Addiction as Entrenchment
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With an account, you can revise, criticize, and comment on ideas.I just noticed that the old TCS glossary has an entry on entrenchment and entrenched habits:
Entrenched ideas are ideas that you are unable to abandon even when they fail to survive rational criticism in your mind.
An entrenched habit is something that you can't stop doing even if you consciously decide to, or which makes you feel bad when you consciously force yourself to stop doing it.
I’ve looked at the glossary many times over the years, so maybe the seeds of my ideas about addiction came from it.
Re consciously deciding to do something: once you’ve automatized some behavior, it’s hard to undo it just by virtue of being automatized, not necessarily because of entrenchment.
The trouble with ‘consciously deciding’ to do something in any case is that the conscious parts of your mind may be on board but other parts may not. But that discrepancy itself need not be entrenched.