Determination of the concepts "a dead", "death" is no less serious things to different spheres of life, than the concept of "living" and "life." The worthily a formalization of the concepts "lifeless" and "death" is needed for biology, medicine, law, economics, politics and ethics.
Encyclopedic articles on theme "lifeless" or "death" adduce only the fantasy of the meanings, differing from each other only by the volume. Moreover, the concept of "death" implies the absence of manifestations of life in the body, whereas this is process. Each stage of the process is just another stage of the development of death.
The concept "non-living" has two categorial differences. As epithet "lifeless" can detect the absence of manifestations of life (e.g., "subject showed no signs of life"). It is assumed that the subject had previously these signs of life. As an adjective, the term "non-living" can characterize belonging to inert matter (e.g., "by all indications, this does not apply to the living"). In this case it was assumed that something was never a living organism.
Thus, the "lifeless" - is either a material object, belonging to inert matter, or it dead. Manifestations of life include the exchange by information with the environment, energy and matter, the ability to reproduce itself, to be able to maintain homeostasis of its own structure, function, and entropy.
Today we know the systemic effects that are beginning to manifest itself in the process of dying body. Organism is dying, but it is not death. First, stops working basic information mechanism. The youngest mechanism phylogenetically dies by first. Secondly, death begins as a sequential process, but not as a fact. For the man a death begins with the death of consciousness. Do not confuse this condition with loss of consciousness. Otherwise we fall into the semiotical trap.
In the next step of the process of death will stop working vital structures of the brain. After this stage nerve cells lose excitability both in single cell and in the ganglia. Next victim – it is a genetic apparatus. At last a living protein died in the dying organism. At this stage it is death of the quantum mechanism of ultra-highfrequency spontaneous of reversible hydration ↔ dehydration living protein which scans the medium at its level.
So at what stage of death can talk about the fact of its occurrence? Many lives depend from answer to this question, including the lives of donors of potential organs? Again before us this eternal question. What to choose? Weal or benefit? After all, good for one does not mean good for another. Thermodynamics, you know. We have no solution of this problem.