[BTirish]

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Ok, I'll try once more. Say this was 100 years ago and we didn't know how to 'revive' a frozen embryo. Would they still be alive? I can't see how 'alive' and 'non-alive' can be based on a possible future state of an entity and/or our ability to revive it. Say we try and revive an embryo and we fail, was it therefore dead while it was frozen? If not, when did it die? Or is it still alive because for all we know there is a future technique that could still revive it?

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I think you're missing my point. Being alive is a condition or quality of an entity, in reality--not just according to our opinion. If there is any natural means by which someone can be revived from whatever deficient state they're in, then they are not dead. If there is no possible natural means whatsoever (in reality, not just according to what we know) to revive someone, then that person is dead. (All living things can be revived from a deficient state by some natural means. This entity cannot be revived from a deficient state by any natural means whatsoever. Therefore this entity is dead. MTT) This is not to say that "being alive" is DEFINED as "the ability to be revived"; it is to say that one consequence or feature of being alive is that revival is possible.

If one tries and fails to revive a frozen embryo, then either the embryo was dead before the revival attempt began, or the attempt failed for some particular reason and the embryo died during the process.

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Nope, it seems treating 'alive' as a state of being rather than a potential state of being is the only meaningful way to deal with the subject ( that doesn't define how we deal with it). When they yelled, "It's alive!!" as Igor started moving, was Igor actually alive all the time since he just needed to be stimulated.

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First it was somewhat unuseful hypotheticals... now it's science fiction hypotheticals?

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I don't see a problem with defining 'being alive' as a state, like ice and water. We don't think of ice as water merely because it's easy for it to be water. The moral question doesn't go away just because we correctly refer to entities in different states as being in different categories. The 'potential' stance leads to moral uncertainty and intellectual sommersaults. Alive/not-alive are not easy definitions to come up with, animal/vegetable/mineral do not have clear boundaries either. We do not call an cucumber an animal just because it's impossible to identify the boundary ( because there is no actual boundary and not even a good arbitrary one).

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See my comments about Aristotle on the wise man above. You cannot demand the same certainty in moral matters as in theoretical ones. You seem to be demanding absolute certainty in practical matters. I'm not performing any "intellectual somersaults." Being alive is the contrary of being dead, so by definition something is either alive or dead. Once one is dead one can't be returned to life by natural means. What's so hard to understand about this?

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The state of medicine today leads to many cases of "we brought him back from the dead" situations. In those situations the person would have stayed dead 100 years ago. By your criteria, they were actually alive ( since the could have been revived), but if that's the case, when did those people 100 years ago die? Or in the modern cases where the revival fails what does the doctor put down as the 'time of death'? If a guy falls over in NYork and another in BoraBora is the NYorker alive but the BoraBoran dead even if they are in identical states?

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Once again, being alive or being dead is a condition that actually exists in entities. We misspeak when we say that someone was "brought back from the dead." You are confusing absolute possibility with contingent possibility. I can state with absolute (and not just moral) certainty that there is absolutely no possible natural means by which my dead grandma (who has been dead for more than 10 years) can be brought back to life. Likewise, I can state with absolute certainty that there is no way to revive bodies exhibiting rigor mortis and decay. In most cases proximate to death though, all that is possible is moral or practical certainty. This is fine, and it shouldn't bother us. It doesn't change the fact that a being is either dead or alive, in reality, and that as a consequence of this that being is either absolutely possibly revivable or not.

Just because it is contingently possible to revive a person in NY while it isn't contingently possible to revive a person in Bora Bora who has the same condition doesn't mean it isn't absolutely possible to revive the latter person. And, again, you are demanding theoretical certainty in practical matters--why should "what time the doctor should put for time of death" be a worthwhile objection in this matter?

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A 10 year old does not get to argue for the rights of a 21 year old on the basis of "one day I'll be one". If I put a live chicken in the a boiling pot, PETA will be after me, if I put a fertized egg in it, they won't. I don't want to be fined for killing an oak tree when I barbeque an acorn.

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If you're going to use rhetorical examples, you might want to clue us in to your actual point. All I can infer is that there are differences in how we are to treat members of human, animal, and plant species, according to the stage of their development. Okay: you're right. But "being alive" is a state shared by human zygotes and human octogenarians, and it is on the basis of being a living member of the human species that the most basic rights are afforded. Other rights or privileges, like getting to drive or to vote, are dependent upon having reached a certain stage of development. You're falsely universalizing from a particular. Just because some rights are age- or development-dependent doesn't mean that all rights are.

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"Me" is the "state of being me" and I don't see a moral problem with falling over and becoming 'dead' even if some medical miracle then revives me, I was still dead for some time. While I'm laying there I am just flesh, the 'me' part kicks in when the brain starts doing it's 'mind' thing again, if it never does, then I stay dead. My death doesn't depend on unrevivability by present day medical skill. Simply, if my mind stops, I stop. "I think, therefore I am" holds.

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I don't subscribe to Cartesianism. I'm not sure what you mean by "the state of being me." If you are actually revived, then you weren't dead. Even if your brain was not exhibiting actual higher functions, the matter of your brain and the rest of your body obviously still had to be capable of it (absolutely speaking) in order for the doctors to revive you. So, it couldn't have been the case that you were dead.