This is what I wanted to get at about your post. There are some people/some environments where I feel totally attached to (what I imagine) are people’s models of me. I’ve worried about my mom’s judgement for basically all my life. But she can’t know me entirely because as you rightly point out, she isn’t me — I’ve felt a lot of comfort in realizing that her model of me (and my model of her modeling me) is necessarily incomplete, and therefore can’t be eternally true. My worthiness isn’t dependent on her model. If it’s any consolation, having this feeling for the past short while hasn’t made me detached from what I generally think is her good judgement.
BUT, at the same time, my mom has been able to like take one look at me and totally figure out motivations that I couldn’t articulate beforehand. I don’t know myself entirely. There are some motivations which appear transparent to to others, and which I could reasonably say right now “I don’t feel”, but I actually might. Not saying this is true of most of the A-ful without B-things you’re feeling. And obviously people over-extend their heuristics. Still, I think this is the value of putting stock in other people’s models of you — different info from the outside. But variable levels of attachment seem to be the problem?
Just want to say that a lot of the conversations here are revolving around using our current model of molecular biology to treat cancer. That model has had a ton of success, and is the best workhorse we have for reliably turning money into life-years probably. I think it’s a big reason why a lot of people throw that idea around that cancer is gonna be cured by just developing a super-cornucopia of drugs.
But I think the heart of this post is in asking “well, are there models that get OUT of that framework? ones that are seismic shifts, like the germ theory of disease?” Yeah, just the one(s) that I’ve seen are super theoretical. Michael Levin’s group, oft heralded on LessWrong bio posts, is in fact starting to study cancer. The argument goes that, like Archimedes mentioned in the comments here, cancer is a disease of individual cells rebelling against multicellularity. Levin’s group thinks that the mechanisms for that control might be electrical/physical — as in, the deformity is more in the “software” (transient signals dictating cell behavior) being run by the “hardware” of whatever mutated proteins are in the cell.
It’s a cool idea, but the work that I’ve seen on that front is really preliminary. I think the most experimental work I’ve read by them is a paper that shows that brain cancer cells are killed by drugs which modulate voltage-gated channels. Ostensibly, this modulates some of the transient signalling on the electrically based “software level” which is driving them away from multicellularity. [I am personally extrapolating these claims.] But I think it’s more likely that they’re seeing a response b/c voltage-gated protein activity is hard-wired to cell survival mechanisms.