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#4683·Tyler MillsOP, about 13 hours agoAIs have created output that is not only novel, but seems to constitute new knowledge (resilient information), such as the famous Move 37 from AlphaGo. That is new knowledge because the move was not present in the training data explicitly, nor did the designers construct it.
This seems to me to be the same distinction that Deutsch and others have made between the genetic evolution we can simulate through evolutionary algorithms and the kind we actually observe in nature. I think it would be helpful to investigate evolutionary algorithms a bit further if you want to develop a clear distinction. This is how I describe it in my book:
There are several mechanisms that genes use to create variants, including sex, mutation, gene flow, and genetic drift, all of which appear to introduce change randomly. But we now know it cannot be entirely random. Something more is shaping what gets trialed, because when we model and simulate evolution using random changes, we never see the sort of novelties that arose in nature. We see optimization. We see exploitation. We see organisms become better at using resources they already use. But we never see a genuinely new use of a resource emerge. A fin may become better at swimming, but it does not become a limb. A metabolism may become more efficient, but it does not open up an entirely new biological pathway. And yet the natural world is full of exactly such extraordinary adaptations.
#4683·Tyler MillsOP, about 13 hours agoAIs have created output that is not only novel, but seems to constitute new knowledge (resilient information), such as the famous Move 37 from AlphaGo. That is new knowledge because the move was not present in the training data explicitly, nor did the designers construct it.
Move 37 was not explicitly present in the training data, nor designed by the programmers, and is extremely hard to vary (Deutsch's criterion for good explanations). Was the move present implicitly in the design of the system and/or the training data? Or inexplicitly? Does either of these mean the discovery of the move was non-creative?
#4683·Tyler MillsOP, about 13 hours agoAIs have created output that is not only novel, but seems to constitute new knowledge (resilient information), such as the famous Move 37 from AlphaGo. That is new knowledge because the move was not present in the training data explicitly, nor did the designers construct it.
Since evolution created genetic knowledge from nothing, it can be said to have the same "narrow creativity" as AI. The confusion over whether AI "is creative" can be resolved by saying that it is, but only narrowly (like evolution), and that the creativity defining people is universal, not limited to any domain. AI creates knowledge in domains it was designed for; AGI can create knowledge in all possible domains, each of which it designs itself.
Recent conversations have revealed that I cannot argue against the notion that current AI systems create new knowledge (and so are creative in some domain). Yet, David Deutsch has argued that creativity is a binary property of programs, and those that have it are people (including AGIs), who can create all possible explanatory knowledge. I am not of the mind that current AI is AGI. So I will try to iron all this out, here.
AIs have created output that is not only novel, but seems to constitute new knowledge (resilient information), such as the famous Move 37 from AlphaGo. That is new knowledge because the move was not present in the training data explicitly, nor did the designers construct it.
Evidence that addiction and procrastination are related: https://www.quora.com/How-do-I-stop-procrastinating-and-addiction-to-the-internet
The person in that link asks, “How do I stop procrastinating and addiction to the internet?”
#4680·Tyler Mills, 2 days agoComputational Universality only implies that all computable programs can be run by UCs. But what is relevant here is what programs can be reached by a given program -- synthesized by it. A UC with knowledge that only contains objectively whirlpool-scale conjectures (resulting from external stimulus or not) will not have niches relating to molecule-scale theories. Such theories solve no problems for it. So there will be no selection for those theories, so evolution will not develop them. Molecule-scale theories constitute intractable niches for the whirlpool system. They are still possible to run, if present, but that is not what's at issue. Observer Theory is correct if it is saying that the theories of reality developed by systems will depend on the abstraction level of their knowledge with respect to reality.
Of course it's true that a system confined to a given abstraction will only evolve theories of that scale. But a person can operate at all computable levels of abstraction. The growth of knowledge by people (e.g. Relativity) would only have happened if people can vary their abstractions arbitrarily, because Relativity solves no problems at any one given level of abstraction, but across many. Observer Theory might be right for certain systems, but is wrong for people.
#4679·Tyler Mills, 2 days agoThe aliasing that happens with the flipbook is a consequence of an imaging system. To suggest that theories/programs/explanations would be subject to aliasing in the same way suggests that they are derived from observation, which is Empiricism (false). They are created from mutation and criticism of existing knowledge, and this process can be performed by all universal computers. Any explanation/rendering/program runnable on one UC is runnable on all, so two observers can always converge to the same laws of physics.
Computational Universality only implies that all computable programs can be run by UCs. But what is relevant here is what programs can be reached by a given program -- synthesized by it. A UC with knowledge that only contains objectively whirlpool-scale conjectures (resulting from external stimulus or not) will not have niches relating to molecule-scale theories. Such theories solve no problems for it. So there will be no selection for those theories, so evolution will not develop them. Molecule-scale theories constitute intractable niches for the whirlpool system. They are still possible to run, if present, but that is not what's at issue. Observer Theory is correct if it is saying that the theories of reality developed by systems will depend on the abstraction level of their knowledge with respect to reality.
