In my last post, I offered a puzzle, one way out of which was to accept the possibility of informed bits of an animal surviving the death of the animal. But the puzzle involved a contrived case--a snake that was annihilated.
But I can do the same story in a much more ordinary context. Jones is lying on his back in bed, legs stretched out, with healthy feet, and dies of some brain or heart problem. How does the form (=soul) leave his body? Well, there are many stories we can tell. But here's one thing that's clear: the form does not leave the toes before leaving the rest of the body. I.e., either the toes die (=are abandoned by the form) last or they die simultaneously with the rest. But in either case, then Special Relativity and the geometry of the body (the fact that one can draw a plane such that one or more toes are on one side of the plane, and the rest of the body is on the other) imply that there is a reference frame in which the form leaves one or more of the toes last. Thus, there will be a reference frame and a time at which only toes or parts of toes are informed. It is implausible to think that one is alive if all that's left alive are the toes. So organs can survive death while informed by the individual's form.
