ah ok, yeah that's a classic philosophical question. i argue only the brain matters, and really it's just the information in the brain
Archived M2K2 Forum
red chamber dream
Quote from Opium:
I think 'you' is your mind (brain). The parts of your body belong to you. When someone becomes a mindless person due to a brain injury, we say that they're gone, and that we miss them, but their body is clearly still there.
yeah, the tragic thing is that we still keep their bodies "alive" for as long as possible. what a waste.
"letting them die' sounds like we stopped taking care of them, which isn't the same as killing someone without their consent. To me it depends on quality of life, and whether or not the person can even have a thought that's organized enough to be considered as consent. If they're truly a vegetable, I say it's an act of mercy to euthanize the body.
Even cattle and dogs are afforded the courtesy of being put down. If a person is gone mentally, then a quick painless death to their body is merciful. Starvation is a slow, painful, ugly death. Even if their mind is gone to the point where they have no intelligence, it's still kind of sick to let the pain happen to their body.
Stupid coworker stories: There are some people I work with that do not understand what 'Save As' means, no matter how many times you explain it to them. This lady keeps insisting that 'save as' doesn't work because she keeps opening up a template, saving it as something else, then looking in the template folder and seeing the original file there. I have explained it to her a million times in a million ways, and each time she feigns understanding, only to prove the next day that she still does not understand.
This is the same woman who thinks the term 'read only' makes no sense because she insists that reading is all you can do with the file anyways.
This is the same woman who thinks the term 'read only' makes no sense because she insists that reading is all you can do with the file anyways.