#4676·Tyler Mills, 2 days agoI'm realizing this is very related to Stephen Wolfram's "Observer Theory", which is interesting, but sounds worryingly relativist to me at times. Something like: Different observers will coarse-grain different laws of physics than the ones we have, for the same reason that the flipbook appears to have motion to us, but not to an observer viewing through a high-speed camera. Debating with LLMs about how that seems to violate computational universality has left me frustrated.
The aliasing that happens with the flipbook is a consequence of an imaging system. To suggest that theories/programs/explanations would be subject to aliasing in the same way suggests that they are derived from observation, which is Empiricism (false). They are created from mutation and criticism of existing knowledge, and this process can be performed by all universal computers. Any explanation/rendering/program runnable on one UC is runnable on all, so two observers can always converge to the same laws of physics.
Here’s a specific example of a working cure for addiction to sugar soda. Apparently, many people struggle with that.
Picture a man who likes the taste of soda but dislikes its fattening effects. (Sugar sodas are high in calories.) And let’s say the conflict between these two preferences is entrenched because his wife doesn’t want him to drink soda (for health reasons, say), and she chastises him, so he hides it from her and can’t talk about it openly, which makes error correction harder. In addition, he was made fun of as a kid for being overweight, so he feels awful whenever he thinks about dieting and can’t deal with the problem effectively. Such conditions are a breeding ground for entrenchment.
The solution in this case is to switch from regular sugar soda to the corresponding diet-soda equivalent. Like switching from Coke to Diet Coke or Coke Zero. It tastes virtually the same and has no calories. So now both parts of him get what they want. :)
This solution is especially interesting because it solves the addiction without having to make any major changes to behavior. A small change – switching from regular Coke to Diet Coke – removes the conflictedness and thus the addiction. More or less the same behavior can continue, showing that addiction is about conflicts between ideas, not about any specific behavior.
The key is to view even a small modification to an idea as an entirely discrete, separate option. The small change can be enough to result in a common preference.
Here’s a specific example of a working cure for addiction to sugar soda. Apparently, many people struggle with that.
Picture a man who likes the taste of soda but dislikes its fattening effects. (Sugar sodas are high in calories.) And let’s say the conflict between these two preferences is entrenched because his wife doesn’t want him to drink soda (for health reasons, say), and she chastises him, so he hides it from her and can’t talk about it openly, which makes error correction harder. In addition, he was made fun of as a kid for being overweight, so he feels awful whenever he thinks about dieting and can’t deal with the problem effectively. Such conditions are a breeding ground for entrenchment.
The solution in this case is to switch from regular sugar soda to the corresponding diet-soda equivalent. Like switching from Coke to Diet Coke or Coke Zero. It tastes virtually the same and has no calories. So now both parts of him get what they want. :)
This solution is especially interesting because it solves the addiction without having to make any major changes to behavior. A small, piecemeal change – switching from regular Coke to Diet Coke – removes the conflictedness and thus the addiction. More or less the same behavior can continue, showing that addiction is about conflicts between ideas, not about any specific or unilaterally unwanted behavior.
The key is to view even a small change to an idea as an entirely discrete, separate option. The small change can be enough to result in a common preference. The original preferences may get to live on the common preference as an approximation, as Popper might put it.
#4675·Tyler Mills, 2 days agoBetter example maybe: A whirlpool in water only exists to an observer that can create whirlpools in its VR. If the observer only has molecule-scale abstraction, it cannot coarse-grain, so there are no whirlpools for it, or explanations in terms of them. (Such a system also cannot be a person, because a person can create all possible explanations).
I'm realizing this is very related to Stephen Wolfram's "Observer Theory", which is interesting, but sounds worryingly relativist to me at times. Something like: Different observers will coarse-grain different laws of physics than the ones we have, for the same reason that the flipbook appears to have motion to us, but not to an observer viewing through a high-speed camera. Debating with LLMs about how that seems to violate computational universality has left me frustrated.
#4615·Tyler Mills, 9 days agoIs all emergence relative? I notice that when a flipbook or a zoetrope gives rise to the perceived motion of still images when they're rapidly changed, that is a result of aliasing on the part of the observer. Is this true in all cases of emergence, perceptual and otherwise..?
Better example maybe: A whirlpool in water only exists to an observer that can create whirlpools in its VR. If the observer only has molecule-scale abstraction, it cannot coarse-grain, so there are no whirlpools for it, or explanations in terms of them. (Such a system also cannot be a person, because a person can create all possible explanations).
