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Evidence that addictive behaviors have links with ancient retroviral infection

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Re: Evidence that addictive behaviors have links with ancient retroviral infection

#101

Post by dustingetz »

manmal wrote: post #100
coldtea wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Addicts and alcoholics can turn their lives around, even though they remain addicts for life. The "addicts for life" is an American puritan view (by AA and other such groups) -- not some scientific fact. Certainly not the view everywhere in the world. You can have an alcoholic of 5-10 years that recovered and can still enjoy the occasional drink just fine without getting back to regular drinking.

Most institutions don’t want to let their clients go—why should AA be any different.

i think you have it backwards- institutions that don’t self sustain, don’t survive.

Re: Evidence that addictive behaviors have links with ancient retroviral infection

#102

Post by mercer »

coldtea wrote: post #98
hellofunk wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also revealing how the unique ability of humans to overcome their fundamental biological nature can be quite impressive and inspiring. Humans have many natural tendencies that are not socially accepted, and better behavior can be learned and tendencies suppressed. Addicts and alcoholics can turn their lives around, even though they remain addicts for life.

> Addicts and alcoholics can turn their lives around, even though they remain addicts for life. The "addicts for life" is an American puritan view (by AA and other such groups) -- not some scientific fact. Certainly not the view everywhere in the world. You can have an alcoholic of 5-10 years that recovered and can still enjoy the occasional drink just fine without getting back to regular drinking.

The more specific statements about addicts become, the more cautious I tend to be.

That said, I do at least agree that your quote is rather particular to AA, and not shared by other programs, like SMART.

The reason I hesitate to dismiss the AA view is that it strikes me as quite possible that, for a subset of addicts, any kind of hope of moderation can be disastrous.

The way I see it, a less dichotomous perspective such as that of SMART is a better starting point than the 'once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic' approach of AA. And if SMART doesn't work, AA might very well be the only solution left.

Re: Evidence that addictive behaviors have links with ancient retroviral infection

#103

Post by wnoise »

dustingetz wrote: post #101
manmal wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most institutions don’t want to let their clients go—why should AA be any different.

i think you have it backwards- institutions that don’t self sustain, don’t survive.

That's an explanation for the observed phenomenon, not him getting it backwards.

Re: Evidence that addictive behaviors have links with ancient retroviral infection

#104

Post by doitLP »

x220 wrote: post #16
woliveirajr wrote: post #2

Every time I find interesting (and frighting) that we are nothing but a collection of ourselves and virus and bacterias, written down to our DNA and RNA or living together with close dependence deep in our guts (literally). Going further, a lot of what we do unconciously is just what a virus or something else "did" to survive or spread in the past, and our free will isn't that free... Edit: "did" wasn't meaning that…

We aren't just a product of that, we are also a product of human sexual selection and epigenetic inheritance of individually acquired traits. Many of your important traits (such as general intelligence) were acquired in part by conscious processes by your ancestors.

Good point. I feel this fact is rarely touched on in discussions of inheritance but we’re seeing more and more the role that such changes play.

Re: Evidence that addictive behaviors have links with ancient retroviral infection

#105

Post by sutterbomb »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #33
lisper wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No one actually believes this, including you. I'm pretty sure that I'm in a better position to know what I actually believe than you are, and I'm telling you, I really do believe this. There are only three possibilities: either free will is an illusion, or dualism is true, or consciousness is the result of unknown new physics. The first is by far the most likely from a scientific point of view, and the evidence for…

I think what _nardi_ is trying to say is that there's no functional difference between having free will, and acting as if you do. What decisions do you make differently with your knowledge that free will is an illusion? What choices do you make differently? (fwiw, I agree with you; I just think it doesn't particularly matter now.)

Well your ethics should shift considerably. Retributive justice is morally repugnant for someone who does not believe in absolute free will.

Re: Evidence that addictive behaviors have links with ancient retroviral infection

#106

Post by hellofunk »

mercer wrote: post #102
coldtea wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Addicts and alcoholics can turn their lives around, even though they remain addicts for life. The "addicts for life" is an American puritan view (by AA and other such groups) -- not some scientific fact. Certainly not the view everywhere in the world. You can have an alcoholic of 5-10 years that recovered and can still enjoy the occasional drink just fine without getting back to regular drinking.

