The living body is two things - the bag of chemicals, and the ongoing self-sustaining well-organized chemical reactions we call “life”. A dead body is just the former. (plus some disorganized chemical reactions commonly called “rotting.”)
How is a running auto engine different from one which is shut off? All the same parts are there, and in the same physical arrangement. All the potential is there. But the self-sustaining process of rotation, compression, combustion, and expansion is not happening.
A living human has trillions more moving parts than a car engine and billions more processes that all have to be working within their design envelopes for the human to “run”. Which is why restarting one from dead has proven so difficult, while starting car engines is easy.
And this is also why, for very simple cases like heart has ceased pumping but the rest of the interlocking chemistry factory has not yet collapsed, we can restart the heart and get the whole system going again. Because almost the whole system really was still going.
As to SIDS, even reading the wiki points out that there is a lot of evidence about what happened. It isn’t a black-box mystery, except maybe to the newspapers.
Right now SIDS is a catchall diagnosis, used when we don’t have the tools to determine the exact cause of a particular death. IOW, SIDS isn’t a thing, but rather the medical termininology equivalent to your kitchen junk drawer full of odds and ends. If the case doesn’t fit in one of the other well-categorized drawers, it goes into the junk drawer called SIDS. Given that, iIt would be silly to expect a single clear cause to appear, where we have an *Ah ha! *moment and SIDS is cured like measles was.
As we get better at sorting out what happened to any given case, the number of SIDS cases will decline as the number of XYZ Syndrome cases climbs from a baseline of zero today, even if the total death count remains unchanged.
So don’t ascribe deep philosophical significance to what’s really just a category in a database.
