Also perhaps why the evolved pattern of death is important: a subnetwork is selected in a brain, which is suited to a specific geological, physical, biological and cognitive environment that the brain is navigating. But when the environment shifts beneath the organisim (as culture does and the living world in general does), then the subnetwork is no longer the correct one, and needs to be reinitialized.
Or in other words, even in an information theoretic sense, it's true: you can't teach a old dogs new tricks. You need a new dog.
Neuroplasticity is a thing though, with plenty of cases of brains recovering from pretty significant damage. They also do evolve and adjust over time to gradual changes in environment. Lots of elderly people are keeping up with cultural and technological change.
This reminds me of a hacker news comment that blew my mind - basically "I" am really my genetic code, and this particular body "I" am in is just another computer that the code has been moved to, because the old one is scheduled to be decommissioned. So I am really just the latest instance of a program that has been running continuously since the first DNA/RNA molecules started to replicate.
> The strange thing about all this is that we already have immortality, but in the wrong place. We have it in the germ plasm; we want it in the soma, in the body. We have fallen in love with the body. That’s that thing that looks back at us from the mirror. That’s the repository of that lovely identity that you keep chasing all your life. And as for that potentially immortal germ plasm, where that is one hundred years, one thousand years, ten thousand years hence, hardly interests us.
> I used to think that way, too, but I don’t any longer. You see, every creature alive on the earth today represents an unbroken line of life that stretches back to the first primitive organism to appear on this planet; and that is about three billion years. That really is immortality. For if that line of life had ever broken, how could we be here? All that time, our germ plasm has been living the life of those single-celled creatures, the protozoa, reproducing by simple division, and occasionally going through the process of syngamy -- the fusion of two cells to form one—in the act of sexual reproduction. All that time, ^^that germ plasm has been making bodies and casting them off in the act of dying. If the germ plasm wants to swim in the ocean, it makes itself a fish; if the germ plasm wants to fly in the air, it makes itself a bird. If it wants to go to Harvard, it makes itself a man.^^ #weirding The strangest thing of all is that the germ plasm that we carry around within us has done all those things. There was a time, hundreds of millions of years ago, when it was making fish. Then at a later time it was making amphibia, things like salamanders; and then at a still later time it was making reptiles. Then it made mammals, and now it’s making men. If we only have the restraint and good sense to leave it alone, heaven knows what it will make in ages to come.
> I, too, used to think that we had our immortality in the wrong place, but I don’t think so any longer. I think it’s in the right place. I think that is the only kind of immortality worth having -- and we have it.
If you're interested in such things, then start layering on epigenetics. The "I" is a product not just of genes, but of your environment as you developed. I was just reading about bees' "royal jelly" recently, and how genetically identical larvae can become a queen or a worker based on their exposure to it.
So the program is not just the zeroes and ones, so to speak, but also more nebulous real-time activity, passed on through time. Like a wave on the ocean.
Or in other words, even in an information theoretic sense, it's true: you can't teach a old dogs new tricks. You need a new dog.