An organism does what it does, but it may not be mechanically explainable
[ that’s why biomedical textbooks are so long ]
The manual for humans is much longer than the manual for a steam engine ... because they’re mining computational irreducibility

Why is medicine hard?

You’re trying to reverse computational irreducibility
[[ Even given a rule and a configuration ... it’s hard to tell what will happen ]]
It’s hard to make predictions
And even harder to know when/how to intervene

Classifying diseases

Even instance is really different; can one bin them?
E.g. it seems tumors have a definite signature
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ICD-9_codes
tumors ; infections ; [ mechanical issues ] ; [ autoimmune ] ; genetic ; [ control system failure ] ; trauma
[ infections: can an agent that is introduced thrive? ]
< metatumor ... ? >

[ Classifying therapies ]

surgery ; drugs ; gene editing ; “lifestyle changes”

Same therapy ; different outcomes

Clinical trials

Here’s a therapy ; run it across a bunch of variants ; see how it does [ when are enough tests enough? ]

Drugs

[ Wide-scale effects ; possibly analogous to changing the underlying rule ]

Molecular-scale therapy

Can we put a “fixer” in at every cell that looks at local information and decides how to heal things ? [For a simple CA, the answer is obviously yes] < Analogous to proofreading enzymes >
The cost of the error correction is quite high
[ Maxwell’s demon - like ]

Preventative medicine / early intervention

Some things will inevitable go wrong; if you intervene quickly, is it more likely to be fixable?
[ early intervention works better because it’s affected less ]

Medical monitoring

Can you tell if there was a perturbation?

When is it better for the system to heal itself?

When does almost no therapy end up being useful?
[[ Every probe of what might be useful has some cost; is the expectation value such that you should intervene or not? ]] [ what is the relative cost of different “ethical” outcomes? ]

When one problem has occurred, what cascade will there be?

[ Modularity helps in preventing a cascade ]

Can one increase longevity? Therapy for long lifetime

Don’t make a perturbation initially .... try to make perturbations that increase lifetime
[ or, rather, increase lifetime with the same “richness of life” ]
How much are our evolved organisms each statistical similar during their behavior ? [ cf rule frequencies ]
< Are there very different rule distributions in the tumor case? >

Multiway graphs

Given an organism ... make a sequence of perturbations ; what states of the organisms are generated