Search Ideas

Maybe traditional/coercive parenting enables this kind of behavior. It’s like he’s his own strict parent, punishing himself for unwanted behavior.

Maybe traditional/coercive parenting enables this kind of behavior. It’s like he’s his own strict parent, punishing himself.

Addiction, responsibility, and choice

Somebody asked, “Is addiction actually a choice or is that just what people tell themselves?” While my response is awaiting approval, I am pasting it below, lightly edited.

Judging by some of the other answers, most people who claim that addicts have no choice mention genes or neuroscience. In my opinion, your genes and your brain are limited factors in your decision making.

Genes are relatively easy to override (think bungee jumping vs inborn fear of heights, hunger strikes, etc). Culture is far harder to resist (eg peer pressure). But still, even if someone’s alcoholism started because they were pressured into drinking, they still made the choice to cave in. Once someone is addicted, it may be hard to stop, but it was still their choice to start whatever behavior became the addiction. I think that would be different only in cases where somebody physically jammed a heroin needle into your arm against your will, say, and got you hooked that way.

Ultimately, people are moral agents with ideas, preferences, and, most importantly, free will. Those are the important concepts when it comes to addiction. People cannot be reduced to their genes or their brains; they’re not ‘brain machines’ or ‘gene machines’, mindlessly enacting their brains’ or genes’ bidding. You can make a choice that limits your free will down the line, but that’s still your choice. And it’s free will that enables addicts to break the cycle. Taking that away from them by telling them it’s just their brains, they can’t help it, may actually make it harder to solve the addiction.

Your question brings up the issue of responsibility and guilt. Morality and responsibility require choice.

I view addiction as an entrenched conflict between an addict’s preferences. That’s why addicts flip flop between behaviors and become their own adversaries. Reading some of the accounts of addiction here on Quora (eg here), it seems as though addicts end up behaving like split people. They try to curb their addiction by putting up obstacles for themselves; after some time passes, they remove those obstacles and ‘indulge’. Then they go back and try more difficult obstacles, which they later remove anyway, and so on. This constant back and forth frustrates both parts and worsens the addiction over time.

If addiction really is caused by an entrenched conflict between preferences, the addict should be able to solve it by creating what’s known as a common preference. It’s a concept usually reserved to solve conflicts between people, but I think it applies just the same to conflicts within a single person. If the addict can create a new option that both sides of him prefer to their initial position, then his addiction should vanish fairly quickly because neither side has a reason to continue holding its original preference. So the conflict, and with it, the addiction, should just… go away.

For example, an addict from Quora complains about his inability to stay off certain websites. One preference of his is to return to those websites repeatedly, while another is to avoid them (and do something else instead). So he blocks the sites, then unblocks them, and so on. If he can come up with a third option both sides of him prefer, such as reading or writing a book, or analyzing movies, or going hunting, or whatever it may be, then he will solve his addiction. But is has to be something both parts of him prefer. It can’t just be more self-coercion – then it won’t work.

Somebody may make a choice that leads to addiction, realize his mistake, and try to correct it. If he makes a reasonable effort – or, as may be required for severe addictions, a near-exhaustive effort – to correct that mistake by coming up with new options both sides of him may prefer, then I think he is morally in the clear, even if he fails. People are fallible; they make mistakes all the time, even bad ones, but they can learn from their mistakes.

However, if he doesn’t even try, or if he evades the issue and pretends nothing is wrong, then he is morally guilty.

It’s wild and sad how self-abusive some people are:

When I was in my second year of studying for me degree, I got heavily into political debate forums, even more so than I am now, and along with playing a lot of computer games and watching a dozen tv shows, I fell really far behind on my studies.

As I realized that I had a problem, I made myself a solution. At the first meeting of the semester for my fraternity, I announced to my brothers that I needed their help kicking my computer addiction. I told them to be on the lookout for any time they saw me doing anything non-school related on my computer. I told them if they did, they were to tell me to stand up and take off my glasses and then slap me as hard as they could in the face. They were very enthusiastic and motivated to “help” me on this problem.

Force stems from pessimism. These people don’t think their problem is soluble.

Curing addiction

If I’m right that the cause of addiction is an entrenched conflict between preferences (#3040), then there’s a simple cure for addiction:¹ common-preference finding with yourself.

Common-preference finding is a concept I am borrowing from a parenting philosophy called Taking Children Seriously (TCS), cofounded by David Deutsch:

A common preference is a solution to a problem, or resolution of a disagreement, that all parties prefer to their prima facie positions, and to all other candidate solutions they can think of. It is the solution that pleases everyone involved in the disagreement.

