Lol, Britney tries to Spear special K's car

[Massive Quasars]

Britney Spears attacked a car with an umbrella.

you have my vote fuhrer

he'll be ready in time

[cumpooter]

a genetic predisposition?

i surmise it's classified as such

[R00k]

I think it's much more productive to just call it a genetic predisposition to addiction. Calling it a disease implies a sort of inability to help oneself, which is the opposite of what alcoholics (& other addicts) need.

The word disease has a stigma that sometimes hurts more than it helps I think.

[[xeno]Julios]

those are both good points Rook - I hadn't considered them before.

I will say a couple more thing though - many alcoholics are using alcohol to medicate an underlying condition like depression and/or anxiety, and thus become doubly reliant on the drug (to feed the addiction and to treat the symptoms of depression/anxiety).

Another thing is that alcohol addiction can be fucking serious shit - it is one of the few cases where the withdrawal symptoms alone can kill you (unlike heroin, for example).

[plained]

idiot

[Nightshade]

those are both good points Rook - I hadn't considered them before.

I will say a couple more thing though - many alcoholics are using alcohol to medicate an underlying condition like depression and/or anxiety, and thus become doubly reliant on the drug (to feed the addiction and to treat the symptoms of depression/anxiety).

Another thing is that alcohol addiction can be fucking serious shit - it is one of the few cases where the withdrawal symptoms alone can kill you (unlike heroin, for example).

I don't think that you can become physically addicted to alcohol. Sure, hardcore drinkers experience potentially fatal withdrawl symptoms, but that's after many, many years of extreme abuse. How many other substances will do the same thing? I think that alcohol abuse is a symptom of the underlying behavioral problem. And yes, some people just can't drink.

[mik0rs]

"Quick, get this man a bottle of Jim Beam and a kebab, STAT!"

Sorry.

:coaster:

[[xeno]Julios]

I don't think that you can become physically addicted to alcohol

what is this opinion based on?

How are you defining physical addiction?

[R00k]

I think it's odd that we hardly ever hear of heroin addiction classified as a "disease" the way alcohol addiction is.

I could probably support calling it a 'cultural' disease more than a physiological/biological disease of an individual.

If other highly addictive drugs were legal, would their addicts have diseases too?

Don't know - it just seems to me like the word disease has been co-opted for use by AA and other groups to reinforce the idea that addicts need outside help, without making them feel personally responsible for their plight.

"It's not your fault. You picked up a drink just like millions of people do, but you happen to have a disease that prevents you from putting it down."

It just seems to me that you can easily replace the word disease with "predisposition to addiction," without losing any meaning.

So is a genetic predisposition to alcohol addiction a disease? If so, you could call a large percentage of native americans 'diseased,' due to their genetic heritage.

Which would hardly seem fair to them.

There seems to be something wrong with introducing a foreign chemical into someone's body, and then depending on their body's reaction to that chemical, calling them diseased.

Are allergies a disease? Is lactose intolerance a disease?

[Eraser]

I don't think that you can become physically addicted to alcohol. Sure, hardcore drinkers experience potentially fatal withdrawl symptoms, but that's after many, many years of extreme abuse. How many other substances will do the same thing? I think that alcohol abuse is a symptom of the underlying behavioral problem. And yes, some people just can't drink.

I think you're part right part wrong.
To me it seems odd that someone would become instantly addicted to alcohol (no matter what genetic makeup someone has, but I'll come back to that later). If someone drinks alcohol over and over again, there does come a physical craving for it, which I think classifies as physical addiction. There are withdrawal symptoms and that points toward physical addiction as well. In this, it's no different from heroin. The only difference might be in the intensity and amount of intake "required" for growing an (physical) addiction.

I do think you're right about underlying behavioral problems, but I do think that's true for any addictive substance. Peer pressure is probably the most common reason for youths to start smoking. That is a behavioral (or mentality) problem as well.


