Posted 29 April 2005 - 01:25 PM
The current definition of death, worked out twenty years ago to address
the technology of the respirator, is falling apart. The braindead will
soon be maintainable indefinitely on life support, and may even be
reanimated. Some suggest we dispense with "death" in favor of
individually determined treatment plans, while others are pushing for a
neocortical standard that would recognize permanent vegetative state as
death. Whether we move in either direction, this century will begin to
see a shift toward consciousness and personhood-centered ethics as a
means of dealing not only with brain death, but also with extra-uterine
feti, intelligent chimeras, human-machine cyborgs, and the other new
forms of life that we will create with technology. The status of these
life forms will be fought out between "transhumanists," advocates of
non-anthropocentric personhood and post-human technological
possibilities, and their opponents the "bioconservatives." But
technologies of neurological remediation will tip the debate to the
transhumanists, and their more tentative, probabilistic,
information-theoretic understanding of death, as the loss of
identity-critical information. The preservation of identity-critical
information, whether on an organic or inorganic platform, will be
considered continuity of legal personhood.