Date: Tue, 17 Dec 1996 18:15:31 -0600 (CST)
From: Omar Nasim <umnasimo-AT-cc.UManitoba.CA>
Subject: Re: Warhol/sci-fi/turnips/death


On Tue, 17 Dec 1996, aspeitia axel arturo barcelo wrote:

> I am sorry to disagree with omar, but Rachel is right. The whole idea of 
> somebody being *conscious* of her death is complete nonsense. Nobody can 
> be consciouss of her death in so far as if they are still consciouss they 
> are not death and if they are death they are no longer consciouss. That 
> is why Death is not defined from the inside out, but completely from the 
> outside. That is what Rachel meant when saying that it is Culture which 
> defines death. It is the living who can recognize who is death, not the 
> other way around. Death, therefore, is not a state of the subject but a 
> category for sorting persons. As our medicine changes, our criteria for 
> recognizing who is death and who is alive changes, and that is all.
> 
	Good "Evening", Thankyou very much for this response, I was 
anticipating this, and I am glad that someone actually caught it and 
chucked it at me!!!  The stand you you take, is reflective of the 
world-view that you subscribe to, the "postmodern".  Where the 
metaphysical or meta-anything is not possible.  But if we look at the 
>from the meta-level, which might not be plausible in our era, we find 
that Death is the phenomena that takes place in an absolute and ultimate 
way.  That is, we are conscious of it, not only in our life and lived 
experiences, but in our actual dying.  I have never died before, so I 
cannot state to you that, when I was dying, I was conscious of it.  So if 
we turn to the empirical cases of death, we find that when people are 
about to die, they are "struck" with that very fact, not by the doctors, 
nor by anyone else, but by their OWN consciousness.  Okay, when we die, 
we might not be able to KNOW we are dead, but if Plato's "Ideas" and the 
Kantian Idea's, Schopenhauer's "Will", and the Religious "spritual world" 
does exist, we would totally KNOW we have died, because we are not in 
that state of regressive physical being.  But this is all metaphysical, 
which your Baudrillard does not allow for, or does he??  So the bottom 
line is, 1) if there is no metaphysical, then there is no conscious death, 
as I had claimed in my previous post. 2) But if metaphysics is possible, 
then death is a conscious state, i.e. being conscious of traversing this 
state of being, into something else, another state, a different position 
in space or in time, becoming one with the "Spheres", I don't know, but 
you know what I mean.  
However, allow me to look at the claim, if there is no metaphysics, then 
conscious death is not possible.  If this is true, we find that death as 
a state that we objectivily experience (eg. as when a friend dies) is not 
a real state.  How can it be something relative?  Rachel had suggested 
that its relative to the culture and science, but I've shown, in the 
previous post that culture and science are relative to death, not the 
other way around.  So if death is not relative, but absolute, then the 
above statment, i.e. the first line of this paragraph, is false.  Therefore
I would hold to number 2 of the possible situations...that is, 
metaphysics is possible, and thus death is real and a conscious thingy.....
thanks
Omar Nasim
Still chained to my anyalitics.....
Bye