As for genetics (and that refers more to R00k's discussion with jules), I would be surprised if there's a gene that's causes addiction specifically for alcohol. I do think there could be a gene (or genes) responsible for becoming easily addicted to something in general. I do feel though that the most powerful element in addiction (or fighting it) is will power. No matter what genetic makeup a person has, saying no is saying no, and if you can't do that, then even the perfect genetic makeup doesn't help against fighting an addiction.

[[xeno]Julios]

After reading rook's last two posts, I'm more inclinced to agree with rook and nightshade on the disease issue, if only because of the social connotations of the word.

Alcohol certainly is an addictive drug, just like other addictive drugs - it stimulates the release of dopamine, a neurotransmitter involved in the reward pathways of the brain.

It has severe withdrawal symptoms.

How is this not physically addictive?


Also, will power doesn't seem to be a very useful construct - it's part of our language, but it doesn't seem to map onto any process which our minds actually employ.

You won't see addiction therapists recommending that addicts simply build up their will power or just try harder. In many cases, such advice can actually be counter productive.

I didn't overcome my nicotine addiction by will power - i came over it by careful reflection, and careful planning. Will power didn't really factor into it.

[A1yssa]

+ money = + crazy

[SplishSplash]

Breaking News: People with addictions have problems and need help.

What's the point in dicsussing whether it's a disease or whatever.

[hax103]

You won't see addiction therapists recommending that addicts simply build up their will power or just try harder. In many cases, such advice can actually be counter productive.

I didn't overcome my nicotine addiction by will power - i came over it by careful reflection, and careful planning. Will power didn't really factor into it.

Well not exactly. A friend of mine is going to an alcohol addiction therapist who is recommending lifestyle changes to improve "self-confidence." Perhaps there is no such thing as will power but in my opinion, "self-confidence" is highly correlated with "will power" (note that I'm not saying they are equivalent). You may not be able to directly train will power, but perhaps one can train other related aspects which will gradually improve will power.

[Survivor]

Also, will power doesn't seem to be a very useful construct - it's part of our language, but it doesn't seem to map onto any process which our minds actually employ.

You won't see addiction therapists recommending that addicts simply build up their will power or just try harder. In many cases, such advice can actually be counter productive.

I didn't overcome my nicotine addiction by will power - i came over it by careful reflection, and careful planning. Will power didn't really factor into it.

I don't have any deep knowledge of the matter you are discussing, but my dad had a whole lot of willpower. One day he said, I'll stop smoking, no external reason, and he quit that moment and never fired one up ever again.

He also lived for 3 months while having Fournier's gangrene. The day he was to be admitted to the hospital he had been walking around with it for at least a few days. He was deadly ill. If my mother would have waited one more day with calling the ambulance he would have died.
Yet he insisted upon walking down the stairs, and entering the ambulance on his own feet instead of on a brancard. Later it came out he also had a bloodsugar level of 64.
He wasn't truly fit like someone who sports regularly, he just was so headstrong he willed his body into submission. Sadly he died due to a respiratory disease because of the automated breathing he had just been taken off when he was starting to recover from the gangrene.

Willpower may be something unprovable but don't say it is of absolutely no use. I just think most people don't have enough willpower to crack the really tough addictions like smoking or drinking, or to keep up eating healthy and sporting.

[Massive Quasars]

Also, will power doesn't seem to be a very useful construct - it's part of our language, but it doesn't seem to map onto any process which our minds actually employ.

It's a useful construct insofar as it maximizes what impulse control capacity a person can bring to bear.

The personal responsiblity construct works in much the same way, except in (though perhaps not limited to) cases of pre-existing executive function impairment (e.g. AD/HD and/or working memory impairment, etc.).

[S@M]

Also, will power doesn't seem to be a very useful construct - it's part of our language, but it doesn't seem to map onto any process which our minds actually employ.

You won't see addiction therapists recommending that addicts simply build up their will power or just try harder. In many cases, such advice can actually be counter productive.

I didn't overcome my nicotine addiction by will power - i came over it by careful reflection, and careful planning. Will power didn't really factor into it.

how can you do those things like reflect etc without bringing your will power to bear?
I though counseling was about helping people bring their will power to teh fore such as through cognitive dissonance and promoting an internal locus of control.
To me what you are saying is about the terminology rather than the process, so can you expand on how reflection and plannign were dissasociated from your will to quit?

