Some lectures are quickly forgotten after you’ve heard them, while others linger in your mind like a question that refuses to be answered. That’s what happened to me a few days ago when I heard José Luis Manzanares Japón speak at the Royal Academy of Medicine in Seville about his book, “What Are We? The Secret of Reality.” I didn’t leave with fewer questions, but with better ones: What is reality? What does it mean to speak of a soul in a world of algorithms, particles, and quantum physics?

Manzanares, an engineer and professor, is neither a theologian nor a philosopher by profession. Perhaps that’s why his approach is both unsettling and refreshing for those of us who come from the healthcare field, accustomed to observing the human body under the cold light of scientific evidence.

The author begins with an observation shared by much of contemporary philosophy: science has come to describe with increasing accuracy the how of things, but fails to grasp the what or the why. We know that life is subject to equations that hold true without exception, but we do not know why it is subject to them or what their validity is based on.

The idea of ​​”What are we?” is as elementary to express as it is difficult to accept: reality should not be reduced to matter and physical interactions, but to a gigantic “software” that controls a cosmic database.

Elementary particles, atoms, molecules, and ultimately, living beings would be “abstract” entities endowed with numerical properties, ordered by algorithms we call “laws of nature.” In that case, mind and spirit would not be mere confusing epiphenomena of brain chemistry, but parts of the game as real as matter.

As a physician, I am interested in this reasoning for two reasons. First, because it challenges the reductionism that sometimes pervades our clinical practice: the idea that if we manage to accurately describe neurotransmitters and neuronal connections, we will have exhausted what a patient “is.”

Secondly, because it reopens intellectual legitimacy to dimensions of everyday life (love, hope, freedom, guilt) that are too often relegated to a “soft” psychology, as a dispensable complement to the biological core.

This existential approach establishes a strong connection with the best philosophical tradition. From Parmenides, it takes the intuition that being (reality) is one, immutable, beyond change. From Heraclitus, it takes the realization that everything flows, that we are immersed in a river of change governed by an internal logic that we do not control.

Democritus comes to mind when we consider that everything we see is composed of very few particles (protons, neutrons, and electrons) and a great deal of empty space. Plato appears when we evoke the “world of ideas”: a third world of immaterial entities (mathematics, laws, justice, science) that are contained in a kind of metaphysical cloud that organizes the physical world. And Aristotle emerges when we speak of man as a unity of body and soul, with faculties such as intelligence, memory, values, and freedom.

This framework will resonate with any believer: we are not dealing with a confessional justification, but rather with a terrain where faith is acknowledged. If the cosmos is a code, a program that creates and maintains material and spiritual realities, the Christian notion of the Logos that orders the world ceases to be a poetic metaphor and touches upon the very structure of reality. The soul here is not a stranger lodged in a body, but the singular mode of a life, the unifying principle of a history, an identity, a network of relationships, a will, and affections.

As a physician, I have witnessed too often how vulnerable this unit is to consider it a mere epiphenomenon. When someone with advanced dementia still has a glimmer of tenderness, a sense of recognition, something within us refuses to reduce it to synaptic impulses. When we accompany a patient at the end of their life, we know that the person departing is not defined by the hemodynamic parameters we monitor. It is not about denying the biological explanation, but about recognizing that this description is insufficient.

In an era where medical technology is advancing far faster than our ethics, revisiting the question of “what are we?” is not an intellectual luxury, but an ethical necessity. How we treat embryos, the terminally ill, the elderly with dementia, and the dying depends on the answer to this question.

If we are nothing more than a complex set of chemical reactions, the temptation to manipulate and discard lives grows. If, on the contrary, we are an enigmatic unity of body and soul, a bundle of relationships and meaning, then every sick person is, in some way, sacred.

Reflections on “What are we?” are not easily resolved, but they have the virtue of unsettling us and jolting us out of the numbness of simplicity. For a physician, that is perhaps the greatest intellectual pleasure: discovering that the question of the soul remains alive, that the inexplicable unity of each person resists all our attempts to reduce it.

José María Domínguez. President of the Ethics and Professional Conduct Committee of the Spanish Medical Association. Bioethics Observatory. Institute of Life Sciences. Catholic University of Valencia