Arnold De Loof 0102

Question: What is the difference between Life and Death?

De Loof: So my next question was: "What can die?" That’s the question. Is it only animals and plants that die? And is life or death something that only applies to the organism, or can parts also be alive? To my students I usually give the following example. It maybe look a bit cruel, but it is just a thought experiment. You take a chicken, and a good knife, and you decapitate the chicken. If you then ask the students whether the chicken is dead, some will say yes, others will say no. They will say no, because indeed if you release the decapitated chicken it will crawl around for a while, and then finally it will bleed to death. But that already shows where the problem is. Some of the students will say, yes it is dead as soon as its head has been cut off, others will say no.

You can do other experiments. You can - again a bit cruel - take the chicken, and amputate a wing. Is it dead? No. Two wings? No. Two wings and a leg? No. You can even take more parts of it and it will still be alive. Nobody would say that it is dead.
 
Next act: you take the chicken and you just sever the central nervous system, which is in the neck. Is it dead? Everybody will say: "Yes, instantly!" We did not remove anything, we just made a slit. Where? At the highest level of communication!
 
Then the last experiment: we decapitate the chicken in the laboratory, where we have all the equipment for culturing cells and the heart, and so on. Then we assume that all these cells stayed alive, or that they keep the typical characteristics of the living state as you find them in textbooks. Then the question is again: is that chicken dead? But all its parts are still alive. So the definition of death is not so unequivocal that one can say: Yes.

The answer to the question: is the chicken dead once it has been decapited? Yes it is.

Because the ability to communicate at the highest level of organisation of this organism is, in this case, irreversibly lost. And that is the definition of death. It is the irreversible loss of communication at the highest level of organisation of the given compartment. That is the start of what can be used as the definition of life.

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