I think common-preference finding is not only the solution to conflicts between people, but also to conflicts between preferences inside a single person. When such conflicts inside a single mind are entrenched, we are dealing with addiction. Since addiction is a special kind of conflict, the solution to addiction is the same as the solution to conflicts generally: common-preference finding.

Take an alcoholic. The two entrenched preferences, in the simplest possible terms, are: to drink, and to stop drinking. In this context, I think it helps to view this single alcoholic as two people. In other words, we can view each preference as a person, or an autonomous actor of sorts. Not because the alcoholic necessarily has a split personality in the clinical sense – although we’ll soon see that the addict acts as his own adversary – but because it helps illustrate the logic behind common-preference finding: it’s fundamentally no different within a single person than across people.

So again, let’s view an alcoholic as two people, just as a thought experiment. They’re forced to be roommates and combine their finances. One of them wants to drink and spend their money on alcohol, whereas the other does not want that. Moving out – choosing not to associate – is not an option because there’s no freedom of association inside a single mind. Although we may choose not to be roommates with an alcoholic, the alcoholic has no choice but to be roommates with himself.

How are these two ‘people’ to live together in harmony? As long as they’re in conflict, they will try to undermine each other. One will put the liquor in the top cabinet to make it harder to reach – the other will get it anyway. One will ask a friend to hold on to his credit card, the other will convince that same friend to give it back.

We can see the same self-adversarial dynamic in addictions to various things. For example, somebody asked (emphasis mine):

What can I do against my addiction to certain websites? I'm addicted to some sites, and I already tried to block them, but I always go back to unblock. I always waste a lot of time on them, and I'm annoyed by myself tha[t] I can[’t] stay away from them.

Do you see the dynamic? He’s like two people: person A blocks the website, until the urge to visit it gets too strong and person B unblocks it. Then person A gets annoyed at person B – who was presumably annoyed at person A for blocking the site in the first place. And the only way to get (temporary) relief from this conflict is to indulge and visit the site again – or so it seems.

This person’s frustration makes it easier to see that, again, knowledge inside a single mind does not act fundamentally differently from knowledge across minds. When you’re in conflict with somebody else, you may feel hopeless at times, like there’s no way to reach that person. If only they’d listen to reason! But that situation is not fundamentally different when that other person is yourself. People sometimes think you should be able to just ‘will away’ those conflicting preferences inside you, but that isn’t always easier to do with yourself than it is with someone else.

Somebody responded to the tortured soul above. Again we see the same self-adversarial dynamic at play:

I have the same problem.

The only solution I have is to remove your accounts completely, or make it so that you can never login again.

A good way for this is to implement a 2-way verification on your account with an Authentication app, then you logout, remove your TOKENS in the Authentication app, and then clear the web browser. You can also reset the backup codes for the 2 way authentication before log out the final time and don't save them.

Now you are out for good.

Except you’re not. Remember, the addict is his own creative adversary. He’ll find ways to get what he wants, at his own expense. So the same respondent immediately contradicts himself (emphasis mine):

I did this, but I managed to get back in by talking to the owner of the site. Why did I do this? 😔

The key is to never give yourself the permission to never under any circumstances look at the site again. … If you look at the site again, I will guarantee you that you will find a way to get back in.

In other words, this person suggests that the ‘solution’ to this conflict between preferences is to entrench it even further by having one run roughshod over the other. That’s not a solution. On the contrary, I suspect it would just frustrate that other part of him, which would then want to visit the site even more, and find even more creative ways to visit it. If somebody else disregarded your preferences, wouldn’t you feel justified in disregarding theirs? Yes. Why should that be any different when that somebody else is yourself? It isn’t.

This respondent continues:

Find something else to do. Because you can not [sic] remove a habbit [sic], you [c]an only replace it by something else. This is the secret [to] habbit building. Maybe every time you feel the urge to look at the website, take a book from your bookshelf and start reading that instead.

Now, whether reading is an actual solution to this conflict depends on the person. Given this respondent’s previous statements, I suspect he’s merely suggesting another form of self-coercion: read whether you like it or not. Again, that will not work; it may well worsen the addiction. But if reading is something both parts of him prefer to their respective initial position, then the addiction should disappear quickly because there’s no reason for either part to continue holding its initial position.

The logic would be the same for the alcoholic from our thought experiment: if part A of his mind wants to spend money on alcohol, while part B wants to spend that money on movie tickets instead, but then they find they both prefer to spend the money on a new book, then they will be in harmony again.

In short, the cure to addiction is common-preference finding with yourself. Unfortunately, there’s no predetermined recipe that you could follow. What you can do, though, is best described by the quote from The Beginning of Infinity from #760:

[W]hat is necessary for progress is to exclude ideas that fail to survive criticism, and to prevent their entrenchment, and to promote the creation of new ideas.

