Intelligent Living Beings and Immature Life Science
A basketball player on the court can effortlessly catch a pass from a teammate and shoot it through the hoop. If we tried to do this by scientific means, it would be almost impossible. First we must precisely calculate the kind of parabolic motion the ball is making, take into account air resistance on the ball, then use mathematical formulas to compute where the ball will be at a given moment, and calculate our own running speed and the height at which the hand should be placed to catch it.
But the human brain contains an enormous number of neurons—reportedly around 100 billion—connected by synapses, and without considering any of those complex parabolas or daunting formulas, they direct the player to catch the ball accurately.
Life is a miracle. People keep believing that artificial intelligence can surpass human intelligence, but in comprehensive capability AI can never surpass it. However powerful the programs we design, they are no match for the instincts produced in us by billions of years of evolution in nature. As for life science, it looks even clumsier in the face of life itself.
A patient with depression once told me that every book I mentioned and every medical view I cited was attacked by many people online. Her thinking was typical of a depressed person: she would immediately seek out negative information about everything and reject all things because of it. Seligman named this habit "learned helplessness," but learned helplessness is not without value; it lets one see the flawed side of things—indeed nothing in the world is perfect. When the great physicist Feynman mounted the Nobel Prize podium, he still felt anxious, thinking his discovery might be an error or a fraud; when he saw a diagram he had casually drawn become the famous Feynman diagram in physics textbooks, he felt apprehensive. For Feynman knew that quantum theory was not the ultimate truth, and that perhaps new discoveries years later would overturn all his conclusions.
Compared with the mysteries of complex nature, mathematics and physics are still immature; compared with complex society, the social sciences are still immature; compared with intelligent living beings, life science is still immature. We have heard of many medical paradigms: the holistic view of Chinese medicine, the Western medical view grounded in modern science, evolutionary medicine interpreted through the lens of evolution, the recently popular functional medicine that blends various health-related factors, and the shamanic medicine promoted by mystics and theists, in which divine guidance is held to operate—not to mention medical views I cannot even list. Each may have its merits, and I believe each has solved the physical and mental problems of some patients.
My own understanding of medicine went through several stages: in middle school, influenced by the natural sciences, I preferred modern medicine; when my mother fell ill and I sought doctors everywhere with poor results, I grew dissatisfied with modern medicine and turned to traditional Chinese medicine for help, but TCM also failed to solve everything; later I became an eclectic, studying both Chinese and Western medicine—integrated Chinese-Western medicine is the mainstream model for treating major disease in China, but unfortunately it still cannot solve many patient problems; in practice I began to realize that neither Chinese nor Western medicine could solve patients' mind-body problems, so I studied mind-body medicine, which opened another door; I then read some works on evolutionary and functional medicine, gaining more understanding of disease—evolutionary medicine gave me a clearer view of disease in the history of biological evolution, and functional medicine more insight into the relation between disease and the person, society, and nature; influenced by family background and personal interest, I also know something of religion and have seen how religious people heal themselves through faith. So today my understanding of medicine can hardly be confined to any narrow field.
Medicine is not only a natural science but also a humanities, because physicians deal with living people and must solve patients' problems rather than mere diseases. Patients' problems are often multiple and intricate; if we ranked public satisfaction with various professions, medicine would likely fall within the bottom three.
Although everyone considers the physician's profession noble—a matter of saving the dying and healing the wounded—in both developed and developing countries the quality of medical care fails to satisfy the public. People have high expectations for physical and mental health, but what medicine can solve is limited, so disappointment is inevitable.
Using any single medical paradigm to solve disease is like computing the ball's trajectory with mathematical and physical formulas and then trying to catch it according to those computations—complex and impractical. Medicine is always only auxiliary to health, never decisive. Yet we see many patients recover; did medicine solve their problems? I think not: medicine only played an auxiliary role, and what truly solved their problems was the body's powerful self-healing ability.
We living beings have evolved on Earth for billions of years; against the various health problems that arise under genetic and environmental influence, we have either already evolved coping strategies, are evolving new ones, or have neither coping strategies nor the ability to evolve effective ones. These invisible inner laws are more likely the true reason for recovery or death. Many apparently cured diseases are self-limiting and nonfatal; once an unhealthy state is removed, the body's self-healing restores the patient. Many non-self-limiting diseases also do not kill patients; behind their successful self-rescue lies the power of evolution—body and mind shed the claws of disease during evolution, and pass their superior genes to the next generation. This is how the human gene pool has been improved generation after generation.
Compared with our ideal state of complete physical and mental health, most living beings, including humans, are still only semi-finished products on the evolutionary road. Although we have a powerful ability to regulate our functions to adapt to the environment and countless antibodies, we are not yet so robust that body and mind never sicken. Our brain and our body outside the brain are in constant conflict, which prevents our spirit and flesh from remaining in a painless state.
Modern brain science tells us that the brain is the key determinant of human lifespan. Our brain constantly observes and judges the external environment to decide how to react. So the Dutch brain scientist Dick Swaab says that using the brain more is better for longevity than physical exercise. The reason basketball players can catch the ball accurately without complex parabolic calculation is that their brain is a highly developed organ that need not fuss over details but directly makes accurate judgments and responses. People with developed brains are also less troubled by emotion, because long thinking has long since let their rational cerebral cortex prevail over their emotional limbic system, easily overcoming the emotions that tend to cause mental and psychiatric illness. People who think diligently are less easily conquered by bad habits and become prisoners of vices; hence their physical health is also better.
So the way of medicine is broad! A true physician can both use existing medical means to relieve the patient's immediate suffering and inspire the patient to develop the mind, use the brain, and fully deploy the high-level intelligence inherent in the living organism to overcome disease. If medicine is measured by its healing effect on patients, no medical system can yet be proud, and no physician can complacently say they have mastered medicine. The ideal physician must not only possess medical skills but also have mind-body penetration sufficient to mobilize the patient's powerful self-healing capacity, helping them use their own evolutionary power to overcome disease.
Voltaire famously said: "Medicine has the function of pleasing the patient, while nature's function is to cure the disease." The placebo effect in pharmacological experiments bears out Voltaire's words: a placebo can produce the same effects as the major antidepressants sold on the market, and the same side effects. All because the patient, through the package insert, believed the "placebo" they were taking had the expected efficacy and side effects. When this belief took hold, the patient's brain neurotransmitters had already changed; so it was not the medication but their own brain—more precisely, the laws of nature—that treated them.
I once rescued a dying patient; in her near-death experience, her angular gyrus may have undergone changes that produced a strong religious experience in that instant. From then on she became a devout believer, and relying only on faith, she suppressed tumor progression. In the past this would have seemed inconceivable to physicians, but today, as brain science advances, we know it is a scientific phenomenon. Such an experience brings earth-shaking change to the patient's conscious world, changes personality, and changes the way genes are expressed; that such a patient's tumor no longer progresses is not hard to understand. The problem is that such cases cannot be ordered; perhaps in future mind-body physicians will find ways to bring this healing model to more patients.
Life science can only be called perfect when it has developed to the point of mobilizing the living organism's own intelligence to solve its survival problems. Such a life science still requires the continued effort of countless people and the gathering of collective wisdom to build.