The perils of being an absolutionist.

People generally think in very black-and-white terms, even when they try not to. I catch myself doing it all the time. That's a tree and thats a dog.  If I get shot in the head I die. Just looking around, you'd be surprised what you take for granted. Most of us think that way because it's easier to solve complex problems when you're not worrying about the littler stuff. That's just evolution. But it's fun to ponder these thing once in a while.

For example, when does someone die? When they are declared dead by a doctor? When their heart stops? When their brain stops functioning correctly? When they stop breathing? Or somewhere in between all these points and more?

In chemistry, this sort of thing used to bother me all the time when you're measuring something. Ideally, all our measurements would contain the same amount of representative particles, ad guessing or error. But we are human, after all, and even if we were to measure out everything drop by drop, there would still be a difference between drops because of the smallness of water molecules. Of course, it is a consolation that any error would be so minute that it wouldn't matter to our perception, but it still bugs me like an itch at the back of my mind.

Here's another one for you. Are you really a human being? Merryman-Webster defines it as: "a person". The Oxford dictionary is a little more in depth.

"A man, woman, or child of the species Homo sapiens, distinguished from other animals by superior mental development, power of articulate speech, and upright stance."

Of course, even this leaves loopholes. What about someone who is comatose? Are they not people too? Or what the other way around? If we were to encounter another sentiment alien race in the future who met all the biological criteria and even called themselves people, the what are they? And besides, everyone is genetically different in some way. According to Darwin, we will eventually produce children with enough genetic diversity to escape the definition of human, but exactly when will that be?

The details are endless. If you look around, partiality is everywhere. It's only a matter of seeing through the illusion.