The HDM includes the notion that death can be easily determined by experiment in the here and now. So the idea that a brainwave or heartbeat is something that once lost (or once absent for 10 minutes, etc.) is part of it. My thought is that doctors get a certain amount of social status when they are able to give an unambiguous answer on the topic of whether someone is “too far gone” or not.
Lawyers deal with words on paper that say whether someone was dead or not at a specified time. While there’s not a technical problem with differentiating legal death from say, moral death, the fact that the HDM more or less corresponds to legal death doubtless makes it easier for such things to be processed.
Writers have to relate their stories to the audience, so if they try to make death a totally bad/avoidable/ambiguous thing there is a high probability they won’t connect with the audience. Morals about how evil it is to grasp for immortality are by contrast a highly popular fantasy trope.
The essential threat is to the comfort level of a large number of people. Their entire notion of death is fuzzy, instinctive, and full of prescientific influences and outdated concepts.
I wonder if Harry Potter would have run into backlash—I mean a wider backlash—if at the end of Philosopher’s Stone, the (good-aligned) alchemist who made the Stone had been reported to be still living as a happy immortal rather than deciding to quit peacefully.
The HDM includes the notion that death can be easily determined by experiment in the here and now. So the idea that a brainwave or heartbeat is something that once lost (or once absent for 10 minutes, etc.) is part of it. My thought is that doctors get a certain amount of social status when they are able to give an unambiguous answer on the topic of whether someone is “too far gone” or not.
Lawyers deal with words on paper that say whether someone was dead or not at a specified time. While there’s not a technical problem with differentiating legal death from say, moral death, the fact that the HDM more or less corresponds to legal death doubtless makes it easier for such things to be processed.
Writers have to relate their stories to the audience, so if they try to make death a totally bad/avoidable/ambiguous thing there is a high probability they won’t connect with the audience. Morals about how evil it is to grasp for immortality are by contrast a highly popular fantasy trope.
The essential threat is to the comfort level of a large number of people. Their entire notion of death is fuzzy, instinctive, and full of prescientific influences and outdated concepts.
I think you mean this trope.
I wonder if Harry Potter would have run into backlash—I mean a wider backlash—if at the end of Philosopher’s Stone, the (good-aligned) alchemist who made the Stone had been reported to be still living as a happy immortal rather than deciding to quit peacefully.