Steven Kotler — Singularity Hub
In The Princess Bride, the always sagacious Miracle Max—aka Billy Crystal—points out “there’s a big difference between mostly dead and all dead.” And he wasn’t wrong.
Death has always been something of a moving target. Take, for example, the first edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, published in 1768, that defined the term as “the separation of soul and body; in which sense it stands opposed to life, which consists in the union thereof.
But how can you tell when said separation occurs? Well, that’s a slightly more complicated procedure and one we still haven’t quite cracked. Thus, moving forward, and trying for an—um— more practical definition, we began to define the end of life by a series of cessations.