
Origins of the myth of dopamine as the ‘pleasure chemical’ - prostoalex
https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/27/17169446/dopamine-pleasure-chemical-neuroscience-reward-motivation
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narrator
Dopamine is the compulsion chemical, not the pleasure chemical. It turns
thoughts into beliefs into actions. This is why people who take too many
dopamine recreational drugs who get leaky dopaminE vesicles tend to easily
believe any thought that occurs to them and do all kinds of psychotic things.
A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick had some great portrayals of what this
looks like.

Opioid are the pleasure chemicals and that's why exogenous opioids destroy
people. There's nothing that an opioid high can't fix, because that's
literally how the brain is wired. Once the opioid receptors are activated, the
brain is literally done trying to do anything else because the ultimate aim,
at least the way the brain is wired, has been acheived.

~~~
Erlich_Bachman
Psychologically, this is a gross oversimplification and seing it this way
generally does not help people.

It implies no choice, it implies that your life is controlled by chemicals.

And yet this theory cannot answer some simple questions, like, why there are
people who actually get off opioids? How is it possible, if opioid is the
"ultimate goal" of the brain and it "literally done trying to do anything",
how does anyone ever get off it?

The brain and especially the mind is much more complex and deep than something
that is controlled solely by some chemical. Chemical is what the brain uses.
Chemicals do not use the brain.

~~~
iamnothere
> It implies no choice, it implies that your life is controlled by chemicals.

This implication would be correct. Hormones and other chemical messengers
heavily influence brain "states" such as moods. The brain learns to make
decisions that maintain homeostasis through the development of somatic
markers, which represent body states that are composed of nerve and chemical
activity. Even nerve impulses themselves are initiated by chemicals. And of
course the structure of your brain and body are dictated by, you guessed it,
chemicals. (Specifically deoxyribonucleic acid.)

"Choice" is a powerful illusion driven by our hypercompetent rationalizing
system, whose purpose is to hide our true intentions in order to help us
better operate in a social world. In the end, we are just elaborate stimulus-
response systems, that is unless you believe in a "soul" or pseudoscientific
quantum magic.

Edit: to more directly address your point about overcoming addiction. The
brain's reward and drive systems are indeed very complex, and I do think that
the suggestion of an "ultimate" goal is a gross oversimplification. On the
other hand, if someone were able to maintain a permanent high (with no need to
re-dose, find more drugs, find money to pay for drugs, etc), then perhaps it
would indeed be impossible for them to overcome their addiction. From the
addict's perspective, part of the problem with getting high is that the
inevitable "low" may be worse, especially when tolerance and dependence kick
in, followed by withdrawal.

~~~
colordrops
> Choice" is a powerful illusion driven by our hypercompetent rationalizing
> system, whose purpose is to hide our true intentions in order to help us
> better operate in a social world. In the end, we are just elaborate
> stimulus-response systems, that is unless you believe in a "soul" or
> pseudoscientific quantum magic.

You are wording things in a derogatory way. If you said "unless you believe
the world is rooted in subjective experience, or is non-deterministic", your
argument would lose its strength (which is rooted in shaming), because there
are many great thinkers and arguments along those lines.

~~~
LolWolf
Not that I agree with the GP, but non-determinism doesn’t imply free will in
the usual strong sense of the phrase (e.g. that there is some intrinsic notion
that humans can directly dictate their own actions). Non-determinism (as in QM
non-determinism) still has deterministic _evolution_ , since specifying the
wave-function at any one point in time is enough to specify it for all of time
via evolution by the Schrödinger equation.

