We think of the divide between life and death as a distinct boundary, and we believe that at any given point, a person is either definitively alive or definitively dead. But lets examine that assumption for a second:
Lets first talk about what it means when a person is doomed from a health standpoint. We can all agree that what constitutes someone being doomed depends on where, and when, they are. A three-year-old with advanced pneumonia in 1740 would probably have been doomed, while the same child with the same condition today might be fully treatable. The same story could be said of the fate of someone who falls badly ill in a remote village in Malawi compared with their fate if they were in London instead. Doomed depends on a number of factors.
That the same thing can be said of dead is at first pretty unintuitive. But Alcors CEO Max More puts it this way: Fifty years ago if you were walking along the street and someone keeled over in front of you and stopped breathing you would have checked them out and said they were dead and disposed of them. Today we dont do that, instead we do CPR and all kinds of things. People we thought were dead 50 years ago we now know were not.
Today, dead means the heart has been stopped for 4-6 minutes, because thats how long the brain can go without oxygen before brain death occurs. But Alcor, in its sites Science FAQ, explains that the brain dies after several minutes without oxygen not because it is immediately destroyed, but because of a cascade of processes that commit it to destruction in the hours that follow restoration of warm blood circulation. Restoring circulation with cool blood instead of warm blood, reopening blocked vessels with high pressure, avoiding excessive oxygenation, and blocking cell death with drugs can prevent this destruction. The site goes on to explain that with new experimental treatments, more than 10 minutes of warm cardiac arrest can now be survived without brain injury. Future technologies for molecular repair may extend the frontiers of resuscitation beyond 60 minutes or more, making todays beliefs about when death occurs obsolete.
In other words, what we think of as dead actually means doomed, under the current circumstances. Someone fifty years ago who suffered from cardiac arrest wasnt dead, they were doomed to die because the medical technology at the time couldnt save them. Today, that person wouldnt be considered dead yet because they wouldnt be doomed yet. Instead, someone today dies 4-6 minutes after cardiac arrest, because that happens to be how long someone can currently go before modern technology can no longer help them.
Cryonicists view death not as a singular event, but as a processone that starts when the heart stops beating and ends later at a point called the information-theoretic criterion for deathlets call it info deathwhen the brain has become so damaged that no amount of present or future technology could restore it to its original state or have any way to retrieve its information.
Heres an interesting way to think about it: Imagine a patient arriving in an ambulance to Hospital A, a typical modern hospital. The patients heart stopped 15 minutes before the EMTs arrived and he is immediately pronounced dead at the hospital. What if, though, the doctors at Hospital A learned that Hospital B across the street had developed a radical new technology that could revive a patient anytime within 60 minutes after cardiac arrest with no long-term damage? What would the people at Hospital A do?
Of course, they would rush the patient across the street to Hospital B to save him. If Hospital B did save the patient, then by definition the patient wouldnt actually have been dead in Hospital A, just pronounced dead because Hospital A viewed him as entirely and without exception doomed.
What cryonicists suggest is that in many cases where today a patient is pronounced dead, theyre not dead but rather doomed, and that there is a Hospital B that can save the daybut instead of being in a different place, its in a different time. Its in the future.
