131–140 of 229 posts
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.
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?
Addiction really has a lot to do with making bad decisions in your life to keep doing the addictive behaviour.
If its not negatively impacting your life, and it's not interfering with relationships and obligations, you're not addicted.
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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?
You're not addicted to weed. Addiction really has a lot to do with making bad decisions in your life to keep doing the addictive behaviour. If its not negatively impacting your life, and it's not interfering with relationships and obligations, you're not addicted.
For anyone interested in further reading on the topic I highly recommend information available from the Institute For Addiction Study (https://www.theinstituteforaddictionstudy.org/).
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> 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 succ…
The other important thing that AA does, which is quite critical, is get individuals with problems frequent, implicit counseling from others who have been through the same thing. This is very hard to get in modern life in most other ways. It's possible, but AA makes it the default process. You can throw away all the other stuff about AA and dismiss it, and you are still left with the fact social therapy in any form is very effective, and AA promotes that.
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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 succ…
I think this is a rather unfair distortion of AA. I know many who have been tremendously helped by the program. It does work for many. It's explicitly unreligious -- they have a notion of a higher power, but make the conscious effort to allow each member to have their own definition of this higher power. It's not a religious process in the sense most would think of it. I also don't think it's fair to mention any one…
Very magnanimous of them. But why would a rehabilitation program have a notion "of a higher power", and especially it's own notion of it?
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…
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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 succ…
I think this is a rather unfair distortion of AA. I know many who have been tremendously helped by the program. It does work for many. It's explicitly unreligious -- they have a notion of a higher power, but make the conscious effort to allow each member to have their own definition of this higher power. It's not a religious process in the sense most would think of it. I also don't think it's fair to mention any one…
This isn't a distortion, this is the empirical view of AA.
As for explicitly unreligious, I would like to include the twelve steps here:
1) We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.
2) Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3) Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
4) Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5) Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6) Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7) Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8) Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9) Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10) Continued to take personal inventory, and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.
11) Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12) Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
I am struggling to find an unreligious interpretation for steps 3, 5, 6, 7, 11, and 12, even if the "higher power" isn't an Abrahamic religion "God".
What's a spiritual awakening to an atheist?
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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…
I've kicked the habit once by NRT and once cold turkey. I'd gone well long enough for any physical withdrawal symptoms (many months).
Both times, I thought just one wouldn't hurt, socially. Both times I started right back up again.
There was a time I could smoke socially. I know people who did that and then went on to live a smoke free life. On the flip side, I've known smokers go years without and just one "oh go on then" hooked them right back on it.
So if nicotine addiction is anything to go by, it would be possible in other addictions too. Unfortunately, the only alcoholics I knew lost their battle and never achieved any semblance of sobriety. They were both at a point where the withdrawal would kill them without clinical supervision.
Link to PNAS research paper: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/09/19/1811940115 Human Endogenous Retrovirus-K HML-2 integration within RASGRF2 is associated with intravenous drug abuse and modulates transcription in a cell-line model Not all humans have the same HK2 viruses in their genomes. Here we show that one specific uncommon HK2, which lies close to a gene involved in dopaminergic activity in the brain, is…
Very sensible that the mutation relates to the dopaminergic activity, just based on our knowledge of the reward pathway and the effect of addictive drugs on dopamine. There may even been a positive feedback loop here, as any viral gene inserted that increases risky, impulsive behavior may also encourage procreation.