#4623·Dennis Hackethal, 9 days agoCan you say more about what you mean by “relative”? I agree about the flipbook example, but the term “relative” is throwing me off a bit here.
I'm wondering if what is true for the flip book is true for many phenomena, or all. Is the emergence of an autonomous feature always a function of ("relative to") what is observing/explaining/attempting to reproduce the system?
What Makes a Professional Epistemologist?
https://libertythroughreason.com/what-makes-a-professional-epistemologist/
Here’s a specific example of a working cure for addiction to sugar soda. Apparently, many people struggle with that.
Picture a man who likes the taste of soda but dislikes its fattening effects. (Sugar sodas are high in calories.) And let’s say the conflict between these two preferences is entrenched because his wife doesn’t want him to drink soda (for health reasons, say), and she chastises him, so he hides it from her and can’t talk about it openly, which makes error correction harder. In addition, he was made fun of as a kid for being overweight, so he feels awful whenever he thinks about dieting and can’t deal with the problem effectively. Such conditions are a breeding ground for entrenchment.
The solution in this case is to switch from regular sugar soda to the corresponding diet-soda equivalent. Like switching from Coke to Diet Coke or Coke Zero. It tastes virtually the same and has no calories. So now both parts of him get what they want. :)
Here’s a specific example of a working cure for addiction to sugar soda. Apparently, many people struggle with that.
Picture a man who likes the taste of soda but dislikes its fattening effects. (Sugar sodas are high in calories.) And let’s say the conflict between these two preferences is entrenched because his wife doesn’t want him to drink soda (for health reasons, say), and she chastises him, so he hides it from her and can’t talk about it openly, which makes error correction harder. In addition, he was made fun of as a kid for being overweight, so he feels awful whenever he thinks about dieting and can’t deal with the problem effectively. Such conditions are a breeding ground for entrenchment.
The solution in this case is to switch from regular sugar soda to the corresponding diet-soda equivalent. Like switching from Coke to Diet Coke or Coke Zero. It tastes virtually the same and has no calories. So now both parts of him get what they want. :)
This solution is especially interesting because it solves the addiction without having to make any major changes to behavior. A small change – switching from regular Coke to Diet Coke – removes the conflictedness and thus the addiction. More or less the same behavior can continue, showing that addiction is about conflicts between ideas, not about any specific behavior.
The key is to view even a small modification to an idea as an entirely discrete, separate option. The small change can be enough to result in a common preference.
Another relevant quote from BoI, chapter 13 (bold emphasis mine):
[Conventionally, people think] of decision-making as a process of selecting from existing options according to a fixed formula …
This is like the self-described addicts in #4640 flip-flopping between blocking and unblocking certain websites: they try to select from existing options rather than create new ones. Continuing:
But in fact that is what happens only at the end of decision-making – the phase that does not require creative thought. In terms of Edison’s metaphor, the model refers only to the perspiration phase, without realizing that decision-making is problem-solving, and that without the inspiration phase nothing is ever solved and there is nothing to choose between. At the heart of decision-making is the creation of new options and the abandonment or modification of existing ones.
To choose an option, rationally, is to choose the associated explanation. Therefore, rational decision-making consists not of weighing evidence but of explaining it, in the course of explaining the world. One judges arguments as explanations, not justifications, and one does this creatively, using conjecture, tempered by every kind of criticism. It is in the nature of good explanations – being hard to vary – that there is only one of them. Having created it, one is no longer tempted by the alternatives. They have been not outweighed, but out-argued, refuted and abandoned. During the course of a creative process, one is not struggling to distinguish between countless different explanations of nearly equal merit; typically, one is struggling to create even one good explanation, and, having succeeded, one is glad to be rid of the rest.
I have some quibbles about explanations being hard to vary, but overall I think Deutsch is right in this quote. The addicts from #4640 are certainly tempted by their current options, they struggle to create even one good alternative, and after having created it, they’d be glad to be rid of their current options.
Another relevant quote from BoI, chapter 13:
[Conventionally, people think] of decision-making as a process of selecting from existing options according to a fixed formula …
This is like the self-described addicts in #4640 flip-flopping between blocking and unblocking certain websites: they try to select from existing options rather than create new ones. Continuing (bold emphasis mine):
But in fact that is what happens only at the end of decision-making – the phase that does not require creative thought. In terms of Edison’s metaphor, the model refers only to the perspiration phase, without realizing that decision-making is problem-solving, and that without the inspiration phase nothing is ever solved and there is nothing to choose between. At the heart of decision-making is the creation of new options and the abandonment or modification of existing ones.
