In a new paper, philosopher Patrick Stokes contemplates how social media sites complicate the idea of death:
[The Australian philosopher Mark Johnson says] that when you fear death, what you fear is not the extinction of this extended physical and social being, but rather you fear that the sense of self that you experience right now is going to be extinguished. … You go to someone's Facebook page and it says "here I am" and "this is what I like" and "here's a bunch of photos of me" and "here's a bunch of interactions between me and my friends that you can see on my wall." When that person dies all of that stuff is still left there and though the profile has become in some sense unresponsive, it's still existent and people continue to interact with it. The social identity of this person continues.
The old standby — and not such a bad standard — is the stopping of the heart. But the stopping of a heart is anything but irreversible. We’ve seen hearts start up again on their own inside the body, outside the body, even in someone else’s body. Christian Barnard was the first to show us that a heart could stop in one body and be fired up in another. Due to the mountain of evidence to the contrary, it is comical to consider that “brain death” marks the moment of legal death in all fifty states. The search for the moment of death continues, though hampered by the considerable legal apparatus that insists that it has already been found.
The Dish 