经济学人下载:怎样死才算死？

They first asked 201 people stopped in public in New York and New England to answer questions after reading one of three short stories. In all three, a man called David was involved in a car accident and suffered serious injuries. In one, he recovered fully. In another, he died. In the third, his entire brain was destroyed except for one part that kept him breathing. Although he was technically alive, he would never again wake up.

首先，他们在纽约和新英格兰的公众场所选择201个人，让他们阅读三个小故事的其中一个，然后回答一些问题。三个故事当中，都讲到一个名叫大卫的男人遭遇车祸并严重受伤。在第一个故事里，大卫完全康复了。在第二个里，他死了。第三个中，除了维持呼吸的那一部分外，他的大脑完全受损。虽然严格来讲，大卫仍然活着，但他再也不会苏醒了。

After reading one of these stories, chosen at random, each participant was asked to rate David’s mental capacities, including whether he could influence the outcome of events, know right from wrong, remember incidents from his life, be aware of his environment, possess a personality and have emotions. Participants used a seven-point scale to make these ratings, where 3 indicated that they strongly agreed that he could do such things, 0 indicated that they neither agreed nor disagreed, and -3 indicated that they strongly disagreed.

随机阅读一个小故事后，每位被试都被要求对大卫的心智能力作出评价，评价内容包括：他能否影响外界发生的事物，能否判断是非和记忆过去的事，能否对他所在的环境有所意识，是否拥有个性和情感。被试们用七个等级来进行评分，3表示非常同意大卫能够完成这些事，0表示既不同意亦不反对，-3表示强烈反对。

The results, reported in Cognition, were that the fully recovered David rated an average of 1.77 and the dead David -0.29. That score for the dead David was surprising enough, suggesting as it did a considerable amount of mental acuity in the dead. What was extraordinary, though, was the result for the vegetative David: -1.73. In the view of the average New Yorker or New Englander, the vegetative David was more dead than the version who was dead.

在《认知》杂志上报道的结果显示，完全康复的大卫得到的评价均值为1.77，死去的大卫得到的评价均值为-0.29。死去的大卫得到这样的分数已经令人甚感惊奇了，因为这表明死者大卫的心智仍相当敏锐。但离奇的是变成植物人的大卫得到的平均分为-1.73。在纽约和新英格兰的普通市民眼中，变成植物人的大卫比死去的大卫“死”得更彻底。

The researchers’ first hypothesis to explain this weird observation was that participants were seeing less mind in the vegetative than in the dead because they were focusing on the inert body of the individual hooked up to a life-support system. To investigate that, they ran a follow-up experiment which had two different descriptions of the dead David. One said he had simply passed away. The other directed the participant’s attention to the corpse. It read, “After being embalmed at the morgue, he was buried in the local cemetery. David now lies in a coffin underground.” No ambiguity there. In this follow-up study participants were also asked to rate how religious they were.

为了解释这个奇怪的观察结果，研究者们作出的第一个假设是被试认为植物人的心智活动比死人更少，因为被试关注的是大卫那连接着维持生命的系统、呆滞的身体。为了研究这个假设，他们又进行了一个后续实验，这次对于大卫的死亡有两个不同版本的描述。一个只说他去世了。另一个则使被试联想到大卫的尸体，它写到：“大卫的尸体在太平间作过防腐处理后，便被埋葬在当地的公墓中。如今他正躺在地下的一个棺材中。”描述非常清晰，毫不含糊。在后续实验里，被试也被要求对自己的宗教虔诚度作出评价。