By definition, once you’re addicted, it’s too late to prevent entrenchment. But that still leaves two possible actions: discarding ideas that fail to survive criticism and promoting the creation of new ideas. In essence, using Veritula.

The cure for addiction is to create new ideas until you find at least one that you are completely unconflicted about.

Curing addiction

If I’m right that the cause of addiction is an entrenched conflict between preferences (#3040), then there’s a simple cure for addiction:¹ common-preference finding with yourself.

Common-preference finding is a concept I am borrowing from a parenting philosophy called Taking Children Seriously (TCS), cofounded by David Deutsch:

A common preference is a solution to a problem, or resolution of a disagreement, that all parties prefer to their prima facie positions, and to all other candidate solutions they can think of. It is the solution that pleases everyone involved in the disagreement.

I think common-preference finding is not only the solution to conflicts between people, but also to conflicts between preferences inside a single person. When such conflicts inside a single mind are entrenched, we are dealing with addiction. Since addiction is a special kind of conflict, the solution to addiction is the same as the solution to conflicts generally: common-preference finding.

Take an alcoholic. The two entrenched preferences, in the simplest possible terms, are: to drink, and to stop drinking. In this context, I think it helps to view this single alcoholic as two people. In other words, we can view each preference as a person, or an autonomous actor of sorts. Not because the alcoholic necessarily has a split personality in the clinical sense – although we’ll soon see that the addict acts as his own adversary – but because it helps illustrate the logic behind common-preference finding: it’s fundamentally no different within a single person than across people.

So again, let’s view an alcoholic as two people, just as a thought experiment. They’re forced to be roommates and combine their finances. One of them wants to drink and spend their money on alcohol, whereas the other does not want that. Moving out – choosing not to associate – is not an option because there’s no freedom of association inside a single mind. Although we may choose not to be roommates with an alcoholic, the alcoholic has no choice but to be roommates with himself.

How are these two ‘people’ to live together in harmony? As long as they’re in conflict, they will try to undermine each other. One will put the liquor in the top cabinet to make it harder to reach – the other will get it anyway. One will ask a friend to hold on to his credit card, the other will convince that same friend to give it back.

We can see the same self-adversarial dynamic in addictions to various things. For example, somebody asked (emphasis mine):

What can I do against my addiction to certain websites? I'm addicted to some sites, and I already tried to block them, but I always go back to unblock. I always waste a lot of time on them, and I'm annoyed by myself than I can[’t] stay away from them.

Do you see the dynamic? He’s like two people: person A blocks the website, until the urge to visit it gets too strong and person B unblocks it. Then person A gets annoyed at person B – who was presumably annoyed at person A for blocking the site in the first place. And the only way to get (temporary) relief from this conflict is to indulge and visit the site again – or so it seems.

This person’s frustration makes it easier to see that, again, knowledge inside a single mind does not act fundamentally differently from knowledge across minds. When you’re in conflict with somebody else, you may feel hopeless at times, like there’s no way to reach that person. If only they’d listen to reason! But that situation is not fundamentally different when that other person is yourself. People sometimes think you should be able to just ‘will away’ those conflicting preferences inside you, but that isn’t always easier to do with yourself than it is with someone else.

Somebody responded to the tortured soul above. Again we see the same self-adversarial dynamic at play:

I have the same problem.

The only solution I have is to remove your accounts completely, or make it so that you can never login again.

A good way for this is to implement a 2-way verification on your account with an Authentication app, then you logout, remove your TOKENS in the Authentication app, and then clear the web browser. You can also reset the backup codes for the 2 way authentication before log out the final time and don't save them.

Now you are out for good.

Except you’re not. Remember, the addict is his own creative adversary. He’ll find ways to get what he wants, at his own expense. So the same respondent immediately contradicts himself (emphasis mine):

I did this, but I managed to get back in by talking to the owner of the site. Why did I do this? 😔

The key is to never give yourself the permission to never under any circumstances look at the site again. … If you look at the site again, I will guarantee you that you will find a way to get back in.

In other words, this person suggests that the ‘solution’ to this conflict between preferences is to entrench it even further by having one run roughshod over the other. That’s not a solution. On the contrary, I suspect it would just frustrate that other part of him, which would then want to visit the site even more, and find even more creative ways to visit it. If somebody else disregarded your preferences, wouldn’t you feel justified in disregarding theirs? Yes. Why should that be any different when that somebody else is yourself? It isn’t.

