Some thoughts on "Erasing Death"

What is death? What is consciousness?

I just finished Sam Parnia’s book Erasing Death. I probably heard about it via Jimmy Akin’s podcast, the episode on Deathbed Visions I think. If you ever enjoyed Art Bell’s “Coast to Coast AM”, Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World is like a Roman Catholic version of that, and the newer Haunted Cosmos is like a Reformed Protestant version of that, and I do listen to both of those from time to time.

The author Sam Parnia is a medical doctor and professor who has specialized in resuscitation, and the book is largely about two questions:

1. What is death?

2. What is consciousness?

What is death?

It used to be pretty easy to define death. The critical organs here are basically the heart, lungs, and brain, and if any of those ceased working (and it was usually the heart - cardiac arrest is the one medical condition we will all experience, he says), the other two would follow in quick succession. Hence the tests of no heartbeat, no respiration, and fixed, dilated pupils (no brain function). But technological advances, especially in the 20th century, have made the answer to this question not so clear.

Toward the end of the book he tells the story of a pair of French doctors, Maurice Goulon and Pierre Mollaret. In the 1950s, they are treating patients with neuromuscular disorders such as polio, which kill you by weakening the muscles used in respiration until you slowly suffocate. In their hospital in Paris, they discovered they could keep many of these folks alive via help from a machine invented a couple of decades before, the iron lung, which would breathe for them. But doctors came to notice a strange phenomenon in some of these patients (and this is rather disturbing, so sorry). Some of these patients would have massive brain injuries, kept alive by the ventilators, but they would die anyway several weeks later when their hearts stopped. But then, when the bodies were sent for autopsies, it was found that their brains were basically liquefied, the brain tissue had degraded to such a tremendous extent. So… when did they really die, then? This machine kept their lungs functioning, but most of their brain had apparently fallen apart some time earlier. Did they die when their heart finally stopped, or had they already died many days earlier and technology just kept some of the machinery working? (And you can understand how that question could be elaborated even more now that we have better technology than the iron lung for, basically, taking over some of the functions of your body for you.)

Or, on the cheerier flip side of this, we’ve also gotten better at bringing people back after death. It might be better to understand, he says, death as a process. It takes many hours, actually, depending on the organ, for the cells to die in an irreversible way after death (this is really why organ donation can be a thing). If proper procedures are followed (especially the cooling of the body to slow the chemical reactions that cause cells to decay), and if the cause of death makes it possible, a person can now be revived several hours after they die. There are some dramatic stories of this, especially, for example, a woman who collapses and dies from hypothermia in a forest (so her body is naturally chilled), is found the next morning and taken to a hospital, has her heart restarted… and goes on to live a normal life. (He talks about watching the movie Titanic, all these people left for dead in the chilly waters of the north Atlantic - something like ideal conditions for preserving the body actually, with modern technology we could have revived many of them.) Well, when you can bring a person back many hours after she died… what is death? What if that time period becomes days? What about a year? Ideally, he says, we would perhaps like to say death is “when the consciousness of the person has left in a way that is irretrievable”, but we don’t have any scientific test to tell us when that has happened.

We don’t have all the answers. But we do know that the once-held philosophical idea that there is no way back after death is not accurate and that there is a significant period of time after death in which death is fully reversible.

To get myself in some trouble here, I couldn’t help but think of parallels to the issue of abortion. It is at least easier to sell the claim of “just a clump of cells” if death is immediate and irreversible if the child is removed from the body of the mother. But if, through technology, we could preserve the life of the child outside of the mother all the way into normal, post-birth maturity… now what? You might object “but nothing has actually changed”, but our ability to preserve life where we lacked that ability before may change our perspective on things.

What is consciousness?

You can see how concerns like those above would naturally flow into the question, what is consciousness? After all, when the woman was dead in the forest for a few hours, where was “she”? In particular where does your “self” - your psyche, your consciousness, that real you, which is consistently you through all the experiences of life - reside? Is it a thing produced by the brain, and when the brain dies, it is annihilated (probably the perspective of most scientists). Or is it some other thing, which might be called the “soul”, might be given other names, or be some other things as well, which has to interact with the brain, but is not itself derived from it? Put another way, does the brain create or contain the psyche?

That’s actually a really hard question to test through scientific measurement. So here he gets into the issue of “near death experiences”, which he prefers to call “actual death experiences” because… why say “near”, you were dead. But just to be clear, NDEs or ADEs are not the only phenomenon that raises the consciousness question. He shares the story of one man, nearly drowns, suffers anoxic brain injury, becomes entirely uncommunicative, only makes loud moaning sounds, especially at night. His wife takes him home, and this continues for years. One night, wife annoyed by the moaning, gives him an Ambien through his feeding tube to quiet him down. A short while later she finds her husband awake, alert, and communicative! A few hours later he’s gone again. She gives him another Ambien and he comes back. It eventually became a daily routine. OK, but his consciousness seemed to be “gone”, for years. Apparently (right?) it was there the whole time, under the surface, waiting for, in this case a drug, to modify the brain so it could resurface. How do we understand that? (This perhaps also gets into the issue of “terminal lucidity”, where people suffering the mental effects of advanced age suddenly become very lucid in the hours before death.)