To choose an option, rationally, is to choose the associated explanation. Therefore, rational decision-making consists not of weighing evidence but of explaining it, in the course of explaining the world. One judges arguments as explanations, not justifications, and one does this creatively, using conjecture, tempered by every kind of criticism. It is in the nature of good explanations – being hard to vary – that there is only one of them. Having created it, one is no longer tempted by the alternatives. They have been not outweighed, but out-argued, refuted and abandoned. During the course of a creative process, one is not struggling to distinguish between countless different explanations of nearly equal merit; typically, one is struggling to create even one good explanation, and, having succeeded, one is glad to be rid of the rest.
I have some quibbles about explanations being hard to vary, but overall I think Deutsch is right in this quote. The addicts from #4640 are certainly tempted by their current options, they struggle to create even one good alternative, and after having created it, they’d be glad to be rid of their current options.
My Conjecture
Conjecture: addiction is the result of the entrenchment of a conflict between two or more preferences in a mind.
Picture someone who wants to give up social media but also really enjoys social media. Those preferences conflict.
If the conflict is entrenched, then both preferences get to live on indefinitely. The entrenchment will not let that person give up social media. He will become addicted.
As I write in #4624, curing addiction involves finding a common preference between the conflicting parts of the addict’s mind: something both parts prefer to their initial positions. In addition, it may involve Randian ideas around introspection and getting one’s reason and emotions in the proper order.
I don’t know whether my explanation applies to physical addictions. For example, I understand severe alcoholics run the risk of death if they quit cold turkey, so for them, it can’t be only about preferences. There’s clearly a physical component as well. So I’m limiting my thoughts on addiction to what we might call ‘addictions of the mind.’ Note, though, that addictions could come in pairs: an alcoholic could have both a physical and a mental addiction to alcohol.
Also, I don’t claim that entrenchment always causes addiction, or that every addiction is the result of entrenchment. I claim that entrenchment is a cause – maybe a common cause – of addiction.
My Conjecture
Conjecture: addiction is the result of the entrenchment of a conflict between two or more preferences in a mind.
Picture someone who wants to give up social media but also really enjoys social media. Those preferences conflict.
If the conflict is entrenched, then both preferences get to live on indefinitely. The entrenchment will not let that person give up social media. He will become addicted.
As I write in #4624, curing addiction involves finding a common preference between the conflicting parts of the addict’s mind: something both parts prefer to their initial positions. In addition, it may involve Randian ideas around introspection and getting one’s reason and emotions in the proper order.
Limitations
I don’t know whether my explanation applies to physical addictions. For example, I understand severe alcoholics run the risk of death if they quit cold turkey, so for them, it can’t be only about preferences. There’s clearly a physical component as well. So I’m limiting my thoughts on addiction to what we might call ‘addictions of the mind.’ Note, though, that addictions could come in pairs: an alcoholic could have both a physical and a mental addiction to alcohol.
Also, I don’t claim that entrenchment always causes addiction, or that every addiction is the result of entrenchment. I claim that entrenchment is a cause – maybe a common cause – of addiction. I also claim that curing addictions of the mind is an epistemological matter, not a medical/scientific one.
#4650·Dennis HackethalOP, 6 days agoThis cure also works for procrastination. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/NeSnPFlp9dk
Another cure for procrastination is to address the pending criticism that causes the procrastination.
Say you need a new car. But you have a pending criticism that says it’s not in your budget. So you put off buying a new car. One day, you check your bank account and some of the cars on the market and find that you can actually afford one after all. In other words, you found a way to address the criticism. So then there’s no reason to procrastinate anymore.
Put in Popperian terms, the (conventional) addict asks himself, ‘who should rule (over my mind)? The part of me that wants to use social media, or the part that doesn’t?’ For all the reasons Popper and Deutsch have pointed out, the question is authoritarian in nature and attracts authoritarian answers. Such answers are a recipe for further entrenchment and unhappiness.
What the addict needs instead is a way to make it as easy as possible to remove bad ideas/preferences without coercion. To cure his addiction, he needs to abandon ‘who should rule over my mind?’ as a criterion for judging preferences.
Put in Popperian terms, the (conventional) addict asks himself, ‘who should rule (over my mind)? The part of me that wants to use social media, or the part that doesn’t?’ For all the reasons Popper and Deutsch have pointed out, the question ‘who should rule?’ is authoritarian in nature and attracts authoritarian answers. Such answers are a recipe for further entrenchment and unhappiness.
What the addict needs instead is a way to make it as easy as possible to remove bad ideas/preferences without coercion. To cure his addiction, he needs to abandon ‘who should rule over my mind?’ as a criterion for judging preferences.
#4625·Dennis HackethalOP, 9 days agoI’ve been developing a new research program toward a unified theory of creation: that of finding parallels between different creative processes such as the economy and the mind in hopes that such parallels may shed light on creation generally.
