Elon Musk's Neuralink, which aims to implant brain chips in humans, announced in September that it was recruiting human clinical trial participants for device testing. The device, known as a brain-computer interface (BCI), collects the electrical activity of neurons and interprets those signals as commands to control external devices. This technology allows people with paralysis to control cursors or keyboards with their thoughts. In addition, Precision Neuroscience implanted its brain implant in three people for about 15 minutes last year to confirm that the implant can successfully read, record, and map electrical activity on the surface of the brain, and plans to expand its research to more patients in 2024.

These industry leaders, who are telling us that science and technology have reached a mature stage where they can have a real and dramatic impact on human conditions, are increasingly realizing the huge capital investment needed for commercialization. However, this change is not merely a technological achievement, butit is another beginning that raises fundamental questions about our human relationship with our bodies, and ultimately about the complex social, customary understanding and meaning of life and deathIt is important to remember this.

Birth certificates record the moment we are born, while death certificates record the moment we die. This distinction reflects the traditional concept of thinking about life and death in a binary way. The biological definition of death has generally meant the 'irreversible cessation' of life-sustaining processes maintained by the heart and brain. However, the invention of CPR around 1960 led to the term 'cardiac arrest', creating a distinction from the previous, unconditional meaning of death. Moreover, ventilators have turned people with brain damage into 'walking corpses', prompting medical, ethical, and legal debates about whether patients can be declared dead. In the field of neuroscience, even recently, there have been cases that contradict the conventional notion that the brain begins to be damaged after a few minutes without oxygen, indicating that the boundary between death and life is becoming increasingly blurred.

In Madagascar, an island nation off the east coast of Africa, there is a ritual called Famadihana in which the bodies of ancestors are exhumed from family graves and danced with the bones of the dead to the accompaniment of various brass bands. This ritual shows a rather dramatic way of seeing death not as a final farewell, but as an ongoing relationship, a part of the process of life. For them, the excavation process is experienced as a time for family members to affirm their love for each other, and in them who say they have made their ancestors very happy through this ritual, we see another challenge to the idea of ​​consciousness, activity, artifacts, and relationships beyond biological death.

We live in an age where there are services that talk about humans everywhere. We can constantly see how smart things like products, the web, and wearables make our lives more convenient and respond directly to our needs. However, we need to pay attention to the fact that these suffocating views, which focus only on each moment of life and are competitively presented as personalized and present-oriented, make us constantly forget that we are beings on a limited path of death, and even make us taboo and distance ourselves from it. In 2014, cultural anthropologist Inga Treitler conducted a survey of 150 participants in Berlin using an interactive card game to explore desires and needs related to death. Through this process, she found that the conversation about death, which was previously thought to be isolating, confusing, and painful, could actually be experienced quite openly and interestingly, and that the assumption that it would be an uncomfortable topic was linked to the cold and strict existing funeral practices. In addition, she found that the experiences of small deaths, such as turning off the lights and going to sleep alone as a child, initially increase fear, but over time, they become a process of gaining courage and strength.

Technological and scientific advances are constantly evolving our understanding of death. The discovery that brain activity continues for some time after the heart stops has opened up the possibility of reversing the body's activity, and suggests a new awareness of life itself, as well as specific changes in end-of-life care, such as what new rituals and conversations we can prepare for and experience with our families during the time before and after death.

It is 2024. Perhaps this is the most appropriate time to focus on a variety of perspectives on death as a benchmark for how we remember, experience, and anticipate the past, present, and future.

References

The Race to Put Brain Implants in People Is Heating Up

The Biggest Questions: What is death?

In Madagascar, the Living Dance With the Dead

We need to talk about death

Putting Death in Its Place: Using Ethnography to Redesign Death⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