[[xeno]Julios]

It's a useful construct insofar as it maximizes what impulse control capacity a person can bring to bear.

Yes: however to think of the source of that impulse control as some sort of engine with more or less power is misguided.

It's more useful to consider the brain a dynamical system which produces emergent outcomes in the form of well ordered behaviours.

Many times, these outcomes seem to be competing with each other, osscilating back and forth until one gains dominance.

In order to adapt your behaviour in a manner which you want it to, it is useful to think of tuning your brain, so that it naturally produces the desired outcome.

One simple way of doing this, in the case of addiction, is to cultivate a desire to quit.

But doing so successfully requires a deep internalization of reasons why it is beneficial for you to quit. You have to be able to meditate (which requires the use of attentional resources) on actions and their consequences, and have an emotional connection with those positive consequences.

If someone really understood that smoking would kill them, and if they truly valued their health, that would be worth more than any amount of willpower.

There's a good essay written by David Perkins called "The Engine of Folly", and one section deals with the idea of willpower. I'm typing this out from my hardcopy:

Weakness of will is one of a folk-psychological cluster of concepts that foreground psychological forces of one sort or another - will, force of habit, and motives that push and pull us, that we resist or to which we submit (Lipson & Perkins 1990). Moreover, this is a folk-psychological concept with an ancient pedigree. Plato held that to truly understand the good is to enact it. However, Aristotle posited a gap between understanding and action: one can understand the good and not muster one's energies to follow through because of acrasia - roughly, weakness of will. Likewise, when people fail to control impulses or when they procrastinate or indulge, we often diagnose a weak will.

Even in its own terms, weak will offers an incomplete account of folly. We suspect weakness of will when someone cannot resist doing something bad or cannot persist in doing something good, but not usually when the person persists in doing something that would be good were it not overdone. For instance, when a person overprepares for an interview, an author fiddles endlessly with a manuscript, or a parent hovers anxiously over a child, we do not normally attribute these follies to weakness of will. When a person persists in advancing his or her agenda at the expense of others, we sometimes view this as a form of folly and speak of the person as strong-willed or willful.

Besides offering an incomplete account of folly, will is a problematic construct in any case. The will involved in a potential action might be interpreted as the strength of the intention to carry it out. According to a review by Gollwitzer (1999), strength of intention correlates with actual behavior but accounts for only 20 to 30 percent of the variance in following through. Moreover, conscious intentions arguably do not cause behaviour directly at all. Various studies suggest that conscious intentions to act immediately do not initiate the action but rather reflect a process already set in motion at a nonconscious level. Conscious intentions about future actions can create a response set, making the occurrence of the action more likely, but again they do not directly cause actions.

However puzzling the will may be, it invokes the general idea of self-regulation. Self-regulation is a more viable concept, not subject to concerns about intentions causing actions, and leaving ample room for unconscious and automatized self-regulative mechanisms as well as conscious and deliberate ones. Management of emergent activity switching is a case in point.

Heuristically, weakness of will appears to be a concept that does more harm than good. As a self-attribution, it is likely to create expectancies against successful self-regulation that function like self-fulfilling prophecies. In this spirit, Lipson and Perkins (1990) argue that it's less effective to think in terms of strength of will than of "strategic use of the will" - instead of trying to overpower a troublesome tendency, try to configure the environment and your expectations and practices in order to undermine the tendency.

cited references:

Gollwitzer, P.M. (1999). Implementation intentions. Strong effects of simple plans. American Psychologist, 54, 493-503.

Lipson, A., & D.N. Perkins (1990). Block: Getting out of your own way. New York: Lyle Stuart.

[Massive Quasars]

It's a useful construct insofar as it maximizes what impulse control capacity a person can bring to bear.

Yes: however to think of the source of that impulse control as some sort of engine with more or less power is misguided.

It's more useful to consider the brain a dynamical system which produces emergent outcomes in the form of well ordered behaviours.

Many times, these outcomes seem to be competing with each other, osscilating back and forth until one gains dominance.

