One set of philosophers argues that the destruction of the frontal lobes, with the memories and personality they encode, is enough to declare someone dead.
Others resist the idea of the brain death altogether and insist that the heart must stop before a body can be treated as dead.
Linda Emmanuel of northwestern university medical school in Chicago, has proposed that individuals should choose their own definition of death - at some point between permanent vegative state and the heart stopping.
Progress in nanotechnology and the miniaturisation of computing will also eventually allow brain damage to be repairedwith implanted machines. Implanted wiring and computer chips already speak directly to and from brains, allowing deaf to hear, the blind to see and paralysed people to control computers directly with their thoughts.
On the other hand, there are enormous social and emotional costs involved in indefinitely maintaining the persistently unconcious in the hope of future cures. The medical and nursing costs for a permanently unconscious person in the industrialised world are many times greater than the average family income.
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1 comment:
Keep up the good work.
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