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#734 · Dennis Hackethal, about 2 months agoPrevailing theories
The prevailing theories around addiction (physical and mental) are phrased in terms of physical things. Consider these quotes from a medically reviewed article by the Cleveland Clinic:
[A]ddiction is a disease — it’s a chronic condition. The American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM) defines addiction as a chronic brain disorder. Addiction doesn’t happen from having a lack of willpower or as a result of making bad decisions. Your brain chemistry changes with addiction.
And:
Behavioral addictions can occur with any activity that’s capable of stimulating your brain’s reward system.
And:
A significant part of how addiction develops is through changes in your brain chemistry.
Substances and certain activities affect your brain, especially the reward center of your brain.
Humans are biologically motivated to seek rewards. […] When you spend time with a loved one or eat a delicious meal, your body releases a chemical called dopamine, which makes you feel pleasure. It becomes a cycle: You seek out these experiences because they reward you with good feelings.
And:
Over time, the substances or activities change your brain chemistry, and you become desensitized to their effects. You then need more to produce the same effect.
In other words, the core of this ‘explanation’ is desensitization: your brain gets used to certain chemicals that feel good, so then you do more of whatever gets your brain those chemicals. A higher dose is required for the same effect.
Any explanation of human behavior involving brains and their chemistry can at best be parochial. Since our computers are universal, we know that they could run any algorithm the brain runs. A computer can, in principle – although we don’t yet know how to program it to – run whatever algorithms make a person, including an addict. A computer made of metal and silicon has neither a brain nor hormones nor any other allegedly relevant chemistry, yet it could still simulate an addict. (Here, ‘simulate’ does not mean ‘fake’ or ‘mimic’ – it basically means ‘give rise to’, ‘instantiate’. A computer running such a program would literally contain a person.)
So the prevailing explanation violates computational universality.