On Thursday morning, the family of Archie Battersbee announced that his life support would end.

Battersbee's story is tragic. In April, his parents found him unconscious at home. He was rushed to hospital. Doctors said that he had no chance of recovery, and kept him temporarily alive in a comaA state of unconsciousness in which a person is unable to respond and cannot be woken up.. 

In June, after an MRI scan, a judge ruled that he was legally "dead" and that the support should stop. Battersbee's family fought a legal battle to continue life support, but they ultimately lost. His mother Hollie Dance has asked to move him to "a peaceful hospiceA medical facility that focuses on providing care and comfort for those with untreatable conditions.  to say goodbye". 

A conventional scientific view of death regards it as a physical event. Our heart stops. We stop breathing. Our body cools down and we become unable to respond.

But the sad story of Archie Battersbee reveals how hard it can be to decide when death occurs. He was declared dead by a court, yet kept alive by medics at the same time. Doctors now dispute whether death can occur before a heart stops, such as when a brain stops working.

Medicine sees death as something that occurs in a moment. When death happens in hospital, medical staff record the time of death.

Many religions also believe death is a one-time only punctuation. In Christianity, for instance, our human body dies but our soulIn many religious and philosophical traditions, the soul is part of a person, often separate from our bodies, which contain our essence. arrives in Heaven or HellMany Christians believe that faithful Christians are rewarded with an afterlife in Heaven, while the evil and non-believers are tortured in Hell.. This afterlife is eternal: as MoliereOne of France's most respected playwrights. His most famous works include Le Malade Imaginaire (The Imaginary Patient). quipped: "We die only once, and for such a long time." But, for mortals, it is also irreversible.

Yet many ideas about death are less straightforward. The Ancient Egyptians held that people had two souls. One of them passed into the afterlife, but the other remained in the body which had physically died. They created mummies to preserve this part-dead, part-alive state. 

Today, Japanese tradition says that life and death is a cycle, rather than a straight line. Our ancestors visit us every August. And Hindus, Buddhists and Sikhs believe in reincarnationThe idea that, after we have died, our soul or essence is reborn into another being.. Our actions in our life - known as karma - determine what we will become in the next life. We could be reborn endlessly into things: gods, demons, animals, plants, even bacteria.

Others think that true death only occurs when we have stopped influencing the world. George EliotThe pen-name of the great Victorian novelist, poet and journalist Mary Ann Evans, best known for her masterpiece Middlemarch (1872).  wrote: "Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them." If someone who is physically dead lives in our mind, are they still alive?

Recently, thinkers have started talking about digital technology's impact on death. Companies collect an enormous amount of information about us, which remains after our bodies perish. It is estimated that, by 2100, there could be 4.9 billion dead users on Facebook. A person's true death might only occur once this information has disappeared.

For scientists Robert Lanza and Bob Berman, there is no death at all. Albert EinsteinA German-born physicist, whose work in the early 20th Century revolutionised scientific understanding of the world. believed that past, present and future is a "persistent illusion". We live in an infinite number of nows. Thus, write Lanza and Berman, "death does not actually exist". We are always alive and dead at the same time.

Yes: Some cultures believe that life and death are cyclical. Yet even for them, death is a moment of transition from one state to another. We can die several times, but each death is a single event.

No: Life and death are more complex than that. There are dozens of interpretations of what death means. Even doctors disagree on whether death comes when the heart or the brain ceases to function.

Or... Doctors may be able to pinpoint the exact moment someone dies. But death is simultaneously a process, from when we move towards the end of our life through to the mourning of those we leave behind.

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