video games, internet gambling,internet porn, and absorption in the internet itself.
Food, Diet, Exercise
“skilled” gambling, day trading of stocks, or dealing in collectibles
thinking is divided into two kinds, a far-seeing process that plans consistently over time and a myopic process left over from our evolutionary roots.
The reason the dieter doesn’t eat the single chocolate éclair is not that it will cause a noticeable gain in weight, but that it will
damage the credibility of her diet. The struggle between impulse and control now turns not so
much on how close she gets to a temptation—although this remains a factor—but on whether
she expects a later self to see her current choice as a defection and thus have less reason in turn
not to defect. Her self-prediction has become the basis of personal rules.
A person may decide that she can’t resist the urge to eat jelly donuts, or to smoke
after meals, or accept cocaine when offered by a friend—or resist that particular modality
of temptation at all.
The result is a circumscribed area of dyscontrol.
Cognitive blocks. Since personal rules organize great amounts of motivation, they create an
incentive to suborn the self-perception process. The potential damage from lapses creates
an incentive not to see them, giving rise to a motivated unconscious: suppression, repression,
denial.
Compulsiveness. Choices may become more important as test cases than for their own sakes,
making it hard to live in the here-and-now. Awareness that damaging a personal rule may
threaten to destabilize a larger network of intertemporal bargains may lead to an unwillingness
risk modifying the rule.
Thus intertemporal bargaining stabilizes not only long-term plans but also ways around them.
“motivated”does not mean “voluntary.” Will is a learned executive function—intertemporal bargaining
that reinterprets patterns of expected reward to reveal incentive for consistent choice. This is the
skill that society holds us responsible for maintaining. But sometimes a personal history of bargaining
has left very little expected reward to be bargained with, raising the question of whether
some addicts “can” stop their activity. That is the crux of whether hopeless addiction can be
called a disease.
Food, Diet, Exercise
“skilled” gambling, day trading of stocks, or dealing in collectibles
thinking is divided into two kinds, a far-seeing process that plans consistently over time and a myopic process left over from our evolutionary roots.
The reason the dieter doesn’t eat the single chocolate éclair is not that it will cause a noticeable gain in weight, but that it will
damage the credibility of her diet. The struggle between impulse and control now turns not so
much on how close she gets to a temptation—although this remains a factor—but on whether
she expects a later self to see her current choice as a defection and thus have less reason in turn
not to defect. Her self-prediction has become the basis of personal rules.
A person may decide that she can’t resist the urge to eat jelly donuts, or to smoke
after meals, or accept cocaine when offered by a friend—or resist that particular modality
of temptation at all.
The result is a circumscribed area of dyscontrol.
Cognitive blocks. Since personal rules organize great amounts of motivation, they create an
incentive to suborn the self-perception process. The potential damage from lapses creates
an incentive not to see them, giving rise to a motivated unconscious: suppression, repression,
denial.
Compulsiveness. Choices may become more important as test cases than for their own sakes,
making it hard to live in the here-and-now. Awareness that damaging a personal rule may
threaten to destabilize a larger network of intertemporal bargains may lead to an unwillingness
risk modifying the rule.
Thus intertemporal bargaining stabilizes not only long-term plans but also ways around them.
“motivated”does not mean “voluntary.” Will is a learned executive function—intertemporal bargaining
that reinterprets patterns of expected reward to reveal incentive for consistent choice. This is the
skill that society holds us responsible for maintaining. But sometimes a personal history of bargaining
has left very little expected reward to be bargained with, raising the question of whether
some addicts “can” stop their activity. That is the crux of whether hopeless addiction can be
called a disease.
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