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XxHavanaHoneyxX t1_iugv5s9 wrote

How does anyone conquer addiction if they aren’t involved in decision making? I can understand how it would perpetuate addiction and make it incredibly difficult to break the habit, but how do some people conquer it? Where does that intervention come from if it’s not the person’s will?

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Extension-Ad-2760 t1_iuhj4ur wrote

How do people even go on a diet.

I feel like just that one thing blows this whole hypothesis open. Maybe I've missed something.

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LunarGiantNeil t1_iui4ope wrote

Here's another example, because the popular bad take on the valid mechanistic view just annoys me: the science on learning things demonstrates that neuroplasticity (the reorganizing of the brain to optimize for cognitive tasks) responds best to "quality inputs" given over your span of attention, which is about 15 minutes for a lot of people, and then requires a good sleep that night to put into practice.

But a quality input requires intent, your conscious role is to filter stimuli, put yourself into a good learning environment, and practice with intention until your focus wanders.

This absolutely suggests the 'awake' part of the brain plays a huge role in teaching things to the unconscious parts of the brain, and then the even other parts play a role in building new brain pathways to make it possible for the conscious and unconscious parts to repeat that thing later.

You 'experience' things through a perception lag, but there really is a role being played by the part of your brain that decides to get off your butt and practice things, with focus. It actually plays a role in physically changing the parts of your brain that run the autopilot parts of your brain that you trigger when you do a complex physio-cognitive thing like playing an instrument or speaking a language.

There's lots of moving parts up there.

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LunarGiantNeil t1_iui32e4 wrote

Most people here are interpreting the data the way they want it to lead.

The research is showing that the experience of consciousness happens after the brain decides to do things, not that there isn't any active intervention by the higher level abstract thinking, reasoning, problem solving portions.

Nerves and brain matter interpret stuff, make recommendations, and bounce stimuli back and forth more than once. It's not all "multiple choice" made by the 'you' parts of your social and consciousness brain matter, true, but those parts DO get input.

So if you want to do something that you don't enjoy, like a diet, it's a wrestling match between parts of the brain and body. It's not a simple one-way decision chain and then it's over and decided.

People want it to be one way or the other. It's not.

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Extension-Ad-2760 t1_iuigxzm wrote

I fully agree with you here.

I think some comparison can be made to the way our societies are run. The leader (your consciousness) has final decision on the biggest decisions, but their decision is affected by hundreds of different other people, and their decisions by hundreds of thousands more (your subconscious. You could argue that in some cases the decisions are pretty much pre-determined, but that's only if the decision is just really obvious.

And these other people also do the more mundane jobs of actually keeping everything going (running your body).

And yet some people are convinced that either the leader has complete control, or the people that inform them do. No: they talk to each other, work things out, and neither truly has full control.

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HandMeDownCumSock t1_iuhsmml wrote

If our mind is just a machine that functions in accordance to available chemicals and stimulus then purely existing in the world will cause cognitive changes.

Your nutrition and available chemicals in your body changes over time, depending on what you consume, what kind of air you inhale, what kind of organisms are living inside of you. All these effect how your brain works.

Everything we see, hear, smell, touch, taste, is a stimulus that the brain will respond to. Even patterns and waveforms of light can change how your brain acts. Pretty much everything that exists is affecting how our brains work. We just ignore most of it.

The agents of change are even more obvious in a case of breaking an addiction. The experiences of being an alcoholic is constantly feeding into memory, each experience is different, and complicates that system. Even simply existing they will be put under the stimulus of withdrawal in some environment, the brain will react to that also. They may here a friend or family member's opinion on their addiction, they may read a book, see an ad online, they may see someone in public that makes them think a certain way, they may see a painting, or a building, or a piece of cheese that for some reason connects in their mind some action for change. It's never just one thing either, there's an unfathomable amount of stimulus happening all the time, and it can all work towards a cumulative effect like deciding to break a habit.

Further environmental factors, based on your brain, will influence whether you do or don't succeed. But those factors could be anything and everything.

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