This respondent continues:

Find something else to do. Because you can not [sic] remove a habbit [sic], you [c]an only replace it by something else. This is the secret [to] habbit building. Maybe every time you feel the urge to look at the website, take a book from your bookshelf and start reading that instead.

Now, whether reading is an actual solution to this conflict depends on the person. Given this respondent’s previous statements, I suspect he’s merely suggesting another form of self-coercion: read whether you like it or not. Again, that will not work; it may well worsen the addiction. But if reading is something both parts of him prefer to their respective initial position, then the addiction should disappear quickly because there’s no reason for either part to continue holding its initial position.

The logic would be the same for the alcoholic from our thought experiment: if part A of his mind wants to spend money on alcohol, while part B wants to spend that money on movie tickets instead, but then they find they both prefer to spend the money on a new book, then they will be in harmony again.

In short, the cure to addiction is common-preference finding with yourself. Unfortunately, there’s no predetermined recipe that you could follow. What you can do, though, is best described by the quote from The Beginning of Infinity from #760:

[W]hat is necessary for progress is to exclude ideas that fail to survive criticism, and to prevent their entrenchment, and to promote the creation of new ideas.

By definition, once you’re addicted, it’s too late to prevent entrenchment. But that still leaves two possible actions: discarding ideas that fail to survive criticism and promoting the creation of new ideas. In essence, using Veritula.

The cure for addiction is to create new ideas until you find at least one that you are completely unconflicted about.

Another self-adversarial dynamic from the same link (emphasis mine):

I have the same issue. I’m starting to fail school and I have no hobbies. I downloaded multiple chrome extensions that block sites and [I put] all those extentions [sic] in there too. So I cant [sic] go to the site of the extention to unblock it and if I remove one I’ll still have to remove the others. Of course you can still remove them and I keep on doing that but try it, maybe it helps. Also telling people and asking is [sic] they can help you.

It’s notable that this person has no hobbies. That means there’s a lack of options their conflicting parts might prefer. Creating new options is the most important part of curing addiction. That’s how others can help too, by suggesting ideas for what you could be doing instead. Not by suggesting ideas for how to coerce yourself.

Curing addiction

If I’m right that the cause of addiction is an entrenched conflict between preferences (#3040), then there’s a simple cure for addiction:¹ common-preference finding with yourself.

Common-preference finding is a concept I am borrowing from a parenting philosophy called Taking Children Seriously (TCS), cofounded by David Deutsch:

A common preference is a solution to a problem, or resolution of a disagreement, that all parties prefer to their prima facie positions, and to all other candidate solutions they can think of. It is the solution that pleases everyone involved in the disagreement.

I think common-preference finding is not only the solution to conflicts between people, but also to conflicts between preferences inside a single person. When such conflicts inside a single mind are entrenched, we are dealing with addiction. Since addiction is a special kind of conflict, the solution to addiction is the same as the solution to conflicts generally: common-preference finding.

Take an alcoholic. The two entrenched preferences, in the simplest possible terms, are: to drink, and to stop drinking. In this context, I think it helps to view this single alcoholic as two people. In other words, we can view each preference as a person, or an autonomous actor of sorts. Not because the alcoholic necessarily has a split personality in the clinical sense – although we’ll soon see that the addict acts as his own adversary – but because it helps illustrate the logic behind common-preference finding: it’s fundamentally no different within a single person than across people.

So again, let’s view an alcoholic as two people, just as a thought experiment. They’re forced to be roommates and combine their finances. One of them wants to drink and spend their money on alcohol, whereas the other does not want that. Moving out – choosing not to associate – is not an option because there’s no freedom of association inside a single mind. Although we may choose not to be roommates with an alcoholic, the alcoholic has no choice but to be roommates with himself.

How are these two ‘people’ to live together in harmony? As long as they’re in conflict, they will try to undermine each other. One will put the liquor in the top cabinet to make it harder to reach – the other will get it anyway. One will ask a friend to hold on to his credit card, the other will convince that same friend to give it back.

We can see the same self-adversarial dynamic in addictions to various things. For example, somebody asked (emphasis mine):

What can I do against my addiction to certain websites? I'm addicted to some sites, and I already tried to block them, but I always go back to unblock. I always waste a lot of time on them, and I'm annoyed by myself than I can[’t] stay away from them.

Do you see the dynamic? He’s like two people: person A blocks the website, until the urge to visit it gets too strong and person B unblocks it. Then person A gets annoyed at person B – who was presumably annoyed at person A for blocking the site in the first place. And the only way to get (temporary) relief from this conflict is to indulge and visit the site again – or so it seems.

