Thinking Aloud

We can give an opposite example. The alliesthesia is usually explained in the way we eat sweets. The first one we eat with great pleasure, every following - with less. Finally, there comes the moment when we begin to look at the sweets with disgust. Similar example can be about thirst quenching. How sweet is the first gulp of water in the hot weather and how difficult it is to drink when they make us drink much (for instance, at a gastric lavage after poisoning). Sometimes, the alcohol consumption is like an administration of a medicine. Yesterday’s drinking a lot often results in serious poisoning of the body. An addict tries to pour liquor into his or her body to avoid the withdrawal sufferings. However, its results in vomiting. Watching the lost product with sorrow such individual often continues to take another portion of alcohol. We’re going to describe the withdrawal syndrome in details further. Now we just mention that such attempts to deceive the alliesthesia are often triggered by a banal fear of the abstinence consequences.

However, the wish to find a global force that may help us overcome a galloping addictive desire bumps into an unexpected obstacle, a purely philosophic one. There can be no force like that at all. We live in a world where the life order is a patchwork. Indeed, the mass public no longer takes such things as life aims, a personal devotion mission as imperatives for themselves. It’s a rule, not an exception when a person can quit his or her job that brings no more moral or material satisfaction and almost never feel sorry about it. The clearest description of this spirit of the public life was given by postmodernism philosophy of the 60s.

Let’s add more details to the reception example. Such things are not nosh-up events, first of all, but social events. There you can bypass a social lift and solve your business problems, find new partners. In other words, short-term rivaling aims (in our case satisfaction and trying all foods) can be replaced with another relation with a long-term part (for example, business interests or scientific career potentials) and a short-term one (the same appetite). In most cases, the long-term aim wins. Let’s add one more component to the same reception model. They serve wine and stronger liquors in such events.

Nevertheless, the combination of a long-term aim and a short-term one in our alcohol addiction overcoming model rational choice story has some potential yet. We wrote before that alcohol addiction unlike some other drugs takes time and often reaches its peak when a person is at the peak of his / her career has a high position in the society, a good salary, favorite work: those things that are weighty not only at the rational level, but also provide strong incentives for the same reward system he / she stimulates with alcohol at the same time. The alcohol addiction study often contain the idea that, statistically, the addiction affects different social strata evenly.