本人以前的参与的一篇学术报告：
Death and what we are
Death for you and me is constituted by the irreversible discontinuation of the vital processes by which we are sustained.This characterization of death could be sharpened if we had a clearer idea of what we are,and the conditions under which we persist.However,the latter is a matter of controversy.
There are three main views:animalism,which says that we are human beings,which quote from the Snowdon 1990,Olson 1997,2007; personism,which says that we are creatures with the capacity for self-awareness; and mindism,which says that we are minds,which may or may not have the capacity for self-awareness by McMahan 2002.Animalism suggests that we persist over time just in case we remain the same animal; mindism suggests that we persist just when we remain the same mind.Personism is usually paired with the view that our persistence is determined by our psychological features and the relations among them,from the idea of Locke 1689 and Parfit 1984.
If we are animals,with the persistence conditions of animals,our deaths are constituted by the irreversible cessation of the vital processes that sustain our existence as human beings.If we are minds,our deaths are constituted by the irreversible extinction of the vital processes that sustain our existence as minds.And if persistence is determined by our retaining certain psychological features,then the loss of those features will constitute death.
These three ways of understanding death have very different implications.Severe dementia can destroy a great many psychological features without destroying the mind,which suggests that death as understood by personists can occur even though death as understood by mindists has not.Moreover,human beings sometimes survive the destruction of the mind,as when the cerebrum dies,leaving an individual in a persistent vegetative state.It is also conceivable that the mind can survive the extinction of the human being:this might occur if the brain is removed from the body,kept alive artificially,and the remainder of the body is destroyed,assuming that a bare brain is not a human being.These possibilities suggest that death as understood by mindists can occur even though death as understood by animalists has not and also that the latter sort of death need not be accompanied by the former.