[From Bruce Abbott (951116.1740 EST)]
Rick Marken (951116.1230) --
Chris Cherpas (951116.1047 PT)
So what happens the first time somebody tries, let's say, crack cocaine?
Suddenly, there's a very "important" reference level to maintain. How did
the new reference level get there?
I've never seen any evidence that there is "suddenly" a very important
reference level to maintain after trying a drug? You seem to be saying that
ingestion of crack cocaine causes a reference (want) for more of it. I'm
pretty sure that it doesn't work that way.
On what basis are you "pretty sure" that it doesn't work that way?
When does it become important to control a given perception? You provide
one example: you want to perceive yourself (or be perceived by others) as
"avant garde," and taking the drug is one way you perceive that you can
achieve this reference. So you create a lower-level control system whose
reference is having taken the drug. The drug-taking is not the "real" goal,
but only a means for achieving the "real" goal. But then, as a consequence,
you experience the effect of the drug; some part of your brain goes "WOW!"
and now, getting that experience back is the "real" goal of taking the drug.
Before experiencing that particular level of the perception the drug alters,
you had no concept of that experience and no reference for experiencing it.
Why do you have that reference now? This, I think, is the question Chris
was asking.
Why is it that, after you have experienced certain perceptual values, do you
WANT to experience them again? Must you assume that "massive error" (pain)
was there in the first place, which the drug relieves? Is there no room for
the possibility that the drug produces "massive pleasure," so that in the
future, living without that experience becomes experienced as "massive error"?
To keep it simple, let's assume that repeated exposure to the drug produces
no "drug tolerance."
The idea that one shot of a drug leads to addiction is a stimulus-response
view of behavior; it suggests that the drug (stimulus) causes addiction
(response). It is a good example of bad science in the service of stupid
social policy (the "war" on drugs).
Is it? What is there to prevent a drug, by occupying certain receptors in
the brain, from activating circuits whose activity we experience as
pleasurable, and doing so to an intense degree? What is there to prevent us
from setting that perceptual experience as a reference level, and devoting
our energies toward bring our current perception to that reference? And if
such a thing does happen, what makes it "bad science" to say so?
Perhaps it is an example of _good_ science in the service of stupid social
policy.
Enquiringly,
Bruce
P.S. Drug tolerance is an example of reorganization.