Is addiction really a disease?

[Jemmons]

17. This is interesting!

I read the lay out as the gray boxes being the original content and the rest being annotations by you.

The quoted text formulates a critique that is quite sophisticated: Can you really expect to have effective rational self control if the standards that you hold your behaviors up against are not fixed or stable?

You make a reference to "scientific principle of cautious experimentation", but this is really more about scientific thinking being used in a context of rational self control, as when you measure your behavior in comparison with a chosen standard. This is off course where the inexperienced person will fail: When your strategy is just to "say no" if the option is not within chosen standards, you will fail if and when your standard change because your brain state has changed because your current context has changed.

Søren Kierkegaard was one of the first people to voice a critique like this when he contrasted rational conclusions with faith based convictions and found that rational conclusions would always be weak and crumble in the face of existential challenges.

So there is a long history of being skeptic about ration self control. More recently we got a bit of empirical evidence for the point. Dan Ariely has shown that standards for whom to exclude as a potential sex partner will change as you get more and more aroused. LeDoux' new understanding of the emotional brain talks about how a survival circuit can "monopolize" brain resources and thus reconfigure the way that you react or act.

In this sense science is now slowly coming around to a point that religious people have favored for a long time. But then again not quite: Where religious thinking will often recommend that you strengthen your faith by religious practice, science is still looking at ways to overcome the pitfalls of rational self control.

But most people dont really think about this. Most people just instinctively follow one or the other path for good or for worse.

I live in the big gray area where we look at ways to make rational self control less vulnerable to state changes as the brain sees a different environment.

Other people find success in shoring up their faith and reliance on the use of faith based convictions.

There are yet no final answers to what is the best option. As much of what goes on is just seeing through programs of rational self control and tweaking your ability to do that as much as possible. But as Brexit, Trumpism and a a lot of other developments have shown, a lot of people are trowing out the rule book as they are more and more frustrated with their results.

This will lead to a lot of unorthodox choices, but it might also lead to a more keen interest in alternative to rational self control either of the faith based variety or indeed in a scientific exploration of stability measures for a rational self control exercised in a brain that can change its configuration as the environment changes.