Thinking Aloud

Having looked through our previous fragment we’re surprised to find that our meditations of the alcoholism nature again come to the question of the meaning of life. We’ve to start again from this point to another direction. The involvement of the sense of life category is an ordinary thing for a philosopher; any choice is admissible. In the broad field of the philosophy the meaning of life is an undefined quantity. Moreover, it can be described as a set with an infinite number of values. However, if in philosophy one can write treatises of hundreds of thousands of words, in practical life including the applied love of wisdom we face natural limitations. Ancient Greek sophists were probably first coaches in European history.

Our comparison of alcoholism to gambling can be enriched with two other important moments. The wish we have attacking a one-arm bandit is definitely wealth. But it isn’t as simple with ethanol. We disclose new reasons of alcohol abuse step by step, but we haven’t run out of them yet. Narrating these motives can take a long while. Another important thing is, like we said repeatedly, a quick response is expected from the body reaction to alcohol. It’s like gambling too. Had a drink and got joy, confidence and relaxation. All these can be gained naturally, just remember healthy lifestyle promotions

Compulsive gambling is the only non-chemical addiction included in the latest version of DSM. The internal reasons of the manual authors to make this choice are unclear to some people; the appropriateness of this decision is sometimes discussed in reference books. Some external factors seem to play an important part in the decision. In particular, the tremendous destructiveness of this activity for the whole social life of a human, especially his or her welfare. Undoubtedly, a person is pushed to gamble by a thirst of becoming rich immediately. By administering alcohol to our body we put a goal for ourselves too.

Аlcohol is an exception among them all. It’s a unique situation when a drug (according to neurobiological researches even more dangerous than illicit ones) has never been outlawed for really long. It isn’t appropriate now to discuss the reasons for this relatively favorable attitude of the society to alcohol, but the attitude doesn’t seem to be relevant to the alcohol abuse danger to humans. On the other hand, this unique situation gives rich and not only experimental material to study the implications and results of the use of alcohol as a psychoactive substance. The paradox of the situation has been stressed many times; there’re many examples of people starting to play a very dangerous and complex game with alcohol as well as attempts to break with the alcohol addiction (mostly in vain).

We can endlessly complicate this picture involving new combinations, but apparently, in the analysis of the interaction of alcohol (such as tobacco or other drugs) with the human body and our mind we’ll never reach the full knowledge. However, remaining within the frameworks of behaviorism we breach its logic step by step. The more options and combinations, the more clearly the simplicity turns into complexity and verifiable things are replaced by hypothetical ones. On the other hand, understanding the complexity of any biological organism (not just human) we feel a priori it shall really be so. 9