Mark & Joe

MARK: A materialist maintains all functions of life to be the manifestation of physical material acting together in a certain way.

JOE: Right.

MARK: Ok, so then the only difference between a dead body and a live body is that the dead body DOES NOT exhibit the movement we call life and the live body DOES exhibit the movement we call life.

JOE: Ok.

MARK: So then if I took a dead body, I should be able to cause the material to make the same movements of life through some operation.

JOE: What?

MARK: Meaning I can make the body move like it's alive.

JOE: Like make it move around – like Weekend at Bernie’s?

MARK: Um, that too. But also, like, restart him.

JOE: You mean like, bring him back from the dead?

MARK: Yes. Resurrect him.

JOE: No. That’s impossible.

MARK: Why would it be impossible to move it around? Meaning, if we can move around Bernie, on a macro level by lifting his arms and moving him a round, if we had even more precise controls (say to his liver, heart, kidneys, etc.) we would have even greater control over him.

JOE: Okay, fine, so we can make him pump his heart and cause his lungs to inflate – but none of that is resurrection.

MARK: Okay, so what would be resurrection?

JOE: Well, he’d have to be able to open his eyes, remember his life, and go on living.

MARK: Ok, but according to the materialist, everything is just the movement of our physical material. So if I can cause the identical movements of the material – I can trigger the exact same movements which we call life. If the movement causes the life effect, then control of the movement means control of the life effect. Basically, I can trigger life.

JOE: But not if they’re dead.

MARK: What would be dead?

JOE: How about dead for 100 years?

MARK: No, the materialist would argue that a hundred year old body would have degraded and obviously be beyond recovery.

JOE: Ok, so how about dead for a year.

MARK: Again, probably no. I’d say that we would have to study exactly how long a brain can last and retain its life movements without the ongoing maintenance the body provides it. But let’s say that a brain can last a few days without too much erosion.

JOE: So, basically you’re saying death. You’re making no sense. On the one hand, you’re saying you can reverse death (which you can’t) and then you’re saying that the only viable subject is somebody who died like minutes ago – which is what we currently do. How are you saying anything different than modern medicine?

MARK:   I am saying modern medicine. I’m saying that modern medicine is founded upon the idea that the body is a machine which can be repaired, upgraded, and healed. Parts can be removed or augmented, or even replaced. We can replace each of our parts or improve their performance.

JOE: That’s not bringing anyone back from the dead, that’s just medicine. Death is different. Death is when the body breaks down so fully that we can’t replace anything – like the brain is now just a lump of goo. You can like zap it or something but it’s never going to “move” the same way again. Because it’s dead now.

MARK: Ok, so then we don’t have the ability to trigger life after death.

JOE: Right. That’s what dead means.

MARK: Right, okay. So then once the brain degrades to that point, there is no way to revive the thing and that’s what dead means.

JOE: Right.

MARK: So how long can we stretch it out?

JOE: What do you mean?

MARK: Like, can we bring back a person a day after they’re dead?

JOE: I guess, maybe someday, medicine will be able to revive a body even a day after death like in a hundred years or something. I doubt it, since we’re pretty advanced in medicine and I think that we know that the limit is basically 8 minutes or whatever.

MARK: Ok, so 8 minutes is our limit. Functions end. 8 minutes later, revival impossible.

JOE: Yes.

MARK: OK, so unless medical science figures out how to add to those eight minutes. Better doctors, better equipment, better techniques. Whatever that number turns out to be – that’s our death limit.

JOE: Yeah. That’s whatever the final death is of each society. It used to be death just happened and nobody was revived. Then we figured out how to revive some people and got better at it so we have the initial cessation of body functions and then the revival limit.

MARK: So for any given society since the advent of “revival”, it’s death + revival which varies based upon the medical skill of that society.

JOE: Right. After that, it’s complete death.

MARK: The end.

JOE: But can you restart it?

MARK: We can do the revival, but that’s it.

JOE: So is that revival bringing someone back form the dead?

MARK: A little bit. But really, that’s just like it was slipping away and we caught it before it could slip away too far.

JOE: But after that, no more. That’s the end. That’s death.

MARK: Right.