I am a fan of Dick Sobsey‘s work and check his blog regularly for his latest news & analysis regarding the abuse of people with disabilities.
His latest blog entry, on What Sorts of People, is concerned with an examination of the logic behind the Donation after Cardiac Death (DCD) protocol. That’s the same protocol, of course, that sparked the publicity in the “near-death experience” of Kaylee Wallace in Toronto earlier this month.
Below is a link and an excerpt from this excellent analysis.
How good is it? Well, my first reaction to reading it was “Damn, I wish I’d written that!”
I don’t react that way often, no matter how much I like an article or essay.
Schrödinger’s Cat & Donation after Cardiac Death
April 17, 2009 — dsobsey
Quantum Ethics: Schrödinger’s Cat & Donation after Cardiac Death
Recent discussions of transplanting hearts from so-called DCD (Donation after Cardiac Death) patients into others (for example the recent Baby Kaylee saga at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children) raise serious questions that seem to only have explainable answers in the field of quantum physics. I don’t know if physicist Erwin Schrödinger actually had a living, breathing cat but the hypothetical cat that he proposed to illustrate a paradox back in 1935 to illustrate a paradox has certainly achieved fame.
The paradox that Schrödinger’s hypothetical cat presented was that the cat was simultaneously dead and alive. Schrödinger asked Einstein to imagine that a cat was inside a box and that we could not see or hear or otherwise sense what was happening inside the box. The cats fate is linked to some random event inside the box. Applying the rules of quantum physics the cat is both dead and alive until we can open the box and and directly determine its state. Common sense would suggest that surely the cat is either dead or alive inside the box, whether we know it or not, but applying the rules of quantum physics, the actual state does not come into being until the moment that we measure it. Of course, Schrödinger didn’t actually believe that; he thought the idea made no sense. His real goal was to point out that if this was dumb idea when applied to cats, it might be just as dumb an idea to apply to subatomic particles.
Now, in the 21st century, we appear to applying a Schrödinger’s cat logic to the ethics of organ donation.
Read the rest of the essay here. –Stephen Drake