When we believe something, we are more likely to act in accordance with that belief. If we believe we're old and slow, or we have more access to some evidence that says that, we'll actually walk slower. Once we own something, we like it more than before we purchased it. In short, life is a bunch of self-fulfilling prophecies. The obvious and immediate question is what happens when you believe you are an alcoholic? Well, then you perform like one when you drink. Or you chose not to drink, knowing that you are an alcoholic and should not drink.
But.
What if being an alcoholic was merely the repeated almost religious assumption that you are one? What if some percentage of addiction isn't physical at all, but only half reasoned conclusions about "what is" and "what isn't" true in "reality" whatever that is?
I don't know if I buy it, but we should recognize that it plays some role in our own expectations for our own behavior.
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OK, but what if the belief supporting your self-fulfilling prophecy is rational? For example, a game-theoretic equilibrium is just that: a self-fulfilling prophecy supported by rational beliefs.
Just because something is a self-fulfilling prophecy does not mean it's easily avoidable. The payoff structure of a game is a limiting constraint on behavior, just as real as physical force. The bleak outcome of a one-shot prisoner's dilemma is also just a self-fulfilling prophecy, but for participants of the game, there's no escaping it.
What I'm getting at is this: What if alcoholism is a rational (even if unconsciously so), equilibrium response to one's environment? If that's the case, you can't just talk yourself out of it; so what's there to be done?
Tell me first about the conditions that would make it rational.
That's easy. Drinking provides short-term enjoyment as well as an escape from reality, but hurts your long-term prospects. What if (in rational expectation) you don't have any long-term prospects, so you might as well drink?
You'd have to be 100% sure somehow that there are no long-term prospects and that, if there were long term prospects, drinking wouldn't change them. Of course, drinking, overeating, smoking, and other compulsions actually represent a place where we can control, to some extent, our destiny. But people of course can drink responsibly--in a way that doesn't hurt them in the long term. The question is only for those that think it will do so.
Wrong, you don't have to be 100% sure that there are no long-term prospects. Have you heard of expected utility or expected value?
What you're basically saying is that you can't make a rational choice of action unless you are 100% sure about the future benefits of that action. If this is right, then addictions of course are not rational. There is a small problem, however: nothing else can be rational, either, because under your definition rational choice is not possible at all.
No, I haven't heard of those terms. But what I'm saying is that you can't be 100% sure that there will never be long term benefits in your life, not that you need to be 100% sure about outcomes before you act on anything.
As long as there is a possibility that you may have some long term benefits, and you know that drinking reduces those benefits, you must favor short term gain over that chance to drink--assuming that drinking will snuff out the long term benefits. Many people can do so without ill long term effects, but not all. The post concerns those that cannot. Perhaps they cannot because they think of themselves a certain way, if, that is, we accept the idea of arbitrary coherence, wherein we reinforce what we've been given without any real anchor.
"But what I'm saying is that you can't be 100% sure that there will never be long term benefits in your life, not that you need to be 100% sure about outcomes before you act on anything."
Whether you realize it or not, what you said is logically equivalent to saying that you need to be 100% sure about outcomes before you can act on anything.
Of course you can't be 100% sure there will never be long term benefits in your life. What I'm saying is drinking can be rational even if you aren't 100% sure of that. For some people in some situations, it can be rational even if they're only 15% sure.
Suppose your life is shit now, so much so than, in the short run, pretty much nothing except for drinking gives you any utility. Suppose that if you don't drink, then with a probability of 60% your life will get better sometime in the future; but with a probability of 40% it will not. Suppose the utility of your life not improving but you drinking is some quantity A, that the utility of your life improving if you don't drink is B>A, and that the utility of you not drinking and your life not improving is A-C. Then, so long as it's true that A > B-(2/3)*C, the rational, expected utility maximizing choice is to drink.
So there. You're only 40% sure that you have no long-term prospects, and the rational choice given your situation is to say fuck it, I should just drink.
This is of course a ridiculously oversimplified, unrealistic example. But it is possible to make this situation as realistic as you'd like. It's been done. Google "theory of rational addiction."
Addictions can be a rational response to one's environment, and you don't have to be anywhere near 100% sure you have no future prospects for it to be possible.
What you've said is that choosing to have a drink can be a rational response to one's environment. Addiction is what happens mentally and physically once you make that decision repeatedly. What I'm interested in here is the propensity to view long term benefits in a distorted way because one identifies oneself as an alcoholic, a way that eclipses the rational view, even by just 5%.
I'm going to recap all this as I see it now: alcoholism can be self-enforcing in at least three ways. One (which is what you describe) is a feedback loop from your perceptions of reality to your actions and back. I think of it as sort of a Darwinian competition of various behavior systems over your mind and body as a host: the behavior that is most successful in distorting your beliefs in ways that make future behavior of the same sort more likely, wins. This is probably the most sinister type of alcoholism, kind of like a parasite treating your beliefs and actions as a host.
Another type is a feedback loop from your perceptions of reality to your actions to reality and back. Example: you've had a streak of bad luck. You start believing you're a hopeless fuckup. This makes you depressed. Depression makes you start drinking. Drinking slowly turns you into a hopeless fuckup. This makes you depressed. Depression makes you keep drinking.
(So the difference between the two is that the parasitic feedback loop does not involve reality at all.)
Third kind: Your life is crap and is likely to stay crap unless you quit drinking and do lots of other things that aren't very fun. And then even if you do those things, there's still a chance that, after all these short-term sacrifices, you won't succeed anyway. So you might as well stop trying and enjoy your drink.
All those situations are self-enforcing. They're equilibria. As such, there definitely isn't a way out of the situation without some sort of third-party intervention.
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