I imagine it would be a total ballache for the person https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/jul/03/they-said-i-dont-exist-but-i-am-here-one-womans-battle-to-prove-she-isnt-dead
A few months ago, we had a question about what would happen if necromancy was possible and an undead was called as a court witness. I gave a rather fun-to-write, tongue-in-cheek answer, which might be germane to your question too. Here’s just a snippet:
So now we come back to zombies. Would a jury be able to set aside their shock, horror, and awe about a zombie in court that they could focus on being the finder of fact? If a zombie says they’re an eye-witness to a mugging, would their lack of actual eyeballs confuse the jury? Even more confusing would be a zombie that is testifying as an expert witness. Does their subject matter need to be recent? What if the case needs an expert on 17th Century Parisian fashion and the undead is from that era and worked in haute couture? Are there no fashion historians who could provide similar expert opinions?
I imagine some religious folks would kill them as an affront to their religion or conversely imprisoned in secret government lab for testing.
Either nobody would believe it, or it would be on every screen and headline for a week, before the next news cycle Swiss the attention away.
Life insurance companies would be changing their terms and conditions.
If they’ve been dead for a while then the body is going to be quite decayed so that unfortunate person would end up dying again immediately.
Unless you’re suggesting this thing that came to life is no longer human. So in that case decayed body/flesh, missing organs/bodyparts, etc. no longer prevent it from “life”. But I’d argue that isn’t a human coming back to life, more like a corpse transforming into something else.
Get killed because that’s a zombie
I swear to God Dave if you found the necronomicon again
If it happened frequently enough, the government would find a way to tax it.
So frequency equals taxes?
Let’s hope they never start counting all the times you jacked it.
Something that nobody seems to have touched upon is the fact that many dead people are embalmed.
If you suddenly came alive again after being embalmed, you’d suddenly become dead again.
Also, post-mortem examinations are not uncommon if the cause of death was not clear. Again this might lead to instant re-death.
Finally, if the cause of death /was/ clear (such as trauma), then again, that may likely result in instant re-death.
While technically true, this really doesn’t change the question. Life is a complex series of chemical reactions; death is what happens when these reactions stop.
Let’s say you die of heart failure. Your heart stops pumping blood. Then the brain stops getting oxygen, due to the lack of blood. Then rigor mortis, and so on. If these aren’t all fixed, you would also re-die immediately (actually, without the brain function being fixed, you would never really be alive again).
The premise assumes that all of that has been addressed by them coming back to life. Adding a few external factors doesn’t change that. If it did, the simple fact that most people are buried and would suffocate would render the point moot. Same for decomposition.
Although cremation would be awfully hard to tackle…
Realistically, Netflix documentary, lots of interviews, newspaper articles, sharing by facebook uncles. If that person is religious, either a following or a statement about seeing the light.
Years and years of fucking with legal system of your country.
Not really. My country’s legal system, at least, foresees that someone may be mistakenly declared dead and so provides in the Todeserklärungsgesetz (§ 24):
(1)Wenn der für tot Erklärte persönlich vor Gericht erscheint und die Aufhebung der Todeserklärung verlangt, so hat das Gericht, falls die Identität des Antragstellers mit dem für tot Erklärten unzweifelhaft feststeht, ohne weiteres Verfahren die Aufhebung der Todeserklärung auszusprechen.
which translates to:
If the person who has been declared dead appears personally in front of a court and demands the cancellation of the declaration of death, then the court has to, if there is no doubt as to the identity of the applicant with the person who has been declared dead, without further procedure declare the annulment of the declaration of death.
“Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”
I actually know about this law from a book (I think) about amusing laws and court decisions. It certainly does sound funny to have a sentence start “if the person who has been declared dead appears personally in front of a court”.
True. I can imagine a kafkaic scene with the reborn person talking to some official, telling them that they’re dead and they can’t be of any help, despite them standing right in front of them.
They would need to have their brain destroyed or head severed to stop them from eating people and making more like themselves.
As others have stated, you’re still going to have to define dead, and you’re going to have to define the question of what happens. I suspect up may not actually have any specifications for either and are just having fun thinking up and about random shit (that’s not a dig; I share this hobby).
But for the sake of further discussion, let’s add a few more specific (but non-limiting) questions just to help the discussion along.
I’m going to exclude cases where they’re already deeply buried or cremated because the obvious answer is “stay there” with the exception of a purely magic related situation where their body just spontaneously recorporeates somewhere? What would be the social consequences to that, how would people react, and what would happen to any property they left behind? This actually raises a lot of other questions related to the social dynamics such as:
- how would the people immediately around them react.
- what proof would people need to believe it?
- are they still on the hook for their student and medical debt
- would it likely start a new religion and how would the existing religions feel about it from most to least happy?
There’s also some physical questions such as how much skin, muscle, brain, and other organ breakdown would have occurred and which part would have the most damage.
There’s questions about whether or not they’re likely to have experienced something spiritual (including what we DO know about near-death experiences like the commonality of a peaceful feeling or spiritual experiences.
I gave no great answers to any of these and additionally encourage others to ask similar hypothetical details to ask about.
The definition of death is that it is not reversible, so it would mean that the person never was dead in the first place.
Thanks, I’ll keep that take in my pocket for later. “Your honor, you can’t possibly prove that in the future a superintelligence won’t be able to reconstruct enough of the victim’s brain to resurrect them, and hence they aren’t dead and I can’t have committed murder!”.
