I agree. Thanks for providing a better one.
> Where is reproducibility, if all we can do is SSH into a snowflake live system
That's the beauty of this, though. You'd have monoclonal lines of decephalized humans. They're not snowflakes.
You'd have knockout lines for studying specific genes, ABO- lines for a blood supply, lines for all the major MHC/HLA for transplants...
If you have twenty identical deceph human clones, you can run your same experiment in duplicate and push for statistically meaningful results.
Over time we'd aim to reduce the costs of the bodies so that they are cheap to expend in individual experiments. That's when it becomes incredibly powerful, when the average researcher can afford these in their budget.
We might learn to control the rate of development. Quickly grow them in a way that doesn't interfere with the experimental results.
Your approach does not duplicate the OS, only hardware wiring. Again, not to say fiddling with condensers and transistors can’t fix a misbehaving program, but it’s not always the best way to address the issue with fewest side-effects.
Some may be, sure.
But could it be that a blanket claim like that comes from us already knowing how to access the hardware, and being uncomfortable to wander out of that comfort zone?
Of course you can’t “tell” the disease to go away any more you can tell a bug to take a hike, but saying we can manipulate the hardware to trigger whatever immune, etc. responses just as well comes from that being the thing we can sort of do reliably at this point.
And even then, can we really?
Read about the phenomenon of cascading medical involvement during childbearing and birth: turns out “hardware manipulation”, which is very compelling to do, tends to have compounding hidden consequences, while the adjustments in the elusive “software” (inducing relaxed state etc.) somehow appear to yield straightforward results. Again, immediately life-threatening conditions aside.
Manipulating transistors and condensers (triggering an immune response, in your example) might just be a suboptimal, incomplete approach when compared to updating the firmware logic (making it so that the response is triggered when and how needed), or of course better yet both.
Our discomfort with the associated uncertainty, however, makes this an unfashionable direction of scientific exploration.
Let's say it's possible to trigger immune response by focusing really hard. Still we need the brainless human to determine which signals the brain needs to send before we start trying to get people to focus really hard.
The staging/prod analogy is flawed.
What we are doing is manipulating board wiring, while what we could do is further our understanding of and abilities to alter the OS and firmware running on it.
Very unfortunately, but understandably, scientifically oriented mindset tends to dismiss the latter route. After all, so far it seemingly rules out any notion of dev environment. Where is reproducibility, if all we can do is SSH into a snowflake live system (or more like XSS inject it, right)? A daunting limitation, but perhaps not impossible to overcome.
That is not to say the former has no place and your point is invalid. Still, when all you have is a hammer…