Defining Death
On this view, death occurs only when the whole brain ceases functioning.
The "whole brain" view.
This is the view that you are your soul.
What is "pure dualism" (or "Platonic dualism")?
This ancient philosopher argued that your death doesn't harm you.
Who is Epicurus?
This is the view that grief has no positive value for the grieving person, but it comes with the territory of love.
This is the view that consciousness can be realized in any underlying substrate, whether biological or not, provided that it's serving the same function.
What is "functionalism"?
This defines death in American law as irreversible loss of circulatory and reparatory function, or loss of function of the entire brain.
What is the Uniform Determination of Death Act of 1981.
This is the view that you are your personality, as psychologically connected to a particular past.
What is the Lockean view of personal identity.
On this view of well-being, death is bad for you inasmuch as it frustrates your desires.
Desire satisfactionism
Two other theories of well-being are hedonism and objective list theory.
Oliver Burkeman says that we should experience this feeling once we recognize that any experience comes at the cost of innumerable other experiences we might have had.
Plato's metaphysics divided the world into these two categories.
The view that a human has died when the cerebrum stops functioning, but not necessarily the whole brain.
The "higher brain" view of death.
This is the view that you are your body, and that there's no non-material or non-physical part of you.
Materialism of physicalism.
This is the view that death is instrumentally bad for the person who dies, provided that person's life would have been worth living.
We fall into this whenever trying to get on top of some sort of work generates more work of the same kind, creating an inescapable cycle.
What is the efficiency trap?
This philosopher in the Timmerman and Cholbi anthology argued that immortality would be terrible precisely because we would have no reason to prioritize anything.
Who was David Beglin.
These are creatures that can cease all biological function when frozen or dehydrated, only to resume biological function later. Cody Gilmore claims that in such states they are neither dead nor alive.
Tardigrades (water bears)
This is the view that your soul is your essential part, although your body is also a part of you.
What is "compound dualism"?
This is one way that death could be bad for you even if you're paradise-bound, according to Taylor Cyr.
What is:
You could miss out on Earthly goods such as marriage and children, which is bad in a respect;
or
You could have started a repentance process that will be more painful in purgatory than it would have been on Earth.
This ancient king of legend was supposed to have abandoned the quest for mortality when came to realize that he could be content with living a happy mortal life on Earth.
Who was Gilgamesh?
Mike Huemer argues that if this is true of the past and future, then your existence now is a good reason to believe that you will be reincarnated (and have been reincarnated infinitely times before).
This is the view that everything that has once been alive must be either alive or dead.
What is "Exclusivism"?
This is the view that you are an organism.
What is "animalism" (or hylomorphism")?
This is the view that death is an intrinsically bad state to be in.
What is annihiliationism?
This is the thought experiment that Samuel Scheffler uses to show that we depend upon the world existing beyond ourselves in order to have meaning in our mortal lives.
What is the "world is destroyed 30 days after you die" thought experiment?
On David Lund's view, this is caused by the disembodied soul of a dead person projecting an image of his or her body in the minds of the living.
What is an apparition?