Inner Practice: Feeling Human Again

This is a picture that is me and not me. It is in fact AI generated with my original facial portraits. And I am not ashamed to admit that and even proud to post some of these pictures in my socials. In fact looking at these pictures of me, I was actually falling in love with these versions of myself. But I know they are not real.

This points us to the fact that we are looking at a time where we have more deep fakes and AI generated social media accounts, photos and any other form of visuals. Right now, technology exists to create completely fake realities that are hard to distinguish from real ones. It is time to wonder what happens when we cannot trust our eyes anymore.

These days we see videos of politician or celebrity saying something crazy, yet maybe they did not say that at all. If all information is equally suspicious, the truth becomes irrelevant. If a memory of an event is shaped entirely by news clips and social media, do we even need the event itself anymore? With the prevalence of AIs and CGIs, the more advanced our ability to simulate reality, the less we will need reality itself. The crisis of reality. Or so we thought.

Crisis of Reality Reveals Profound Trajectory of Human Needs

However as human beings, we are actually highly intuitive and sensitive. The human hand can detect surface irregularities as small as 13 nanometers. We are wired to find comfort in materials and visuals that carry the imperfections of natural formation. Synthetic perfection will never trigger the same neurological response as weathered wood or hand-carved stone or a filtered AI generated photo. So we do know what is real and what is not, if we pay enough attention, watch carefully and listen closely to our intuition and heart and how the subject in concern makes us feel.

What should seriously terrify us is that due to the predominance of technology, we are already at a certain point where it does not even matter if something is real. It only matters if it feels real for many even though we may know deep inside or suspect that it is not.

In contradiction, as our daily lives become increasingly digitized and accelerated and AIs are threateningly pervasive, this turns out to reveal something profound about the trajectory of human needs - our hunger for authentic sensory experience and intelligence to become correspondingly intense in the most subtle ways.

Going back to nature, holistic, untouched, calming, healing, simplicity, restoration, honesty - the things that will matter most in the coming decades will not be those that mirror our technology, but those that offer us refuge from it. They are capable to address the body's deepest needs rather than the mind's surface desires and delusions.

In other words, what exists to be the most powerful and precious in face of the dominance of technology and AI is whatever that can help us remember what it feels like to be human again.

Thanks to technology, it shows us what being human really means and needs.

Can AI and technology ever replace Acupuncture and Traditional Chinese Medicine?

My answer is a clear no.

Healing modalities such as acupuncture and Traditional Chinese Medicine have their basis stemmed from philosophies and elements of nature and work according to the artistic and intuitive wisdom, skills and experiences of doctors. They offer not just mechanistic superficial treatments but healing to the core of the soul because they consider the complexity and synergy of humanistic reasons for patient’s recovery. 

From a neurological perspective, acupuncture itself functions as sophisticated yet direct stress-reduction healing arts. Every needle inserted into the human body creates a measurable shift in brain activity that promotes creative thinking and emotional regulation. As human beings we are part of nature. Healing nature with nature simply activates our biophilic responses, lowering cortisol levels and heart rate without conscious effort and side effects.

No matter how exact AI can code and duplicate the doctor’s brain and the actual process of healings with acupuncture and Traditional Chinese Medicine, there is always one thing that AI can never achieve.

The human touch.

Basics of TCM, TCM(Traditional Chin Med), Inner Practice, Being HumanXiang Jun LimDr (TCM) Xiang Junacupuncture, healing, tcm, inner practice, meditation, human, AI, reality, human touch