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Evidence that addictive behaviors have links with ancient retroviral infection

sciencedaily.com

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

#111

Post by lisper »

checkyoursudo wrote: post #107
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 k…

Please notice that I was very careful to talk about the perception of free will, and not free will itself.

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

#112

Post by buboard »

Ygg2 wrote: post #17
buboard wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> as if they and others around them possess free will. How would we "act as if they don't" ?

If I punch you, will you blame me?

Indeed i will, but now you move the goalpost to the definition of "blame". Even if both of us are deterministic zombies who just care for our self-preservation, i would create a mental note ("blame") for me to find ways to discourage your behavior. Somewhere along those lines the concept of blame is born, but one could claim that it is a deterministic mental variable. Indeed i would blame anything that hits me as if it had agency, if i can't see it. Like xerxes lashing the waves, i could be angry at a rock for falling on my face (and indeed anger follows pain), it's just that i know that fighting back at the rock is no benefit to me.

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

#113

Post by Frondo »

hellofunk wrote: post #106
mercer wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

AA isn't so much a recovery program as a submarine Christian conversion program; it's seldom better than nothing, and often worse. Very consistently and well-marketed, though.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/04/the-irr...

(Fun fact: when it started, it wasn't anonymous -- except one of the founders kept showing up drunk in public, and they realized this itself was pretty quickly debunking their success claims!)

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

#115

Post by toasterlovin »

hellofunk wrote: post #51
danharaj wrote: post #4

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. That ability is itself part of the fundamental biological nature of humans, or whatever. The way you phrased it suggests a Cartesian dualistic interpretation.

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.

Color me skeptical of the idea that humans can really go against the grain of their evolved instincts. What seems much more likely is:

1) A large subset of people possess instincts that were successful for reproduction in the ancestral environment, but are no longer so. See also plummeting birth rates despite being at the historical peak in terms of access to resources for the average person (in the developed world, at least).

2) Some people's evolved instincts are to play a long game based on building reputation and then leveraging that reputation over the long term, rather than pursuing immediate wants and desires. Such an instinct will produce a lot of behavior that seems out of line with a naive interpretation of how we "should" be evolved to behave.

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

#116

Post by MrEfficiency »

twodave wrote: post #47

There are so many more things than substances to be addicted to. Psychological dependence on certain behaviors can be just as strong as physical dependence on a substance. It looks like this study is focused on drug addiction which on its own is really intriguing, but I wonder if there would be any evidence in the human genome to predict behavioral addiction.

I found that I'm addicted to weed, but not harmful drugs.

Alcohol ruins your day.

I can be productive on weed and/or caffeine. Both of them get work done.

I believe I'm addicted to the productivity, when I take them outside of a work environment, I want to work.

At what point is this positive reinforced habits?

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

#118

Post by dfee »

hellofunk wrote: post #106
mercer wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Not necessarily. The AA model is then unforgiving. This can create tremendous pressure, with the consequences of non-compliance being infinitely greater.

When it works, it works the best. When it doesn’t work, it’s a cliff. E.g. “20 years out the window”.

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

#119

Post by dfee »

hellofunk wrote: post #109
lovich wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Here’s that behavior on display: https://www.reddit.com/r/rarepuppers/comments/9ime34/heckin_...

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

#120

Post by toasterlovin »

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.

Genetic inheritance via epigenetic pathways is extremely rare and basically irrelevant. It explains essentially 0% of the evolved traits that you see in humans and other complex organisms.

And none of our important traits were acquired by conscious processes on the parts of our ancestors, unless you mean by that statement that our ancestors consciously endeavored to further their own interests and as a side effect of this, we evolved the way we did. But if that's what you meant, it's a really disingenuous way to describe basic natural selection.

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