The Second Death in the Age of Language Models: Names, Tokens, and Digital Afterlife

The saying that a person dies twice, once biologically and once when the name is spoken for the last time, has no single verified author. This note traces the phrase through David Eagleman's Sum (2009), older nineteenth-century formulations, Robert Hertz's anthropology of mortuary process, Jan Assmann's account of the Egyptian ren and cultural memory, and existential theories of symbolic immortality. It then examines the LLM case: public writing can persist as recombinable token patterns across models, but that persistence is informational residue rather than consciousness, witness, or survival.