Th 15th century painting “Ascent to Empyrean” by Hieronymus Bosch. One individual who had an ADE told Parnia this painting very much resembled what he saw.

But about the ADEs… I won’t dwell on this too long. But these are, I’m sure you know, where people who die, and are later brought back to life, report having these experiences while their body was dead. And precisely because we are now so successful at resuscitating people who have died, we’re getting more of these reports than ever before.

…when we examine the evidence accumulated so far from resuscitation science through studies of the brain during and after cardiac arrest, we have to at least consider the possibility that the human mind and consciousness could be a separate, undiscovered scientific entity that is not produced by the brain. However, it interacts with the brain and thus continues to exist after biological death has started. Evidence is mounting that those who are brought back from death through resuscitation techniques can tell us what they experienced as well as specific details relating to their own periods of resuscitation… even though the brain was in a state in which it was unable to function.

Parnia says common elements of ADEs, worldwide, include:

1. Feelings of peace, happiness, joy, and being pain-free.

2. An out-of-body experience where you look down on yourself from above. (Some of the most remarkable stories to me are people who report, accurately and in great detail, upon what was happening in their hospital room when they had no brain activity. That doesn’t necessarily prove “immortal soul”, but it certainly proves stuff is happening that our science does not understand. And we have a lot of these stories now, it is indisputable that this sometimes happens.)

3. A panoramic review of their lives, often where they experience the events of their life from the perspective of the other person, and judge themselves.

4. Encounters with deceased relatives.

5. Going through a tunnel.

6. Encounters with a loving being of light.

7. Encountering some sort of point of no return where it is understood, if they pass that line, they cannot return to their body.

Parnia goes through proposed chemical explanations for ADEs and finds them implausible (usually because you can induce similar chemistry without death, and it doesn’t cause an ADE, but you’ll have to read the book for that). Let me share just a couple thoughts from this discussion if I could.

One, and Christians sometimes make this mistake I think, you do not suddenly become omniscient when you die. (Indeed, the chance to keep learning forever is a particularly enticing aspect of the afterlife for me!) Ergo if your consciousness is active, and you experience something after death (and let’s remember that most of these experiences are just a few minutes), you’re going to interpret what you see in light of the beliefs you formed during life. Of course you would, how could it be otherwise. So when a Christian says he encountered God, and a Hindu shares a very similar sounding story but says he encountered Yama, we should not hear that as a contradiction. No, they had the same sort of experience, and understood it differently. (Now from a Christian perspective, I know you’re thinking, why a Hindu would have a cheery meeting with God might be a much harder question… and one I’m not going to address in this post, sorry, not what I’m after at the moment.)

And two… numbers seem to vary quite a bit, but in a study Parnia did, 5% of the people who were resuscitated said they had an ADE. Well, why didn’t the rest? Now again I'm speculating here because we just don't have all the answers, but I think we have to keep in mind that if you have (or are) a soul that survives death, once it returns to your body, it again has to function with the physical brain. Probably, if you want to form (maybe) or relate (almost definitely) a memory of the experience, that has to happen now with the participation of your physical brain. So, this is just speculation of course, but maybe everyone who dies has an ADE. Maybe it’s 100%. But only 5% of people remember them and are able to relate them when they wake up. Maybe this depends upon how well their body is treated when they are gone. Maybe it depends upon other factors. We all dream every night, notes Parnia, but some people remember those dreams very well, and others not at all. But 100% of people dream. If you only remember 5% of your dreams, it doesn’t mean the rest never happened. Scientifically, at the moment, we have absolutely no way to measure whether or not someone has an ADE, all they can do is tell us.

Incidentally, both of the above also offer a possible answer to - hey, what about this person who says they had an ADE, but it mentioned reincarnation? Well, assuming this person is trying to be honest, I think it is quite possible that in such cases either the still-finite-human-being misinterpreted part of the experience, or somehow misremembered it later. Again, we can’t really say for certain, but both possibilities are certainly options.

And finally I appreciated his point that… we can only learn so much, right now, by looking at the brain. For example, our ability to map brain activity (e.g. a functional MRI) is helpful, but it doesn’t really tell us about the reality or unreality of an experience. If you are having a really terrible time in life, it might make you depressed - we could see that depression with the right sort of brain scan. If you take certain drugs, as a side effect of the medication, it might make you depressed - looks exactly the same in the brain scan. If you are in love with a woman because you are in love with the woman - we could see that love with the right sort of brain scan. If you are drunk, and being drunk produces feelings of affection for the girl at the end of the bar - looks exactly the same in the brain scan. The analogy is not a perfect one, but perhaps you’re getting the point that “real experience” and “simulated experience” look exactly the same to many of our scientific measurements. Similarly, if the big question is, “consciousness is the brain” or “consciousness uses the brain”, both possibilities may look exactly the same to many of our present-day scientific techniques.

So I found that all quite interesting.

THAT IS ALL.

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