The concept of “death” is too complex to be captured by any phenomenon other than the process of computation of this concept in human minds, or something derived therefrom.
No, death can easily be explained in a reductionist way without positing ontologically-basic subjectivity.
Death simply refers to when a self-perpetuating process (usually labeled “life”) stops maintaining itself far from equilibrium with its environment via expenditure of negentropy (free energy). Note that a common term for dying (in English) is “reaching room temperature”. (Yes, yes, cold-blooded life forms are always staying close to room temperature, but they stay far from equilibrium in other ways—chemically, structurally, etc..)
Being frozen in such a way that the process that is you can be recovered is not death, at least not completely. You are still far from equilibrium with your broader environment—note that you still have a large KL divergence, so the information contained in you has not been irreversibly deleted.
Well, it’s a dysphemism rather than a euphemism, but forms of it are used, and it doesn’t appear to be unique to America. Check this Googling and its alternate suggestion and you see a New Zealand blog mentioning that some “oxygen waster” has finally “reached room temperature”.
Being frozen in such a way that the process that is you can be recovered is not death, at least not completely. You are still far from equilibrium with your broader environment—note that you still have a large KL divergence, so the information contained in you has not been irreversibly deleted.
I find this reasoning opaque. “Equilibrium with your broader environment”? Replace the head of the frozen person with a watermelon, and you’ll have as much distance from “equilibrium” as for the head, but the person will be dead.
Not quite right. If you remove the head, and (as I presume you mean) let it die, its information is gone, as is the infomation about its connection with the body, and the information recovered would not be capable of fully specifying the process constituting the original person. They would be “more dead”.
As I defined life as the sustenance of a process far from equilibrium, you have destroyed more of the process that is that individual.
On top of that, a frozen watermelon has a far smaller KL divergence from its environment than a human head. It is not the same distance from equilibrium—it’s closer.
You’ve just hidden the complexity in the choice of the system for which you define a simple metric (I doubt it’s even right as you state, but assume it is). What you call the process is chosen by you to make the solution come out right (not deliberatively for that purpose, but by you anyway). Physics will be hard-pressed to even say what is the same rigid object over time (unless you trivially define that so in your formalism—but then it’ll be math), not to speak of the “process” of living person (where you can’t define in math what that delineates—the concept is too big for a mere human to see).
Get the print of a person in digital form and transmit it to the outer space by radio—will the person’s process involve the whole light cone now? How is that different from just exerting gravitational field?
I have not hidden any complexity nor made any arbitrary choice. The process that is the human body is mostly understood, in terms of what it does to maintain homeostasis (regulation of properties against environmental perturbations). Individual instances of a human body—different people—carry differences among each other—what memories they have, what funcitonality their organs have, and so on.
Way up at the level of interpersonal relationships, we can recognize an individual, like “Bob”, and his personality traits, etc. We can recognize when a re-instantiation of a person still acts like Bob. This is not an arbitrary choice—it’s based on a previous, non-arbitrary identification of a chunk of conceptspace called “the person Bob”.
So we can know when Bob has irreversibly mixed with his environment.
Get the print of a person in digital form and transmit it to the outer space by radio—will the person’s process involve the whole light cone now?
The person will be in the same dormant state as when they are frozen, or as a seed is before it is planted, or the chemicals that mix to make a virus before they are mixed. The information to reconstitute the being is still there, but it is not yet restored to its self-sustaining, entropy-exporting process. When you transmit their information through space, you are giving structure to the EM waves propagating against background noise, so there’s still a KL divergence from the environment: the waves you transmit are different from what you would expect if you expected normal background noise.
You still, of course, need someone capable of decoding that and reinstantiating the person. When all information about how to do so is lost, then the person is finally irreversibly mixed with their environment and permanently dead, in line with the definition I gave before.
How is that different from just exerting gravitational field?
I’m not sure of the purpose of this question. Could you state clearly what your position is, and which part you believe I’m disagreeing with, and why that disagreement is in error?
Sorry, I wish I had followed this earlier.
No, death can easily be explained in a reductionist way without positing ontologically-basic subjectivity.
Death simply refers to when a self-perpetuating process (usually labeled “life”) stops maintaining itself far from equilibrium with its environment via expenditure of negentropy (free energy). Note that a common term for dying (in English) is “reaching room temperature”. (Yes, yes, cold-blooded life forms are always staying close to room temperature, but they stay far from equilibrium in other ways—chemically, structurally, etc..)
Being frozen in such a way that the process that is you can be recovered is not death, at least not completely. You are still far from equilibrium with your broader environment—note that you still have a large KL divergence, so the information contained in you has not been irreversibly deleted.
Never heard that one. Is that an American idiom? “Passing away” seems to be the standard euphemism where I’m from, but I usually just say “dying”.
For reference, I’ve never encountered that either, and I’m an American and a student of British English.
Well, it’s a dysphemism rather than a euphemism, but forms of it are used, and it doesn’t appear to be unique to America. Check this Googling and its alternate suggestion and you see a New Zealand blog mentioning that some “oxygen waster” has finally “reached room temperature”.
A very insightful idiom indeed!
I find this reasoning opaque. “Equilibrium with your broader environment”? Replace the head of the frozen person with a watermelon, and you’ll have as much distance from “equilibrium” as for the head, but the person will be dead.
Not quite right. If you remove the head, and (as I presume you mean) let it die, its information is gone, as is the infomation about its connection with the body, and the information recovered would not be capable of fully specifying the process constituting the original person. They would be “more dead”.
As I defined life as the sustenance of a process far from equilibrium, you have destroyed more of the process that is that individual.
On top of that, a frozen watermelon has a far smaller KL divergence from its environment than a human head. It is not the same distance from equilibrium—it’s closer.
You’ve just hidden the complexity in the choice of the system for which you define a simple metric (I doubt it’s even right as you state, but assume it is). What you call the process is chosen by you to make the solution come out right (not deliberatively for that purpose, but by you anyway). Physics will be hard-pressed to even say what is the same rigid object over time (unless you trivially define that so in your formalism—but then it’ll be math), not to speak of the “process” of living person (where you can’t define in math what that delineates—the concept is too big for a mere human to see).
Get the print of a person in digital form and transmit it to the outer space by radio—will the person’s process involve the whole light cone now? How is that different from just exerting gravitational field?
I have not hidden any complexity nor made any arbitrary choice. The process that is the human body is mostly understood, in terms of what it does to maintain homeostasis (regulation of properties against environmental perturbations). Individual instances of a human body—different people—carry differences among each other—what memories they have, what funcitonality their organs have, and so on.
Way up at the level of interpersonal relationships, we can recognize an individual, like “Bob”, and his personality traits, etc. We can recognize when a re-instantiation of a person still acts like Bob. This is not an arbitrary choice—it’s based on a previous, non-arbitrary identification of a chunk of conceptspace called “the person Bob”.
So we can know when Bob has irreversibly mixed with his environment.
The person will be in the same dormant state as when they are frozen, or as a seed is before it is planted, or the chemicals that mix to make a virus before they are mixed. The information to reconstitute the being is still there, but it is not yet restored to its self-sustaining, entropy-exporting process. When you transmit their information through space, you are giving structure to the EM waves propagating against background noise, so there’s still a KL divergence from the environment: the waves you transmit are different from what you would expect if you expected normal background noise.
You still, of course, need someone capable of decoding that and reinstantiating the person. When all information about how to do so is lost, then the person is finally irreversibly mixed with their environment and permanently dead, in line with the definition I gave before.
I’m not sure of the purpose of this question. Could you state clearly what your position is, and which part you believe I’m disagreeing with, and why that disagreement is in error?