This person’s frustration makes it easier to see that, again, knowledge inside a single mind does not act fundamentally differently from knowledge across minds. When you’re in conflict with somebody else, you may feel hopeless at times, like there’s no way to reach that person. If only they’d listen to reason! But that situation is not fundamentally different when that other person is yourself. People sometimes think you should be able to just ‘will away’ those conflicting preferences inside you, but that isn’t always easier to do with yourself than it is with someone else.

Somebody responded to the tortured soul above. Again we see the same self-adversarial dynamic at play:

I have the same problem.

The only solution I have is to remove your accounts completely, or make it so that you can never login again.

A good way for this is to implement a 2-way verification on your account with an Authentication app, then you logout, remove your TOKENS in the Authentication app, and then clear the web browser. You can also reset the backup codes for the 2 way authentication before log out the final time and don't save them.

Now you are out for good.

Except you’re not. Remember, the addict is his own creative adversary. He’ll find ways to get what he wants, at his own expense. So the same respondent immediately contradicts himself (emphasis mine):

I did this, but I managed to get back in by talking to the owner of the site. Why did I do this? 😔

The key is to never give yourself the permission to never under any circumstances look at the site again. … If you look at the site again, I will guarantee you that you will find a way to get back in.

In other words, this person suggests that the ‘solution’ to this conflict between preferences is to entrench it even further by having one run roughshod over the other. That’s not a solution. On the contrary, I suspect it would just frustrate that other part of him, which would then want to visit the site even more, and find even more creative ways to visit it. If somebody else disregarded your preferences, wouldn’t you feel justified in disregarding theirs? Yes. Why should that be any different when that somebody else is yourself? It isn’t.

This respondent continues:

Find something else to do. Because you can not [sic] remove a habbit [sic], you [c]an only replace it by something else. This is the secret [to] habbit building. Maybe every time you feel the urge to look at the website, take a book from your bookshelf and start reading that instead.

Hope this helps.

Now, whether reading is an actual solution to this conflict depends on the person. Given this respondent’s previous statements, I suspect he’s merely suggesting another form of self-coercion: read whether you like it or not. Again, that will not work; it may well worsen the addiction. But if reading is something both parts of him prefer to their respective initial position, then the addiction should disappear quickly because there’s no reason for either part to continue holding its initial position.

The logic would be the same for the alcoholic from our thought experiment: if part A of his mind wants to spend money on alcohol, while part B wants to spend that money on movie tickets instead, but then they find they both prefer to spend the money on a new book, then they will be in harmony again.

In short, the cure to addiction is common-preference finding with yourself. Unfortunately, there’s no predetermined recipe that you could follow. What you can do, though, is best described by the quote from The Beginning of Infinity from #760:

[W]hat is necessary for progress is to exclude ideas that fail to survive criticism, and to prevent their entrenchment, and to promote the creation of new ideas.

By definition, once you’re addicted, it’s too late to prevent entrenchment. But that still leaves two possible actions: discarding ideas that fail to survive criticism and promoting the creation of new ideas. In essence, using Veritula.

The cure for addiction is to create new ideas until you find at least one that you are completely unconflicted about.

Here’s a specific example of a working cure for addiction to sugar soda. Apparently, many people struggle with that.

Picture a man who likes the taste of soda but dislikes its fattening effects. (Sugar sodas are high in calories.) And let’s say the conflict between these two preferences is entrenched because his wife doesn’t want him to drink soda (for health reasons, say), and she chastises him, so he hides it from her and can’t talk about it openly, which makes error correction harder. In addition, he was made fun of as a kid for being overweight, so he feels awful whenever he thinks about dieting and can’t deal with the problem effectively. Such conditions are a breeding ground for entrenchment.

The solution in this case is to switch from regular sugar soda to the corresponding diet-soda equivalent. Like switching from Coke to Diet Coke or Coke Zero. It tastes virtually the same and has no calories. So now both parts of him get what they want. :)

Here’s a specific example of a working cure for addiction to sugar soda. Apparently, many people struggle with that.

Picture a man who likes the taste of soda but dislikes its fattening effects. (Sugar sodas are high in calories.) And let’s say the conflict between these two preferences is entrenched because his wife doesn’t want him to drink soda (for health reasons, say), and she chastises him, so he hides it from her and can’t talk about it openly, which makes error correction harder. In addition, he was made fun of as a kid for being overweight, so he feels awful whenever he thinks about dieting and can’t deal with the problem effectively. Such conditions are a breeding ground for entrenchment.

The solution in this case is to switch from regular sugar soda to the corresponding diet-soda equivalent. Like switching from Coke to Diet Coke or Coke Zero. It tastes virtually the same and has no calories. So now both parts of him get what they want. :)

The part about putting the liquor in the top cabinet reminds me a bit of my relationship with salt.