My own remarks in #4624 about the self-adversarial dynamic of addiction remind me of Ayn Rand’s thoughts on pressure groups in a mixed economy. I’m seeing parallels between a mixed economy and the addict’s mind:
A mixed economy is a mixture of freedom and controls—with no principles, rules, or theories to define either. Since the introduction of controls necessitates and leads to further controls, it is an unstable, explosive mixture which, ultimately, has to repeal the controls or collapse into dictatorship.
Similarly, I oppose the introduction of controls in the addict’s life, such as the various tricks people describe to stay off websites. Note also the parallel to the addict’s life being unstable, and having to either cure the addiction or collapse into self-destruction. Continuing in Rand’s text:
A mixed economy has no principles to define its policies, its goals, its laws—no principles to limit the power of its government. The only principle of a mixed economy—which, necessarily, has to remain unnamed and unacknowledged—is that no one's interests are safe, everyone's interests are on a public auction block, and anything goes for anyone who can get away with it.
Such is the dynamic between the warring preferences in an addict’s mind.
Such a system—or, more precisely, anti-system—breaks up a country into an ever-growing number of enemy camps, into economic groups fighting one another for self preservation in an indeterminate mixture of defense and offense, as the nature of such a jungle demands.
An addict’s mind is just such a jungle.
While, politically, a mixed economy preserves the semblance of an organized society with a semblance of law and order, economically it is the equivalent of the chaos that had ruled China for centuries: a chaos of robber gangs looting—and draining—the productive elements of the country.
Similarly, addicts can appear to have a functioning life while quietly destroying themselves.
A mixed economy is rule by pressure groups. It is an amoral, institutionalized civil war of special interests and lobbies, all fighting to seize a momentary control of the legislative machinery, to extort some special privilege at one another's expense by an act of government—i.e., by force.
This is exactly how I see the dynamic inside an addict’s mind. The conflicting preferences coerce each other repeatedly and fight for momentary control of the self.
In the absence of individual rights, in the absence of any moral or legal principles, a mixed economy's only hope to preserve its precarious semblance of order, to restrain the savage, desperately rapacious groups it itself has created, and to prevent the legalized plunder from running over into plain, unlegalized looting of all by all—is compromise; compromise on everything and in every realm—material, spiritual, intellectual—so that no group would step over the line by demanding too much and topple the whole rotted structure.
Likewise, it is compromise, not common-preference finding, that dominates the addict’s life: he spends some of his time indulging in his addiction, and some of his time abstaining, being conflicted during both.
If the game is to continue, nothing can be permitted to remain firm, solid, absolute, untouchable; everything (and everyone) has to be fluid, flexible, indeterminate, approximate. By what standard are anyone's actions to be guided? By the expediency of any immediate moment.
Likewise, the addicts’ actions are less guided by principle and more by the expediency of the immediate moment. As his addiction worsens, the harder it is for him to live his life long-range. If the conflicting preferences are part good and part bad, then the bad will drive out the good (see Rand’s essay ‘The Anatomy of Compromise’). This dynamic, along with the entrenchment of error, explains why addiction worsens automatically when left unaddressed.
The only danger, to a mixed economy, is any not-to-be-compromised value, virtue, or idea. The only threat is any uncompromising person, group, or movement. The only enemy is integrity.
Integrity describes a mind that is unconflicted.
As long as the conflict between an addict’s preferences remains, they act as pressure groups inside his mind. Just as the government of a mixed economy, the role of the addict’s self is reduced to that of arbiter between these pressure groups inside his mind. These pressure groups can at best temporarily get what they want, at the cost of the other, which will then clamor even louder to get what it wants, and so on, until the entrenchment is so severe, and error correction so hopeless, that this self-adversarial dynamic ends, as is the case for severe drug addictions, in prison or even death.
As Rand explain in ‘The Anatomy of Compromise’, this spiral can only be stopped by a reversal of basic principles: not compromising between conflicting preferences, or trying to live with that compromise, but instead viewing those preferences as individual actors with rights, who will (and should) only cooperate when they can get what they truly want.
Put in Popperian terms, the (conventional) addict asks himself, ‘who should rule (over my mind)? The part of me that wants to use social media, or the part that doesn’t?’ For all the reasons Popper and Deutsch have pointed out, the question is authoritarian in nature and attracts authoritarian answers. Such answers are a recipe for further entrenchment and unhappiness.
What the addict needs instead is a way to make it as easy as possible to remove bad ideas/preferences without coercion. To cure his addiction, he needs to abandon ‘who should rule over my mind?’ as a criterion for judging preferences.
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.
As I write in #4624, curing addiction involves finding a common preference between the conflicting parts of the addict’s mind: something both parts prefer to their initial positions. In addition, it may involve Randian ideas around introspection and getting one’s reason and emotions in the proper order.
My Conjecture
Conjecture: addiction is the result of the entrenchment of a conflict between two or more preferences in a mind.
