Does the brain create the mind?

That’s only one of the countless questions raised by the wrenching Terri Schiavo ordeal that riveted the world, frankly. The ramifications of that pivotal event are only getting broader and deeper.

For instance, we’re getting a better idea now of how much we didn’t know then about the so-called ‘persistent vegetative state’, though plenty of experts knew plenty about it then.

The crux of the matter, of course, is this: what are the facts in the Schiavo case, and, more generally, what are the real issues involved in the diagnosis of persistent vegetative state (PVS)?

This is an excellent analysis.

“Persistent vegetative state,” defined succinctly but accurately, is the denial of subjective experience in a brain-damaged human being. PVS is the medical assertion that a human being is an object, but not a subject.

PVS is the only modern medical diagnosis that denies the personhood of a patient, and thus is fraught with logical and ethical problems.

(Actually, medical ethics have so devolved into health care rationing for those deemed worthy of it…we now get medical judgments that deny a patient’s personhood de facto just because they are somehow cognitively impaired.)

Furthermore, patients diagnosed with PVS are precisely those patients in whom discernment of awareness is most unreliable. We can never directly apprehend the thoughts of other people; we infer the thoughts of others only by their behavior. Patients with severe brain damage are precisely those people in whom expression of behavior is most impaired and in whom diagnoses based on assessment of behavior are most unreliable.

So we get the “materialist” reaction to consider these patients ‘objects but not subjects’, making it easier to stop caring for them as if they were….persons.

In my view, the political efforts to save Ms. Schiavo’s life were well-intentioned and completely justified. I believe that many of the medical opinions offered publicly by physicians who favored withdrawal of Ms. Schiavo’s hydration and nourishment were rank pseudoscience. What was done to Ms. Schiavo was an atrocity.

Which is one of the reasons for ‘America’s Lifeline’, a center of gravity for the health care and bioethics maelstrom we’re in right now. Princeton Professor Robert George is back this week to illuminate the dark side of the Nazi-like movement to declare people as “lebensunwerten Lebens“, or lives unworthy of life. And to tackle these other thorny issues caused by certain mindlessness.