I wouldn’t go along with that. Anyway, that’s what I read.
Fortunately, you’ve got a banana and have been well-trained in its defensive use.
In Spain the official term for “we didn’t bother with the autopsy since it wasn’t required by law or by the family” is “cardiorespiratory arrest.” While someone who dies in an accident will get autopsied, it’s not uncommon for them to get a certificate that says “cardiorespiratory arrest caused by massive trauma (description of the specific trauma).”
Poisoning, drowning and bleeding to death get something else. But in most cases… “cardiorespiratory arrest.”
Suicide is a form of homicide, according to the Catholic Church and others (it’s definitely sinning against the “thou shalt not kill”) but most legal codes list it separately if they do. There’s other forms of homicide that get their own term… parricide, matricide, genocide among others.
You may be right, I could be remembering incorrectly.
“Lack of blood to the brain”
Well, sure, in theory, but I’ve always interpreted it as talking about information “death” in more of a practical sense: when you’d have to have a magical computer to track all the particles that made up the neurons and related structures and what has happened to them along the way, you can safely say “information theoretic death” has occurred.
This article on Alcor’s site has a section on information theoretic death that may explain it better than I am.
Discover magazine says that lack of oxygen is always the cause of death.
It sounds like you’re talking relatively quick methods? Following up on Little Nemo’s post, we don’t need to list every fatal drawn-out illness that “would, without intervention, be fatal”?
Even in starvation? Does your body waste away until you have no muscles to draw in air?
I think you suffer heart attack eventually – which of course causes a lack of oxygen to the brain that kills it.
But I thought we were discussing the cause of death rather than the definition of death. In most cases, blood doesn’t spontaneously stop traveling to the brain.
I guess it would make sense for us to define death before we decide upon its cause. I like the definition I’ve been using throughout, if that works for you. Also, I’m talking about the ultimate cause of death, not the initial cause.
On another website I see creative methods of death mused upon almost daily. They’re a morbid bunch over there. On second thought, I probably shouldn’t repost those.
The definition creates the causation. If you define death as the point when the heart stops beating, then the heart attack caused the death. If you define it as the point when the brain stopped functioning, then the loss of oxygen to the brain caused the death. And if you define death as the decomposition of the body, then death is always caused by being eaten by microbes.
Sure. I like Information Theoretic Death as a definition, how about you?
being gored by Kevin Bacon?
Yeah, but then you have to decide just how magical a computer you’re willing to allow. The question clearly goes beyond current technology, since it’s typically applied to cryogenically frozen heads.