The Arrival Of Death

There is no difference between a living and a freshly dead body other than one thing: the former has a consciousness, and the other does not.  It does not matter if the consciousness, the mind or the soul, fades from existence or persists outside of the body, both of which are logically possible and yet neither of which can be proven to be true; biological death is really brought about when consciousness is no longer present in the body.  Only at this point does the necrobiome start to consume a body so that is decomposes.

Death has not arrived as long as a person is still alive, and to be alive, a person's consciousness must exist.  Every moment of experience logically necessitates that there is something doing the experiencing.  No one needs to wonder, except for the non-rationalists who have not come free of assumptions to the logical axioms that even this truth hinges on, if they are still alive in the sense of conscious.  Whether one has a body is not self-evident, for while one could only doubt one's own consciousness if one was already conscious, and one could more foundationally not doubt logical axioms without relying on them metaphysically and epistemologically, the body can only be proven in a much more elaborate, difficult manner [1].

Still, the rot is initiated within a handful of minutes, so is claimed.  While it could take years for full skeletonization to occur, depending on the method of burial if applicable, once the cardiac and neurological system shut down (the heart and brain being the foremost organs respectively), it is not supposed to be long before the body that was once alive deteriorates and soon becomes food for still-living things: bacteria and fungi are intimately involved in the decomposition process.  These microbes do not engage in such activity until after a person (or other animal) is dead, the state brought about when their consciousness is gone.

Death is the cessation of life.  Again, regardless of what happens to the immaterial consciousness of a biological being after it dies, it is no longer in the body, not as it was before.  This is, after all, precisely why the death of a loved one is so penetrating to people who mourn the loss—the person, the mind, they loved is either no longer existent at all or has gone to some other plane of conscious life.  No one who is still alive in the biological sense can know what will happen after death due to epistemological limitations.  It does not follow by logical necessity that the soul will or will not live on, or that it if will, there is an immediate afterlife.

The living, nonetheless, can observe the remnant corpses of other people, and the stages of decomposition can be seen occuring on a bodily level as time elapses.  Now, what I am focusing on is not the logical possibility of certain afterlives or the evidence for the highly misunderstood Christian afterlife [2].  I am emphasizing that consciousness no longer inhabiting a physical shell is literally what entails biological death itself for corporeal creatures with minds, and physical decomposition follows.

[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/07/dreams-and-consciousness.html

[2].  For just one post on this matter, see here:

https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2024/01/i-will-come-back-and-take-you-to-be.html