Addiction as Entrenchment
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With an account, you can revise, criticize, and comment on ideas.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.
Solutions for the conflict may need to be found creatively, case by case. It depends on the nature of the particular entrenchment and the preferences involved. A more overarching answer for how to cure addiction might involve Randian ideas around introspection and getting one’s reason and emotions in the proper order.
Prevailing explanations do not mention entrenchment. They do not refer to any epistemological concepts. My theory does.
Prevailing explanations tend to put emphasis on the object instead of problem situations, like thinking addiction comes from the cigarette. This theory doesn't.
There is a similar (identical?) theory put forward by Marc Lewis in The Biology of Desire. He explains addiction as the process of "reciprocal narrowing". The process of reciprocal narrowing does not remove conflicting desires, but instead reinforces a pattern of dealing with conflict through a progressively narrower, habitual response (substance, action, mental dissociation). Addiction, therefore, as you suggested, is a process of managing the "conflict between two or more preferences within the mind."
There is also a definition by Gabor Mate that is similar to this. I will add a link when I find it.
Elaboration:
The conflict in addiction is between short-term and long-term solutions.
The preference for short-term in addiction is caused by uncertainty/an inability to make predictions based on explanations.
This uncertainty can be real (e.g. increased heroin addiction during the Vietnam War) or learned from insecurity during one's early years.
Interesting. Do you think the conflict is always between short vs long-term preferences, or could there be addictive conflicts between two short-term preferences or even two long-term preferences?
Always, because of the underlying uncertainty about the future. Please criticise!
If we view addiction as entrenchment of ideas (in the broad sense), why can't you have conflict between implicit and explicit preferences, which are both short-term preferences? Something in your body is addicted to a substance, but you could simultaneously, consciously, not want to take the substance because you don't like how it feels.
Hmm could you give examples of such addictions between implicit and explicit short-term preferences?