I’m fine with that answer. Regardless of how you or science describes or defines “vegetative state” if brain activity and a beating heart are both detected in a human being, that human being has life and is alive. Correct?
You can make a heart beat if you like - you don’t even have to have a body attached.
If the brain has activity and the heart is beating, the brain cells and heart cells are functioning enough to support those activities. It tells us nothing beyond that - whether higher brain functions are active, for instance, or whether external life support is required.
I note the lack of response to my request for clarification.
:smack:
From a source that people around here like to cite, we can measure fetal brain wave activity around the 25th week of development. Before that, there are most definitely active neurons, but we don’t know at what point they’re wired up into some sort of brain. Some of that is due to measurement difficulties – we can’t put a cap of electrodes on a fetus like we can with a newborn.
Very early on in development, an embryo has no brain cells, and is just an undifferentiated mass of stem cells. Later, brain cell precursors differentiate themselves from the mass, and eventually grow into a brain-like structure. That structure continues to grow and develop, but for a while you have an undeveloped brain that does not show any of the electrical signs of brain activity that we see in newborns or adults. At week 25 you see brain waves. The brain continues to develop through birth, and it keeps developing well into adulthood (or until death, depending on your definition of brain development).
And breathing. Let’s include that too, as **griffin1977 **points out. So, we have an alive human if it’s 1) human, 2) alive, 3) breathing, 4) brain activity and 5) beating heart (assuming the beating heart is attached to the human and not on a different table with electrodes making it dance).
I’m having to keep my definitions exceedingly limited so as to keep them applicable to all possible situations so as to avoid misinterpretation. I have absolutely zero interest in debate, as my posting record in GD will show. I simply feel that your unwillingness to pin down your interest in the topic indicates a possible intent to twist my words to support a statement with which I would not agree.
If’n ye act sneaky, don’t be surprised when people get suspicious.
I asked a question hoping for a factual scientific answer. It seems to me like you’d like to think ahead of me and somehow make this into a debate. If I was looking for a debate, I’d take it to great debates. I asked for a factual scientific answer and I thank you for giving it.
If I came here and asked something like: what is air, I imagine you might drop by and decline to answer for whatever reason without attempting to understand or pin down my interest in such a question. Let that be the same for this question. What my interest in asking the question is, is mine and only mine. I’m going to assume that you have exhausted all the answers available to you for my question. Thanks.
Are you at all capable of reading what so many people have written?
There is more than one “factual scientific answer.”
There is more than one “factual scientific answer.”
There is more than one “factual scientific answer.”
How many times to you need to hear this before you understand?
Sometimes, and sometimes the heart is arrested and/or fibrillated in order to test implanted defibrillator devices. For all intents and purposes, the patient is still considered alive. However, a beating heart is only one metric that determines life. In order for the heart to beat, there must be other metabolic processes that support that organ function. Those, individually and collectively, represent life as well.
A beating heart is a sign of life, but it is not the only possible sign (there are other signs that are as good or better), it is not a sufficient sign (The heart can beat, but the rest of the organism can be functionally dead), and it is not a necessary sign (The heart can be not beating, but the rest of the organism is still alive.)
The most accurate scientific answer to your question is “meh.”
Not exactly a reassuring response.
And there isn’t a single “factual scientific answer”. Life at a single-cell level is reasonably well defined. The exact point when a complex multicellular organism is alive is **not **well defined; it depends on the definitions of the particular scientist or doctor who is doing the defining. All a heartbeat unequivocally means is that the cells of the heart are in good enough shape to spontaneously discharge and contract. All brainwaves unequivocally mean is the the neurons in the brain are in good enough shape to discharge. Whether you want to call one or the other or the two together or something else included in the mix as meaning that the animal is alive is not a scientific question.
My apologies. You appear to be quite emotional about this specific question.
I’m not at all; I just prefer to have my discussions in an honest and intellectually open manner.
Your problem is that you’re expecting a scientific answer to a non-scientific question. Science doesn’t have a definition for delicious either.
There is more than one “factual scientific answer.”
Here’s hoping this gets through.
And which definition is appropriate depends on what you want to do with the answer. It is similar to asking “what is the speed limit?”. Well if you are a physicist the answer is the speed of light at about 186,000 miles a second. If you were a driver on the highway in the US, it might be 65 mph. In a residential area it might be 35mph. Without knowledge of what you want to do with it its not clear what the right answer is, but that doesn’t mean that there is no right answer.
Who is “you”? You didn’t quote a message so it’s not clear who “you” is. If you mean me (since your message is right after mine), I am not in the least emotional about the question. The fact of the matter is that there simply is no scientific answer.