with a brain, death can also be defined as the irreversible cessation of functioning of the whole brain, including brainstem, and brain death is sometimes used as a legal definition of death.
The human skull is used universally as a symbol of death.ĭeath is the irreversible cessation of all biological functions that sustain an organism.
0 kommentar(er)
