Understanding Death

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Understanding Death
The podcast video dubbed “When Am I Dead?” brings forth more confusion than clarification about the concept of death. The different people interviewed in the podcast indicate that beliefs about dying are primarily a derivative of socio-cultural experiences. Therefore, it suffices to say that the consideration of the meaning or state of death remains subjective since people let their worldviews inform different concepts about dying.
Coherently, those from a highly religious background would consider death being a departure of the soul/spirit from the human body. The perception stems from a belief system that appreciates human beings being an invisible tenet but uses the body to establish his/her purpose in the material world. For this reason, one would measure the mass of a human body before and immediately after death. The rationale is that the soul/spirit lives in the body and its departure mark death. However, the experiment remains unreliable and with lack of credibility, considering the fact that a 21-grams-difference between a live and dead body is statistically insignificant.
The analysis of the difference between living and death is different from a scientific point of view. Scientists focus on body functions to determine whether a person is dead. As a result, some would opine that death is a result of the heart stopping to function. The explanation was most dominant in recent decades before the invention of equipment that senses brain activities. As a result, a stethoscope was the instrument used by scientists to affir...