Monthly Archives: March 2015

Is Death Fundamentally a Biological Phenomenon?

James Bernat writes that it’s built into the “paradigm” of death that “death is fundamentally a biological phenomenon.” But suppose humans in the distant future are successful in building an artificial intelligence that has person-level properties such as consciousness, memory, etc. And suppose this robot is destroyed. Would we not want to say that the robot died? What other concept would be appropriate for describing what happened to this artificial intelligence? Thus it seems like death is not a fundamentally biological phenomenon.

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