End stage Alzheimer's disease and the morality of positive euthanasia

Hello All,

I have long thought about exactly where the soul/mind of an Alzheimer sufferer exist in the End Stage where the person has become so incapacitated that they are zombie like and comatose.

Playing Devils Advocate I put a few points for discussion as follows”

Could the degradation of the mind due to end stage Alzheimer’s disease suggest that the mind and, resultantly, the human consciousness could be transient things.

Does this prove that most preconceived notions of an afterlife are fundamentally flawed? ?

Must we be able to perceive, evaluate and understand the afterlife for in to become a reality in the afterlife? E.g. or heaven or hell are creations of the mind which appears dead in the end stage Alzheimer sufferer

Mind might not survive without a functioning human body. Does the eternal soul live on? If the consciousness dies then the thing that makes you an individual, self-aware human might cease at that moment also?

As the disease progresses the Alzheimer's victim goes through anger, rage, violence, depression, regressing to childhood, forgetting current life - almost living in a 'past life' state. in random stages of this disease.?..

The final stage of the Alzheimer sufferer is unspeakably difficult for the family who must look after and nurse the person they loved so much but who is now just a blank eyed robot that somehow retains the ability to eat and drink.
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I have seen the terrible devastation of this disease where the person is apparently absent from the body and the body lives on as a mindless biological entity.

But the body was the vehicle of the soul of a loved one, is this person trapped in the horror of dark void, or has the mind or soul ceased to exist.?

Does the  person trapped inside a dark Alzheimer body suffer unspeakably and if we could really establish this, would not positive euthanasia be an option?.

If God, forbid, I ever got into this state I would welcome someone giving me a huge dose of morphine and releasing me into my destiny

What do you think about this vexing problem?

The difficult question is can positive euthanasia ever be justified?

I think the body does not contain all of the soul, that the soul is bigger than just the body, and it resides in different places at once, experiencing different things at once. Thus, Alzheimer's does not extinguish the soul nor unduly burden a soul but gives it another experience for the soul to grow from.

Likewise caregivers also grow from the experience by experiencing compassion and from understanding more about suffering on the physical pain.

Hi Alan,
it's not a difficult question: positive euthanasia can be justified very simply as it ends the physical suffering. From my experience (which is nothing like yours obviously) it would appear that the current 'stay alive at all costs until the last possible moment' worldview is from those who think that this is the only life we have and so no matter how horrendous we've got to hang onto it.

Needless to say, if reincarnation was a widely accepted fact by 'the establishment' (whoever you regard them to be) then ending this life this way would seem not only compassionate and caring, but also supremely logical and no-one would regard it as anything other than just and natural.

'Mind might not survive without a functioning human body' -I think this idea doesn't hold up. All the OOBE cases that are well documented show that you can still think and reason OOB and while experiencing a NDE.
If the soul is inhabiting the body and a disease like Alzheimers affects the body, it doesn't mean that the soul is not funtioning, only that the connection between the soul consciousness and the body isn't working correctly.

A suitable analogy would be the captain of a ship giving orders over a telephone line to the crew. If the telephoen line is faulty and the messages come across as garbled, that doesn't mean that the captain has gone mad, only that the physical means of communication are interrupted (Normal service will be resumed as soon as the next incarnation starts? ).

So the degradation of the mind 'proving' that preconceived notions of the afterlife are flawed is irrelevant.
In the words of Bob Monroe:
'You are more than your body'
-and that includes your mind. The mind is a wonderful tool, but analogous to a computer in many ways. Most folks here know how crazy things get when a computer goes on the blink!

Best wishes,
David.

When John was in a coma, there were times he wasn't there - I'd put my hand on his arm, and the body was empty (sleep with a man for 20 years, and you know when they're there and when they're not).

I think the "soul" or whatever comes and goes at that point.  The same in Alzehiemer's. I also think that what it's getting as input from teh sensory organs isn't necessarily what is happening, and likewise what goes out gets garbled.

Imagine one of those aliens from "Men in Black"...the ones inside a people suit, operating it from a little cockpit.  If the sound and video when wrong, they'd be just as coherent as ever, but hearing and seeing, and therefore interpreting, what was going on outside all wrong.  Then when they push the buttons and move the levers to make their response, that isn't going out as intended, either, on top of it being based on the incorrect input.  That's how I see it when the soul is  trying to operate a malfunctioning body.