Binding Chaos
Death
The decoupling of the five elements of a person (body, self, life, will and consciousness) in such a way that they often cannot be rejoined.
Expanded explanation
Death is a separation rather than an ending, and the word often is carrying weight. If the five elements can sometimes be rejoined, which is what resuscitation after minutes or hours implies, then death is a state that is occasionally reversible and therefore not a threshold. Marsh presses this directly. Death is not a binary switch but a process, and it is also often a matter of opinion, which is why the point at which it is declared moves with circumstances that have nothing to do with the body. Her reading of Schrodinger's cat inverts the usual lesson. The cat being neither or both dead and alive is not a paradox about quantum mechanics but a picture of ordinary reality, since everything is both until it is authoritatively declared to be one or the other. Each element has its own fate on this account. The body persists and its parts are of many different ages. If life is energy then it follows the first law of thermodynamics and continues to exist afterwards in some form. Self, will and consciousness can be present after death on the working medical definition, which is what testimony from those who have died or decoupled for other reasons describes. The self survives but cannot continue expanding without the assistance of outside wills, which is why Marsh treats the living as continuing the selves of the dead rather than merely remembering them.
In Heather Marsh’s words
Marsh reads the cat in the box as a description of how death actually works rather than as a paradox about physics.
“death is not a binary switch but a process”
Abstracting Divinity
Examples
- Five separate fates
- Body, self, life, will and consciousness come apart rather than stopping together, so each has to be tracked on its own.
- The cat in the box
- Everything is both dead and alive until authoritatively declared otherwise, which Marsh treats as literal rather than as a thought experiment.
- Expansion without a will
- A surviving self cannot keep expanding by itself, which is how the living come to continue the selves of the dead.
How others use it
Medicine works with cardiopulmonary and neurological criteria and has been arguing about their relation since brain death was formalized in 1968, with bioethicists including Robert Veatch treating the newer standard as a legal convention. Philosophy divides over whether death is bad for the one who dies, running from Epicurus through Thomas Nagel and Derek Parfit, and generally assumes a person is a unity that either persists or does not. Anthropology after Robert Hertz records societies treating death as a process lasting months. Marsh's definition is closest to the anthropological view but arrives by decomposition rather than by ritual, since a person made of five separable elements cannot end all at once, which makes gradual death a structural consequence rather than a cultural belief.
Sources
Defined in the Binding Chaos series glossary, and developed through the decoupling and post-death chapters of Abstracting Divinity.
Recommended reading path
Then read in full: Abstracting Divinity.
A suggested order for exploring this corner of the theory.