One part of me has been trying to eat less salt, for health reasons. But another part of me likes the taste of salt; it makes many dishes taste better.

I’ve noticed that placing the salt shaker on my dinner table makes it harder to resist putting salt on my food. So I put the salt shaker in my kitchen cabinet. That simple act makes me want salt less because I don’t want to get up to grab it.

I don’t think the conflict is entrenched, and it’s not a huge deal, so this doesn’t rise anywhere near the level required to consider this an addiction. I mention it only to show that my way to deal with the conflict isn’t a solution yet. It’s a self-coercive patch. The part of me that doesn’t want salt runs roughshod over the part that does – for a while, until the roles are reversed and I eat more salt again. That’s not a common preference; it’s arbitrary.

I’ve tried coming up with some solutions, like replacing salt with potassium chloride, but it doesn’t taste good, so then I don’t eat it as much. I just go back to salt instead.

Though I’m an advocate of rationality, I always like to remind people not to see me as a representative of it. This is an example of why. My relationship with salt is clearly irrational. If I had mastered rationality, I would have already found a solution.

The part about putting the liquor in the top cabinet reminds me a bit of my relationship with salt.

One part of me has been trying to eat less salt, for health reasons. But another part of me likes the taste of salt; it makes many dishes taste better.

I’ve noticed that placing the salt shaker on my dinner table makes it harder to resist putting salt on my food. So I put the salt shaker in my kitchen cabinet. That simple act makes me want salt less because I don’t want to get up to grab it.

The problem is, this isn’t a solution. It’s a self-coercive patch. The part of me that doesn’t want salt gets to run roughshod over the part that does. That’s not a common preference; it’s arbitrary.

I’ve tried coming up with some solutions, like replacing salt with potassium-chloride, but it doesn’t taste good, so then I don’t eat it as much. I just go back to salt instead.

Though I’m an advocate of rationality, I always like to remind people not to see me as a representative of it. This is an example of why. My relationship with salt is clearly irrational. If I had mastered rationality, I would have already found a solution.

Another way to put it is that addiction is an entrenched type of irrationality inside your mind. The cure to irrationality is rationality, aka common-preference finding. How could it be otherwise?

My Conjecture

Conjecture: addiction is the result of the entrenchment of a conflict between two or more preferences in a mind.

Picture a smoker who wants to give up smoking but also really enjoys smoking. Those preferences conflict.

If the conflict is entrenched, then both preferences get to live on indefinitely. The entrenchment will not let the smoker give up smoking. He will become a chain smoker.

As I write in #4624, curing addiction involves finding a common preference between the conflicting parts of the addict’s mind: something both parts prefer to their initial positions. In addition, it may involve Randian ideas around introspection and getting one’s reason and emotions in the proper order.

I’ve been developing a new research program toward a unified theory of creation: that of finding parallels between different creative processes such as the economy and the mind in hopes that such parallels may shed light on creation generally.

My own remarks in #4624 about the self-adversarial dynamic of addiction remind me of Ayn Rand’s thoughts on pressure groups in a mixed economy. I’m seeing parallels between a mixed economy and the addict’s mind:

A mixed economy is a mixture of freedom and controls—with no principles, rules, or theories to define either. Since the introduction of controls necessitates and leads to further controls, it is an unstable, explosive mixture which, ultimately, has to repeal the controls or collapse into dictatorship.

Similarly, I oppose the introduction of controls in the addict’s life, such as the various tricks people describe to stay off websites. Note also the parallel to the addict’s life being unstable, and having to either cure the addiction or collapse into self-destruction. Continuing in Rand’s text:

A mixed economy has no principles to define its policies, its goals, its laws—no principles to limit the power of its government. The only principle of a mixed economy—which, necessarily, has to remain unnamed and unacknowledged—is that no one's interests are safe, everyone's interests are on a public auction block, and anything goes for anyone who can get away with it.

Such is the dynamic between the warring preferences in an addict’s mind.

Such a system—or, more precisely, anti-system—breaks up a country into an ever-growing number of enemy camps, into economic groups fighting one another for self preservation in an indeterminate mixture of defense and offense, as the nature of such a jungle demands.

An addict’s mind is just such a jungle.

While, politically, a mixed economy preserves the semblance of an organized society with a semblance of law and order, economically it is the equivalent of the chaos that had ruled China for centuries: a chaos of robber gangs looting—and draining—the productive elements of the country.

Similarly, addicts can appear to have a functioning life while quietly destroying themselves.