In order to adapt your behaviour in a manner which you want it to, it is useful to think of tuning your brain, so that it naturally produces the desired outcome.

One simple way of doing this, in the case of addiction, is to cultivate a desire to quit.

But doing so successfully requires a deep internalization of reasons why it is beneficial for you to quit. You have to be able to meditate (which requires the use of attentional resources) on actions and their consequences, and have an emotional connection with those positive consequences.

If someone really understood that smoking would kill them, and if they truly valued their health, that would be worth more than any amount of willpower.

There's a good essay written by David Perkins called "The Engine of Folly", and one section deals with the idea of willpower. I'm typing this out from my hardcopy:

Weakness of will is one of a folk-psychological cluster of concepts that foreground psychological forces of one sort or another - will, force of habit, and motives that push and pull us, that we resist or to which we submit (Lipson & Perkins 1990). Moreover, this is a folk-psychological concept with an ancient pedigree. Plato held that to truly understand the good is to enact it. However, Aristotle posited a gap between understanding and action: one can understand the good and not muster one's energies to follow through because of acrasia - roughly, weakness of will. Likewise, when people fail to control impulses or when they procrastinate or indulge, we often diagnose a weak will.

Even in its own terms, weak will offers an incomplete account of folly. We suspect weakness of will when someone cannot resist doing something bad or cannot persist in doing something good, but not usually when the person persists in doing something that would be good were it not overdone. For instance, when a person overprepares for an interview, an author fiddles endlessly with a manuscript, or a parent hovers anxiously over a child, we do not normally attribute these follies to weakness of will. When a person persists in advancing his or her agenda at the expense of others, we sometimes view this as a form of folly and speak of the person as strong-willed or willful.

Besides offering an incomplete account of folly, will is a problematic construct in any case. The will involved in a potential action might be interpreted as the strength of the intention to carry it out. According to a review by Gollwitzer (1999), strength of intention correlates with actual behavior but accounts for only 20 to 30 percent of the variance in following through. Moreover, conscious intentions arguably do not cause behaviour directly at all. Various studies suggest that conscious intentions to act immediately do not initiate the action but rather reflect a process already set in motion at a nonconscious level. Conscious intentions about future actions can create a response set, making the occurrence of the action more likely, but again they do not directly cause actions.

However puzzling the will may be, it invokes the general idea of self-regulation. Self-regulation is a more viable concept, not subject to concerns about intentions causing actions, and leaving ample room for unconscious and automatized self-regulative mechanisms as well as conscious and deliberate ones. Management of emergent activity switching is a case in point.

Heuristically, weakness of will appears to be a concept that does more harm than good. As a self-attribution, it is likely to create expectancies against successful self-regulation that function like self-fulfilling prophecies. In this spirit, Lipson and Perkins (1990) argue that it's less effective to think in terms of strength of will than of "strategic use of the will" - instead of trying to overpower a troublesome tendency, try to configure the environment and your expectations and practices in order to undermine the tendency.

cited references:

Gollwitzer, P.M. (1999). Implementation intentions. Strong effects of simple plans. American Psychologist, 54, 493-503.

Lipson, A., & D.N. Perkins (1990). Block: Getting out of your own way. New York: Lyle Stuart.

In part, you seem to be arguing against a position you believe I take with respect to impulse control separate from the utility of will question.

I'm not well read in this area, but my impression is that on-the-fly behavioral self-control exists as (but may not be limited to) a capacity for free won't, an ability to interrupt unconscious activity that might culminate in action. The relationship between short-term will and action may not be causally direct, but their seems to exist some more immediate executive control in the form of behavioral filtering. How this might affect our judgment of the will construct's utility (past to present) remains an open question IMO, and perhaps I was too quick to the draw in my devil's advocacy.

[[xeno]Julios]

at the moment, the position i'm taking doesn't deny the existence of a will, or even a free will.

Rather, I'm arguing that successful overcoming of entrenched behavioural patterns requires a strategic use of that will, rather than a strong will.

Hence, my reaction to the idea of willpower.