Picture someone who wants to give up social media but also really enjoys social media. Those preferences conflict.
If the conflict is entrenched, then both preferences get to live on indefinitely. The entrenchment will not let that person give up social media. He will become addicted.
As I write in #4624, curing addiction involves finding a common preference between the conflicting parts of the addict’s mind: something both parts prefer to their initial positions. In addition, it may involve Randian ideas around introspection and getting one’s reason and emotions in the proper order.
I don’t know whether my explanation applies to physical addictions. For example, I understand severe alcoholics run the risk of death if they quit cold turkey, so for them, it can’t be only about preferences. There’s clearly a physical component as well. So I’m limiting my thoughts on addiction to what we might call ‘addictions of the mind.’ Note, though, that addictions could come in pairs: an alcoholic could have both a physical and a mental addiction to alcohol.
Also, I don’t claim that entrenchment always causes addiction, or that every addiction is the result of entrenchment. I claim that entrenchment is a cause – maybe a common cause – of addiction.
#4626·Dennis HackethalOP revised 9 days agoMy 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.
As I write in #4624, curing addiction involves finding a common preference between the conflicting parts of the addict’s mind: something both parts prefer to their initial positions. In addition, it may involve Randian ideas around introspection and getting one’s reason and emotions in the proper order.
These claims may be too sweeping. I need to be more humble. I don’t know much about addiction to physical substances, so it may be best to limit my claims to addictions of the mind (like addictions to social media, video games, etc) rather than substances like alcohol or cigarettes.
It’s only an addiction if the presumed addict agrees that it’s an addiction (if he’s being honest).
Children are often unfairly accused of being addicted to video games or electronic devices, but they’re not conflicted about it at all. It’s the opposite: they’re learning, they’re having fun, they’re unconflicted playing video games. Parents’ worries or disagreement don’t make that behavior an addiction.
However, if the parents threaten punishment, and the child has to hide his preferences from them; or if the school schedule gets in the way and threatens to override the child’s preferences, then there’s a real risk of not just conflicting preferences, but of entrenchment, and he may indeed become addicted. So it can be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
#4640·Dennis HackethalOP revised 8 days agoCuring addiction
If I’m right that the cause of addiction is an entrenched conflict between preferences (#3040), then there’s a simple cure for addiction:1 common-preference finding with yourself.
Common-preference finding is a concept I am borrowing from a parenting philosophy called Taking Children Seriously (TCS), cofounded by David Deutsch:
A common preference is a solution to a problem, or resolution of a disagreement, that all parties prefer to their prima facie positions, and to all other candidate solutions they can think of. It is the solution that pleases everyone involved in the disagreement.
I think common-preference finding is not only the solution to conflicts between people, but also to conflicts between preferences inside a single person. When such conflicts inside a single mind are entrenched, we are dealing with addiction. Since addiction is a special kind of conflict, the solution to addiction is the same as the solution to conflicts generally: common-preference finding.
Take an alcoholic. The two entrenched preferences, in the simplest possible terms, are: to drink, and to stop drinking. In this context, I think it helps to view this single alcoholic as two people. In other words, we can view each preference as a person, or an autonomous actor of sorts. Not because the alcoholic necessarily has a split personality in the clinical sense – although we’ll soon see that the addict acts as his own adversary – but because it helps illustrate the logic behind common-preference finding: it’s fundamentally no different within a single person than across people.
So again, let’s view an alcoholic as two people, just as a thought experiment. They’re forced to be roommates and combine their finances. One of them wants to drink and spend their money on alcohol, whereas the other does not want that. Moving out – choosing not to associate – is not an option because there’s no freedom of association inside a single mind. Although we may choose not to be roommates with an alcoholic, the alcoholic has no choice but to be roommates with himself.
How are these two ‘people’ to live together in harmony? As long as they’re in conflict, they will try to undermine each other. One will put the liquor in the top cabinet to make it harder to reach – the other will get it anyway. One will ask a friend to hold on to his credit card, the other will convince that same friend to give it back.
We can see the same self-adversarial dynamic in addictions to various things. For example, somebody asked (emphasis mine):
What can I do against my addiction to certain websites? I'm addicted to some sites, and I already tried to block them, but I always go back to unblock. I always waste a lot of time on them, and I'm annoyed by myself tha[t] I can[’t] stay away from them.
Do you see the dynamic? He’s like two people: person A blocks the website, until the urge to visit it gets too strong and person B unblocks it. Then person A gets annoyed at person B – who was presumably annoyed at person A for blocking the site in the first place. And the only way to get (temporary) relief from this conflict is to indulge and visit the site again – or so it seems.
