On Larry King and an atheist's fear of death – Telegraph Blogs
Monday 9 December 2013 | Blog Feed | All feeds  Tom Chivers   On
Larry King and an atheist's fear of death  First you die, and
then this happens. (Artist's impression: Jeff Bryant)   Larry
King, the former CNN broadcaster, made the news this morning
after saying he wants to be frozen after his death, so that he
can be revived when medical technology improves. He might not be
entirely serious – cryogenic freezing is something of a joke,
after all – but his reasoning was interesting.  First, I should
say why cryogenic freezing of humans, or cryonics, is something
of a joke. It's not inherently ridiculous: when someone is
recently dead, while it may be beyond the realms of existing
medical science to revive them, all the information that made
them human is still there: their brain structures, encoding
their memories and personality, are intact. It's called the
information-theoretic definition of death: there is a point of
decay of the brain at which