A mixed economy is rule by pressure groups. It is an amoral, institutionalized civil war of special interests and lobbies, all fighting to seize a momentary control of the legislative machinery, to extort some special privilege at one another's expense by an act of government—i.e., by force.

This is exactly how I see the dynamic inside an addict’s mind. The conflicting preferences coerce each other repeatedly and fight for momentary control of the self.

In the absence of individual rights, in the absence of any moral or legal principles, a mixed economy's only hope to preserve its precarious semblance of order, to restrain the savage, desperately rapacious groups it itself has created, and to prevent the legalized plunder from running over into plain, unlegalized looting of all by all—is compromise; compromise on everything and in every realm—material, spiritual, intellectual—so that no group would step over the line by demanding too much and topple the whole rotted structure.

Likewise, it is compromise, not common-preference finding, that dominates the addict’s life: he spends some of his time indulging in his addiction, and some of his time abstaining, being conflicted during both.

If the game is to continue, nothing can be permitted to remain firm, solid, absolute, untouchable; everything (and everyone) has to be fluid, flexible, indeterminate, approximate. By what standard are anyone's actions to be guided? By the expediency of any immediate moment.

Likewise, the addicts’ actions are less guided by principle and more by the expediency of the immediate moment. As his addiction worsens, the harder it is for him to live his life long-range. If the conflicting preferences are part good and part bad, then the bad will drive out the good (see Rand’s essay ‘The Anatomy of Compromise’). This dynamic, along with the entrenchment of error, explains why addiction worsens automatically when left unaddressed.

The only danger, to a mixed economy, is any not-to-be-compromised value, virtue, or idea. The only threat is any uncompromising person, group, or movement. The only enemy is integrity.

Integrity describes a mind that is unconflicted.

As long as the conflict between an addict’s preferences remains, they act as pressure groups inside his mind. Just as the government of a mixed economy, the role of the addict’s self is reduced to that of arbiter between these pressure groups inside his mind. These pressure groups can at best temporarily get what they want, at the cost of the other, which will then clamor even louder to get what it wants, and so on, until the entrenchment is so severe, and error correction so hopeless, that this self-adversarial dynamic ends, as is the case for severe drug addictions, in prison or even death.

As Rand explain in ‘The Anatomy of Compromise’, this spiral can only be stopped by a reversal of basic principles: not compromising between conflicting preferences, or trying to live with that compromise, but instead viewing those preferences as individual actors with rights, who will (and should) only cooperate when they can get what they truly want.

Curing addiction

If I’m right that the cause of addiction is an entrenched conflict between preferences (#3040), then there’s a simple cure for addiction:¹ common-preference finding with yourself.

Common-preference finding is a concept I am borrowing from a parenting philosophy called Taking Children Seriously (TCS), cofounded by David Deutsch:

A common preference is a solution to a problem, or resolution of a disagreement, that all parties prefer to their prima facie positions, and to all other candidate solutions they can think of. It is the solution that pleases everyone involved in the disagreement.

I think common-preference finding is not only the solution to conflicts between people, but also to conflicts between preferences inside a single person. When such conflicts inside a single mind are entrenched, we are dealing with addiction. Since addiction is a special kind of conflict, the solution to addiction is the same as the solution to conflicts generally: common-preference finding.

Consider an alcoholic. The two entrenched preferences, in the simplest possible terms, are: to drink, and to stop drinking. In this context, I think it helps to view this single alcoholic as two people. In other words, we can view each preference as a person, or an autonomous actor of sorts. Not because the alcoholic necessarily has a split personality in the clinical sense – although we’ll soon see that the addict acts as his own adversary – but because it helps illustrate the logic behind common-preference finding: it’s fundamentally no different within a single person than across people.

So again, let’s view an alcoholic as two people, just as a thought experiment. They’re forced to be roommates and combine their finances. One of them wants to drink and spend their money on alcohol, whereas the other does not want that. Moving out – choosing not to associate – is not an option because there’s no freedom of association inside a single mind. Although we may choose not to be roommates with an alcoholic, the alcoholic has no choice but to be roommates with himself.

How are these two ‘people’ to live together in harmony? As long as they’re in conflict, they will try to undermine each other. One will put the liquor in the top cabinet to make it harder to reach – the other will get it anyway. One will ask a friend to hold on to his credit card, the other will convince that same friend to give it back.

We can see the same self-adversarial dynamic in addictions to various things. For example, somebody asked (emphasis mine):

What can I do against my addiction to certain websites? I'm addicted to some sites, and I already tried to block them, but I always go back to unblock. I always waste a lot of time on them, and I'm annoyed by myself than I can[’t] stay away from them.