This person’s frustration makes it easier to see that, again, knowledge inside a single mind does not act fundamentally differently from knowledge across minds. When you’re in conflict with somebody else, you may feel hopeless at times, like there’s no way to reach that person. If only they’d listen to reason! But that situation is not fundamentally different when that other person is yourself. People sometimes think you should be able to just ‘will away’ those conflicting preferences inside you, but that isn’t always easier to do with yourself than it is with someone else.
Somebody responded to the tortured soul above. Again we see the same self-adversarial dynamic at play:
I have the same problem.
The only solution I have is to remove your accounts completely, or make it so that you can never login again.
A good way for this is to implement a 2-way verification on your account with an Authentication app, then you logout, remove your TOKENS in the Authentication app, and then clear the web browser. You can also reset the backup codes for the 2 way authentication before log out the final time and don't save them.
Now you are out for good.
Except you’re not. Remember, the addict is his own creative adversary. He’ll find ways to get what he wants, at his own expense. So the same respondent immediately contradicts himself (emphasis mine):
I did this, but I managed to get back in by talking to the owner of the site. Why did I do this? 😔
The key is to never give yourself the permission to never under any circumstances look at the site again. … If you look at the site again, I will guarantee you that you will find a way to get back in.
In other words, this person suggests that the ‘solution’ to this conflict between preferences is to entrench it even further by having one run roughshod over the other. That’s not a solution. On the contrary, I suspect it would just frustrate that other part of him, which would then want to visit the site even more, and find even more creative ways to visit it. If somebody else disregarded your preferences, wouldn’t you feel justified in disregarding theirs? Yes. Why should that be any different when that somebody else is yourself? It isn’t.
This respondent continues:
Find something else to do. Because you can not [sic] remove a habbit [sic], you [c]an only replace it by something else. This is the secret [to] habbit building. Maybe every time you feel the urge to look at the website, take a book from your bookshelf and start reading that instead.
Now, whether reading is an actual solution to this conflict depends on the person. Given this respondent’s previous statements, I suspect he’s merely suggesting another form of self-coercion: read whether you like it or not. Again, that will not work; it may well worsen the addiction. But if reading is something both parts of him prefer to their respective initial position, then the addiction should disappear quickly because there’s no reason for either part to continue holding its initial position.
The logic would be the same for the alcoholic from our thought experiment: if part A of his mind wants to spend money on alcohol, while part B wants to spend that money on movie tickets instead, but then they find they both prefer to spend the money on a new book, then they will be in harmony again.
In short, the cure to addiction is common-preference finding with yourself. Unfortunately, there’s no predetermined recipe that you could follow. What you can do, though, is best described by the quote from The Beginning of Infinity from #760:
[W]hat is necessary for progress is to exclude ideas that fail to survive criticism, and to prevent their entrenchment, and to promote the creation of new ideas.
By definition, once you’re addicted, it’s too late to prevent entrenchment. But that still leaves two possible actions: discarding ideas that fail to survive criticism and promoting the creation of new ideas. In essence, using Veritula.
The cure for addiction is to create new ideas until you find at least one that you are completely unconflicted about.
Simple, not necessarily easy! Also, I don’t think addiction (of the mind) is a disease, so I use the term ‘cure’ loosely/figuratively.
Another relevant quote from BoI, chapter 13 (bold emphasis mine):
[Conventionally, people think] of decision-making as a process of selecting from existing options according to a fixed formula …
This is like the self-described addicts in #4640 flip-flopping between blocking and unblocking certain websites: they try to select from existing options rather than create new ones. Continuing:
But in fact that is what happens only at the end of decision-making – the phase that does not require creative thought. In terms of Edison’s metaphor, the model refers only to the perspiration phase, without realizing that decision-making is problem-solving, and that without the inspiration phase nothing is ever solved and there is nothing to choose between. At the heart of decision-making is the creation of new options and the abandonment or modification of existing ones.
To choose an option, rationally, is to choose the associated explanation. Therefore, rational decision-making consists not of weighing evidence but of explaining it, in the course of explaining the world. One judges arguments as explanations, not justifications, and one does this creatively, using conjecture, tempered by every kind of criticism. It is in the nature of good explanations – being hard to vary – that there is only one of them. Having created it, one is no longer tempted by the alternatives. They have been not outweighed, but out-argued, refuted and abandoned. During the course of a creative process, one is not struggling to distinguish between countless different explanations of nearly equal merit; typically, one is struggling to create even one good explanation, and, having succeeded, one is glad to be rid of the rest.
I have some quibbles about explanations being hard to vary, but overall I think Deutsch is right in this quote. The addicts from #4640 are certainly tempted by their current options, they struggle to create even one good alternative, and after having created it, they’d be glad to be rid of their current options.
#4625·Dennis HackethalOP, 9 days agoI’ve been developing a new research program toward a unified theory of creation: that of finding parallels between different creative processes such as the economy and the mind in hopes that such parallels may shed light on creation generally.
