A pathway locked

A person who can no longer choose otherwise.

A substance. A pathway locked. A person who can no longer choose otherwise.

The person has been shaped by the same input, again and again. Shaped until the other paths are, for now, out of reach.

The tradition called this addiction. It swung between two answers. Addiction is a disease. Addiction is a weakness. Neither is the structural account.

This is the third of five chapters about the body. The first was about keeping a body running. The second was about editing a body before its person can choose. This one reads the body’s corridor at a different scale: the mind.

The corridor is the range of states a body can keep running in. The mind has one too. The book calls it the cognitive corridor. It is the buffer your mind’s modelling runs on. It is the working room where you read where you stand, and see the paths open to you.

This chapter asks two things. Under what conditions does your capacity to choose hold? And under what conditions does it collapse?

Two more chapters follow. Extending a body. The end of life. The test set up in the chapter on medicine runs here without being built again.

One discipline governs this chapter. It stops at the test. It does not sort every substance into a list. It walks one worked case: recreational opioid use under non-medical conditions. There the test gives a verdict no major medical or social tradition disputes.

You run the test everywhere else, on substances and pathways the chapter does not name. The reach is yours. The chapter does not pretend to cover everything.

Source. Ø Applications, Chapter 7 — Cognitive Sovereignty and Addiction. The book in full: the420code.org/Applications.pdf. The short edition: the420code.org/models/applications/07-cognitive-sovereignty-and-addiction/. The film, The noise floor: the420code.org/films/applications/. Its kill switches: APP-7.1 to APP-7.5.