Do you see the dynamic? He’s like two people: person A blocks the website, until the urge to visit it gets too strong and person B unblocks it. Then person A gets annoyed at person B – who was presumably annoyed at person A for blocking the site in the first place. And the only way to get (temporary) relief from this conflict is to indulge and visit the site again – or so it seems.

This person’s frustration makes it easier to see that, again, knowledge inside a single mind does not act fundamentally differently from knowledge across minds. When you’re in conflict with somebody else, you may feel hopeless at times, like there’s no way to reach that person, and you wish they’d just listen to reason. But that situation is not fundamentally different when that other person is yourself! People sometimes think you should be able to just ‘will away’ those conflicting preferences inside you, but that isn’t always easier to do with yourself than it is with someone else.

Somebody responded to the tortured soul above. Again we see the same self-adversarial dynamic at play:

I have the same problem.

The only solution I have is to remove your accounts completely, or make it so that you can never login again.

A good way for this is to implement a 2-way verification on your account with an Authentication app, then you logout, remove your TOKENS in the Authentication app, and then clear the web browser. You can also reset the backup codes for the 2 way authentication before log out the final time and don't save them.

Now you are out for good.

Except you’re not. Remember, the addict is his own creative adversary. He’ll find ways to get what he wants. So the same respondent immediately contradicts himself (emphasis mine):

I did this, but I managed to get back in by talking to the owner of the site. Why did I do this? 😔

The key is to never give yourself the permission to never under any circumstances look at the site again. … If you look at the site again, I will guarantee you that you will find a way to get back in.

In other words, this person suggests that the ‘solution’ to this conflict between preferences is to entrench it even further by having one run roughshod over the other. That’s not a solution. On the contrary, I suspect it would just frustrate that other part of him, which would then want to visit the site even more, and find even more creative ways to visit it. If somebody else disregarded your preferences, wouldn’t you feel justified in disregarding theirs? Yes. Why should that be any different when that somebody else is yourself? It isn’t.

This respondent continues:

Find something else to do. Because you can not [sic] remove a habbit [sic], you [c]an only replace it by something else. This is the secret [to] habbit building. Maybe every time you feel the urge to look at the website, take a book from your bookshelf and start reading that instead.

Hope this helps.

Now, whether reading is an actual solution to this conflict depends on the person. Given this respondent’s previous statements, I suspect he’s merely suggesting another form of self-coercion: read whether you like it or not. Again, that will not work; it may well worsen the addiction. But if reading is something both parts of him prefer to their respective initial position, then the addiction should disappear quickly because there’s no reason for either part to continue holding its initial position.

The logic would be the same for the alcoholic from our thought experiment: if part A of his mind wants to spend money on alcohol, while part B wants to spend that money on movie tickets instead, but then they find they both prefer to spend the money on a new book, then they will be in harmony again.

In short, the cure to addiction is common-preference finding with yourself. Unfortunately, there’s no predetermined recipe that you could follow. What you can do, though, is best described by the quote from The Beginning of Infinity from #760:

[W]hat is necessary for progress is to exclude ideas that fail to survive criticism, and to prevent their entrenchment, and to promote the creation of new ideas.

By definition, once you’re addicted, it’s too late to prevent entrenchment. But that still leaves two possible actions: discarding ideas that fail to survive criticism and promoting the creation of new ideas. In essence, using Veritula.

The cure for addiction is to create new ideas until you find at least one that you are completely unconflicted about.

Can you say more about what you mean by “relative”? I agree about the flipbook example, but the term “relative” is throwing me off a bit here.

Ration … has pretty indirect relation with the common sense.

That’s fine. Common sense is often found to be wrong upon closer inspection. It’s rationality that helps us seek truth. Common sense says the sun rotates around the earth; rationality helped us understand why that isn’t the case.

How rationality will help you to stand the right up, and do the thing?

If you’re asking how rationality will help you figure out the right course of action: using the process outlined in #4471.

Ration overrated and has pretty indirect relation with the common sense.

That’s fine. Common sense is often found to be wrong upon closer inspection. It’s rationality that helps us seek truth. Common sense says the sun rotates around the earth; rationality helped us understand why that isn’t the case.

pretty often

So not all the time.

Unclear how comments would be rendered.

Not sure this is a good idea. You say you wouldn’t mind horizontal scrolling, but users generally dislike horizontal scroll.

Is all emergence relative? I notice that when a flipbook or a zoetrope gives rise to the perceived motion of still images when they're rapidly changed, that is a result of aliasing on the part of the observer. Is this true in all cases of emergence, perceptual and otherwise..?

Need rate limiting for new users to prevent excessive posting.