When I was trying to make sense of Peter Watts’ Echopraxia it has occurred to me that there may be two vastly different but both viable kinds of epistemology.
First is the classical hypothesis-driven epistemology, promoted by positivists and Popper, and generalized by Bayesian epistemology and Solomonoff induction. In the most general version, you have to come up with a set of hypotheses with assigned probabilities, and look for information that would change the entropy of this set the most. It’s a good idea. It formalizes what is science, and what is not; it provides the framework for research, and, given the infinite amount of computing power on a hypercomputer, extract the theoretical maximum of utility from sensory information. The main problem is that it doesn’t an algorithmic way to come up with hypotheses, and the suggestion to test infinitely many of them (aleph-1, as far as I can tell) isn’t very helpful either.
On th other hand, you can imagine data-driven epistemology, where you don’t really formulate any hypotheses. You just have a lot of pattern-matching power, completely agnostic of the knowledge domain, and you use it to try to find any regularities, predictability, clustering, etc. in the sensory data. Then you just check if any of the discovered knowledge is useful. That barely (if at all) can distinguish correlation and causation, that does not really distinguish scientific and non-scientific beliefs, and it doesn’t even guarantee that the findings will be meaningful. However, it does work algorithmically, even with finite resources.
They actually go together rather nice, with data-driven epistemology being the source of hypotheses for the hypothesis-driven epistemology. However, Watts seems to be arguing that given enough computing power, you’d be better off spending it on data-driven pattern matching than on generating and testing hypotheses. And since brains are generally good at pattern matching, System 1, slightly tweaked with yet-to-be-invented technologies, can potentially vastly outperform System 2 running hypothesis-driven epistemology. I wonder to which extent it may actually be true.
A qucik search on Google Scholar with such queries as cryonic, cryoprotectant, cryostasis, neuropreservation confirms my suspicion that there is very little, if any, academic research on cryonics. I realize that being generally supportive of MIRI’s mission, Less Wrong community is probably not very judgmental of non-academic science, and I may be biased, being from academia myself, but I believe that despite all problems, any field of study largely benefits from being a field of academic study. That makes it easier to get funding; that makes the results more likely to be noticed, verified and elaborated on by other experts, as well as taught to students; that makesit more likely to be seriously considered by the general public and governmental officials. The last point is particularly important, since on one hand, with the current quasi-Ponzi mechanism of funding, the position of preserved patients is secured by the arrival of new members, and on the other hand, a large legislative action is required to make cryonics reliable: train the doctors, give the patients more legal protection than the legal protection of graves, and eventually get it covered by health insurance policies or single payer systems.
As for the method itself, it frankly looks inadequate as well. I do believe that it’s a good bet worth taking, but so did Egyptian pharaohs. And they lost, because their method of preservation turned out to be useless. I’m well aware of all the considerations about information theory, nanorobotics and brain scanning, but improving our freezing technologies to the extent that otherwise viable organisms could be brought back to life without further neural repairs seems to be the thing we should totally be doing.
Thus, I want to see this field develop. I want to see at least once a year a study concerning with cryonic preservation of neural tissue in a peer-reviewed journal with high impact factor. And before I die I want to at least see a healthy chimpanzee being cooled to the temperature of liquid nitrogen, and then brought back to life without losing any of its cognitive abilities.
What can we do about it? Is there an organization that is willing to collect donations and fund at least one academic study in this field? Can we use some crowdfunding platform and start such campaign? Can we pitch it to Calico?