More On Risk and Information-Theoretic Death
There's dead and then there's dead and definitely not coming back. Cold water drowning victims can be restored to life if treated quickly. Cryosuspended people can plausibly be restored to active health by medicine of the future. Life renewed isn't a possibility for the buried or cremated, however: the pattern of the brain, the definition of who they are, is lost. That last is information-theoretic death, wherein all the information that is you is gone. In a future in which aging is cured, reducing the risk of this form of death becomes the primary concern. From Depressed Metabolism: "Perhaps the most logical proposal to achieve a negligible chance of information-theoretic death is to duplicate a person. If enough duplicates are made, the chance that all of them will die can be made very small. But this raises the issue of whether such duplicates are the same individual. Some people would argue that this strategy does not produce atomistic non-serial immortality. It is also not clear how the question of whether a copy of an individual is the same individual can ever be resolved by empirical observation or logical deduction. Perhaps the most realistic proposal to reduce the probability of information-theoretic death would be to separate the neurological basis of the person from its body in such a fashion that the risk of complete destruction of the person would become negligible."