[tcaudilllg]

should the dead be brought back to life?

[XMark]

Well, there's resuscitation techniques to bring the VERY recently dead back to life. But once the brain has died and started to decompose, I doubt there's anything anyone can do. It would be like trying to turn a hamburger back into a cow.

Maybe you could reanimate the corpse somehow but there's nothing of the original person left and you just have a vegetable/zombie.
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Mark Hall
Abstract Productions
I PLAYS THE MUSIC THAT MAKES THE PEOPLES FALL DOWN!

[Ninkazu]

Indeed. The laws of thermodynamics must be obeyed.

[tcaudilllg]

So necrosis eliminates the possibility. Even if you did revive the brain's function somehow, the necrotic cells would create infection and a gradual rotting away of the brain.

I wonder if there is a switch somewhere that shifts awareness to another body...?

[XMark]

Do you believe in the concept of a soul? I don't know if we're talking supernatural or biological here.

I don't believe in a soul myself. It's kind of silly in movies where two peoples' souls switch and they act like each other (Freaky Friday, etc). Memories are all in the brain. You would have to physically transplant your brain into another person's body to have that effect.

Or, possibly upload your memories into a computer if that technology ever becomes possible. If that upload could be done without losing any data, that could be considered a form of life extension if you could at some point further down the line download your memories into a new body (probably a synthetic one).

That opens up a whole new can of worms about consciousness though. The old "transporter" question. If you copy yourself exactly and destroy the original is it still you?

Personally I'd say yes. Because every cell in your body replaces itself over time anyways. We're all just walking through really slow transporters, so to speak :)
_________________
Mark Hall
Abstract Productions
I PLAYS THE MUSIC THAT MAKES THE PEOPLES FALL DOWN!

[tcaudilllg]

Life is nothing without subjective experience and the ability to recognize it.

Via the principle of relativism, if you die then the world blinks out, because you are not there to prove it exists. The entire purpose of life is subjective experience. There is no other. Relationships with people can enrich subjective experience, but they are a means to an end, not an end in itself.

Never in our lives do we experience a cessation of awareness. When we sleep, we experience a moment of the sounds around us "fading" and then we "warp" to a dream. If the sleep is brief, we simply "warp" to a later point in time, with no knowledge that we were asleep. (in fact, we only "experience" sleep when we dream) Subjectively, subjective experience never ends.

We cannot say that there is not a life beyond this one. It may be that our memories and identity simply die with our body, and our experience transmutes to a new body to learn the world all over again. Of there is also the possibility of eternal recurrence, where we live the same life over and over again as the universe reiterates its history eternally, but I prefer to believe that there are other universes out there.

Still, none of this explains what we actually are, or how we came to be.

[XMark]

I like the idea of the universe repeating itself and living my life over again to infinity.

Still, whether I like it or not has no bearing on whether it will actually happen. So far it looks like the universe is just going to keep stretching out until all the stars burn out and everything dies...

[XMark]

Yeah, I'm going into militant atheist mode again, I gotta stop doing that :)

Back to the original question - if the dead could be brought back to life, should they? Depends entirely on the person.
_________________
Mark Hall
Abstract Productions
I PLAYS THE MUSIC THAT MAKES THE PEOPLES FALL DOWN!

[tcaudilllg]

[DeveloperX]

..why do fucking retarded discussions get posted on game development forums? ..I swear off topic or not..there should be a line drawn. This is the kind of shit that belongs on those obscure retarded post infested forums.

RPGDX is nothing like it once was, and I fear that it never will be again.
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Rambling Indie Games, LLC

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[tcaudilllg]

It's in off topic so who cares? No RPGDX probably will not be what it once was because it has no leader. There is no Mandrake figure actively organizing anybody, so there isn't the same kind of momentum that it once had.