My own remarks in #4624 about the self-adversarial dynamic of addiction remind me of Ayn Rand’s thoughts on pressure groups in a mixed economy. I’m seeing parallels between a mixed economy and the addict’s mind:
A mixed economy is a mixture of freedom and controls—with no principles, rules, or theories to define either. Since the introduction of controls necessitates and leads to further controls, it is an unstable, explosive mixture which, ultimately, has to repeal the controls or collapse into dictatorship.
Similarly, I oppose the introduction of controls in the addict’s life, such as the various tricks people describe to stay off websites. Note also the parallel to the addict’s life being unstable, and having to either cure the addiction or collapse into self-destruction. Continuing in Rand’s text:
A mixed economy has no principles to define its policies, its goals, its laws—no principles to limit the power of its government. The only principle of a mixed economy—which, necessarily, has to remain unnamed and unacknowledged—is that no one's interests are safe, everyone's interests are on a public auction block, and anything goes for anyone who can get away with it.
Such is the dynamic between the warring preferences in an addict’s mind.
Such a system—or, more precisely, anti-system—breaks up a country into an ever-growing number of enemy camps, into economic groups fighting one another for self preservation in an indeterminate mixture of defense and offense, as the nature of such a jungle demands.
An addict’s mind is just such a jungle.
While, politically, a mixed economy preserves the semblance of an organized society with a semblance of law and order, economically it is the equivalent of the chaos that had ruled China for centuries: a chaos of robber gangs looting—and draining—the productive elements of the country.
Similarly, addicts can appear to have a functioning life while quietly destroying themselves.
A mixed economy is rule by pressure groups. It is an amoral, institutionalized civil war of special interests and lobbies, all fighting to seize a momentary control of the legislative machinery, to extort some special privilege at one another's expense by an act of government—i.e., by force.
This is exactly how I see the dynamic inside an addict’s mind. The conflicting preferences coerce each other repeatedly and fight for momentary control of the self.
In the absence of individual rights, in the absence of any moral or legal principles, a mixed economy's only hope to preserve its precarious semblance of order, to restrain the savage, desperately rapacious groups it itself has created, and to prevent the legalized plunder from running over into plain, unlegalized looting of all by all—is compromise; compromise on everything and in every realm—material, spiritual, intellectual—so that no group would step over the line by demanding too much and topple the whole rotted structure.
Likewise, it is compromise, not common-preference finding, that dominates the addict’s life: he spends some of his time indulging in his addiction, and some of his time abstaining, being conflicted during both.
If the game is to continue, nothing can be permitted to remain firm, solid, absolute, untouchable; everything (and everyone) has to be fluid, flexible, indeterminate, approximate. By what standard are anyone's actions to be guided? By the expediency of any immediate moment.
Likewise, the addicts’ actions are less guided by principle and more by the expediency of the immediate moment. As his addiction worsens, the harder it is for him to live his life long-range. If the conflicting preferences are part good and part bad, then the bad will drive out the good (see Rand’s essay ‘The Anatomy of Compromise’). This dynamic, along with the entrenchment of error, explains why addiction worsens automatically when left unaddressed.
The only danger, to a mixed economy, is any not-to-be-compromised value, virtue, or idea. The only threat is any uncompromising person, group, or movement. The only enemy is integrity.
Integrity describes a mind that is unconflicted.
As long as the conflict between an addict’s preferences remains, they act as pressure groups inside his mind. Just as the government of a mixed economy, the role of the addict’s self is reduced to that of arbiter between these pressure groups inside his mind. These pressure groups can at best temporarily get what they want, at the cost of the other, which will then clamor even louder to get what it wants, and so on, until the entrenchment is so severe, and error correction so hopeless, that this self-adversarial dynamic ends, as is the case for severe drug addictions, in prison or even death.
As Rand explain in ‘The Anatomy of Compromise’, this spiral can only be stopped by a reversal of basic principles: not compromising between conflicting preferences, or trying to live with that compromise, but instead viewing those preferences as individual actors with rights, who will (and should) only cooperate when they can get what they truly want.
Rand explains that each government control necessitates another, intensifying the war between pressure groups.
I think the same is true for addicts. They try to implement some control/restriction but it just makes things worse because the other part of them retaliates. So then they try to implement even stricter controls. All the while, the war between the pressure groups of the addict’s mind intensifies.
Rather than default to adding more controls, the addict should ask whether his life was already subject to too many controls at the beginning of his addiction, and whether that caused the addiction in the first place. He should consider removing controls to lessen the entrenchment.
Many problems related to addiction and procrastination stem from people’s overoptimism about their willpower, their simultaneous pessimism about the solubility of problems, and their ignorance as to the unintended consequences of self-coercion.