Redefining Reality - The Intellectual Implications of Modern Science

limited amount of time, we must make choices. We must design
ourselves as a project in the time we have. Because we are mortal,
the life we have acquires meaning.
At the same time, it seems as if some of our most prized technologies
are created with the goal of immortality; through them, we are
trying to destroy every path where we could meet our mortal end.
Medical science invents drugs and procedures to cure diseases; we
pasteurize food to kill microbes; we put airbags in cars; and so on.
Because we think that death is bad, we spend large sums of money
to try to make ourselves immortal.
Whether or not our death-defying technologies help us to become
more or less human depends on what we mean by the word .
We use death to distinguish human from nonhuman. We use
the words body and corpse to indicate that someone who has
died is no longer considered a person. But what property of the
body do we use to determine dead from alive?
Traditionally, this property is minimal functioning of bodily
person is alive if he or she has a heartbeat.
non-beating heart back into service, and we say of someone
who has received this treatment that he or she was dead but
was brought back to life. Although we think of the person
as having been dead, we usually do not think that he or she
stopped being a person.
Death as a removal of personhood seems to require permanent
death, not merely temporary death. Intervention that allows
the body to regain its ability to maintain itself implies that
continuing life was possible, and it seems that where there is
this possibility, personhood is maintained.
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