The more specific statements about addicts become, the more cautious I tend to be. That said, I do at least agree that your quote is rather particular to AA, and not shared by other programs, like SMART. The reason I hesitate to dismiss the AA view is that it strikes me as quite possible that, for a subset of addicts, any kind of hope of moderation can be disastrous. The way I see it, a less dichotomous perspective s…

> The reason I hesitate to dismiss the AA view is that it strikes me as quite possible that, for a subset of addicts, any kind of hope of moderation can be disastrous.

This, absolutely this. And since it is impossible to know in advance if moderation is possible for a given person, AA optimizes for the worst case scenario and assumes that no one can handle moderation, which has the greatest likelihood of success for all who use this strategy.

Re: Evidence that addictive behaviors have links with ancient retroviral infection

#107

Post by checkyoursudo »

lisper wrote: post #6

I have some bad news for you: your perception of free will is a by-product of your ignorance of how your brain works. Every decision you think you make is actually just a bunch of neurons firing, and those neurons were built by your DNA.

Just because I love arguing about free will, and because I feel like a lot of the time people are not all talking about the same thing when they say "free will", would some of you be willing to tell me what you think "free will" means?

Please say what you sincerely think free will means, and try not to give me strawman or devil's advocate positions on what you think your opponents think it means, if you would be so kind.

Re: Evidence that addictive behaviors have links with ancient retroviral infection

#108

Post by sutterbomb »

redwards510 wrote: post #87
nardi wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one actually believes this, including you. You may say you do, and even think you do, but you don’t. Everyone acts as if they and others around them possess free will. We act that way because that’s what we believe. Honestly, I don’t think we understand enough about consciousness and how it arises from physical brains/bodies to make such an extraordinary claim like “there is no free will,” when the entire history…

I don't believe in free will because of a simple thought experiment. Maybe someone with a background in ML can chime in. Imagine we could perfectly map all your brain's neural connections at an instant in time to software. This is not out of the realm of possibility in the future, right? Now imagine we "asked" that model to make a decision. Any decision. Wouldn't that frozen-in-time model give the same answer every t…

I use the same line of thought, but without any modeling. Suppose you could go back in time to a major decision in your life and make it over. But you arrive at that same point in time, with all of the same information you had, no new information about the future, with all of the same hormonal and biochemistry etc. Is there any way you could have chosen differently than what you did? I don't see how. Unless you want to introduce randomness, but that's also not choice.

Re: Evidence that addictive behaviors have links with ancient retroviral infection

#109

Post by hellofunk »

lovich wrote: post #93
hellofunk wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have heard it frequently mentioned by interesting scientists (most recently, by Neil DeGrasse Tyson) that this ability to live against natural biological tendencies is unique for humans among the rest of the animal kingdom. So while it may be fundamental to humans, it is not apparently fundamental to the general biology of the world, and humans appear to be an interesting exception.

Dogs do it, albeit with human help. Considering that humans that grew up alone, ie. feral, seem to have no self control either I would think that dogs get to count too

Can you give an example of dog behavior that does this? I'm curious.

Re: Evidence that addictive behaviors have links with ancient retroviral infection

#110

Post by ergothus »

bluGill wrote: post #91
ergothus wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a bit circular...I may choose to breed with someone, but i do that because I find them attractive (because DNA tells me what is attractive), because my (known in humans to be inaccurate) risk assessment says it is worth it, etc. Plus, of the countless decisions I make every day, almost none of them are conscious. I can retroactively justify them as if they had been, but studies show we are far less conscious t…

You cannot choose to breed with someone who is already dead. Even if you succeed in breeding with someone (alive), if their genes are not very good your children won't live to breed. Thus if intelligence is a factor at all in survival (and it seems like it should be) your ancestors may not have had a choice but to select for intelligent.

> Thus if intelligence is a factor at all in survival (and it seems like it should be) your ancestors may not have had a choice but to select for intelligent.

And this explains the large collection of (in our understanding) not-terribly-intelligent creatures on the planet how?

Not trying to be snarky, just pointing out that intelligence is just one of many paths, and it's very hard to have strong conclusion about how something so rare fares in evolution, and if the tend will maximize or if it pays off to be "just a little" intelligent, just like it pays to be "just a little" able to swim.

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