I'm basically reiterating perkins, and he makes that same point in the excerpt I quoted.

p.s. u might wanna re-read your last post - there's some strange syntax going on in the beginning of the second paragraph

[[xeno]Julios]

btw the point you bring up is a very interesting one - the project of reconceptualizing the idea of a "will" within a framework that is consistent with cognitive neuroscience is tantalizing, though ultimately i believe it leads to a conclusion that not all are ready to accept.

[Massive Quasars]

at the moment, the position i'm taking doesn't deny the existence of a will, or even a free will.

Don't get caught up on the phrasing, I didn't mean to open that avenue of discussion. Free won't isn't necessarily free, but it appears to be a willful or executive rejection of potential actions.

Rather, I'm arguing that successful overcoming of entrenched behavioural patterns requires a strategic use of that will, rather than a strong will.

Hence, my reaction to the idea of willpower.

I'm basically reiterating perkins, and he makes that same point in the excerpt I quoted.

I jumped into the discussion to address your post narrowly, without appreciating the greater context of this thread. For that I apologize, I'll probably give your post another read over as well.

p.s. u might wanna re-read your last post - there's some strange syntax going on in the beginning of the second paragraph

Yes, I was in the process of editing it when you posted this reply. I might go at it once more and polish it up.

[[xeno]Julios]

ah - never heard of free won't before - that's why i thought ur syntax was off.

i get it now

[Massive Quasars]

btw the point you bring up is a very interesting one - the project of reconceptualizing the idea of a "will" within a framework that is consistent with cognitive neuroscience is tantalizing, though ultimately i believe it leads to a conclusion that not all are ready to accept.

I don't want to give you the impression that I have a vested interest either way, I'm merely playing devil's advocate for the moment. I don't know how well folk psychological concepts will map onto neuroscientific theory (indeed if at all, though there might be nascent hints either way, even at this early stage ).

[Eraser]

Julios, do you feel that there's a significant difference between willpower in the context of fighting a negative vs achieving a positive?

I ask this question because you seem to think that willpower is subordinate to efficiency of will (or however you wish to put it). However, when looking at, for example, professional athletes, it's not uncommon for them to reach the goal on pure willpower, even if their body has practically given up. Don't you feel that if someone is headstrong and determined enough that they can fight an addiction as well? I'm not saying that this is definitely the case, but it's a line of thought to follow.

I do see that it does introduce a few other things to consider. For example, what fuels this determination and does the clearly defined finishing line of the athlete make it easier? (that may be a bit of an open door, I'd say ofcourse that makes it easier).

With those questions again we end up in the territory of your previous arguments. (Social) behaviour shaping and setting clearly defined goals fuel someone's will to do something. I do believe that if someone has defined a goal, a method or path to get from "here" to that goal and possibly rules to avoid critical situations and methods to escape those add to the self-confidence of someone and thus fuel their willpower to reach their goals. I almost forget to mention the influence of one's environment. Social support from family, a partner or friends can be one of the biggest catalysts to sustain something.

Perhaps the problem with addiction is that it's hard to set a goal. The truth (as explained in the clip from Ferguson) with addictions is that you're never "cured" (dangerous word to use in this discussion ). There is no end goal that, once passed, leaves you free of any troubles. I have zero experience with addictions (my dad smokes, but never even tried to give up), but I wouldn't be surprised if fighting an addiction isn't a case of just going forward and we'll get there in the end (like a marathon runner would). In other words, it's hard to measure progress, another thing that breaks down confidence in one's self.

To make a long story short, what I think is that willpower is a definite influence or requirement when fighting an addiction (or reaching any goal for that matter). The more important thing is what are the influences on one's self-confidence and willpower. What fuels it, what drives you to get there. Without those things set in proverbial stone, it's probably damn hard to bring up the will power to start something. I refuse to believe that willpower is a purely genetic thing. I believe that external influences play a much bigger role.

One last thing, I'm wondering if anyone here is familiar with Stephen R. Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. His second habit is Begin with the End In Mind. This is all about setting goals before starting something. At first it feels like stating the obvious, but far too few people actually think about and consider such things. But that's a whole other discussion.