So, this notion would require something stronger than QM non-determinism, or a
different definition of free will.

~~~
Erlich_Bachman
> specifying the wave-function at any one point in time is enough to specify
> it for all of time via evolution by the Schrödinger equation.

Scientifically this is not very correct when you consider the chaos theory,
which has been widely accepted by physicists for many decades now.

The problem is in practical application (and we live in a practical world,
right?). The thing is that in theory, yes you can have some equation or
elaborate mathematical model about the world and calculate everything. But
once you start doing it, you immediately will see that it is impossible to
calculate anything to such precision that this would work, the world is so big
and complex that to calculate an X amount of world into the future, you would
need Y (>X) amount of world to host those calcaultions. This is only the tip
of the iceberg of why that is impossible.

So in practice, it is impossible to "specify it for all of time".

This is not just some logical trick, this is an important difference.

It's the same principle that applies in the Turtle-Achilles paradox
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno%27s_paradoxes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno%27s_paradoxes)).

In the perfect logical world of perfect science and nice beautiful theories
and equations - Achilles can never possibly reach the turtle. And yet in the
physical reality that we live in it's obvious to anyone (and is truthful) that
Achilles will easily reach and overrun the turtle.

On a related note, what is your definition of free will? People with similar
SamHarris-esque arguments seem so happy that they have proven that there is no
"free will", and yet it seems they have a difficult time defining what it is
they have proven? Isn't this a problem if they are trying to be scientific?
Would a perfect scientist ever entertain such vague concepts?

"intrinsic notion that humans can directly dictate their own actions" is very
vague. Specifically, I can't see any place where even perfect determinism
would conflict with this notion: a human is a very complicated deterministic
neural network, that analyses the world and does some actions. This whole
network processes information, and makes decisions based on that information.
Based on that information it does directly dictate it's own actions. Of course
those actions are going to be in part based on external information, but in
part on the structure and form and function of the network itself. You're not
going to find any single neuron that decides everything, but it's very clear
that the whole network decides things.

Do you have a disdain for the fact that actions are being based on external
stimulus? That this somehow is a problem for free will existing? But of course
we would want them being based on external stimulus, that surely must be a
part of being sentient? Reacting to something that happens in the world, not
just blindly "choosing" random things for the sake of choosing?

And of course "based on external stimuli" \- does not mean that the way it's
going to react to them it "pre-determined" by something. The network can
choose to react to stimuli from right now, or from yesterday, or from some
other part of memory, or even from it's own thoughts or definitions. Those are
also stimuli. It's obvious to any sentient human that sometimes we do react
and act based on such things, not simply on currently active external stimuli.

~~~
LolWolf
I'm... not really sure what argument is being presented here. There's some
weird accusations of vagueness, yet I see no proposition for a definition of
free will here (and in the original comment, there was never attempt to
provide one, since it had little to do with the content of the comment as a
response to a tiny claim made in a sentence or so), and I just see a lot of
random attacks against a position I don't even hold ("People with similar
SamHarris-esque arguments seem so happy that they have proven that there is no
"free will"", "Do you have a disdain for the fact that actions are being based
on external stimulus?" the latter of which I have no idea if I even
understand).

So what's the point? If you'd like to reason with me, at least give me a
starting point, rather than accusing a comment I wrote in less than a minute
of not being "scientific" because it doesn't define all of the terms it makes
use of; even if the statement within it is correct with most definitions,
discarding chaos theory and ‘practicality’ issues (which the statement above
is totally unconcerned with).

~~~
Erlich_Bachman
Well I'm sorry you feel attacked.

The arguments (even though written in a quite short form in your post) are
indicative of a much bigger and broader discussion taking place right now in
the intellectual/philosophical world. This gives people the ability to infer a
lot of information from even small statements, because the exact forms and
phrases that you use are used in exact same manner by other people who have
gone much deeper into this discussion and have a lot of thoughts about these
things.

Sometimes on the internet one has to infer, because otherwise you would need
every participant to first write a 100pages essay of all of their thoughts
about the matter, before anything can be reliably responded to them without
inferring.

In this case it seems you don't wish to have a well structured and formulated
position with deeply going implications into this matter, which I inferred
from your post. I guess sometimes inferring just backfires.

Coming back to having some kind of grounded argument, I would say that

> Non-determinism (as in QM non-determinism) still has deterministic
> evolution, since specifying the wave-function at any one point in time is
> enough to specify it for all of time via evolution by the Schrödinger
> equation.

is not really the case. Specifying anything in this matter (including
evolution) works in theory and not in practice. There is no physically viable
way to do this. Since science deals with physical reality first and foremost
(math does not, but we talk about physics and the nature of reality, right?) -
then scientifically that statement does not make a lot of sense. It is in fact
not enough to specify the wave-function in such a way as to specify it for all
time via evolution. This is the essence of Turtle-Achilles paradox and more
prominently Chaos Theory, which has been an established paradigm of science
for many decades now.

You write that "discarding chaos theory the statement is correct". Well, yes
perhaps. It's about the same as to say "discarding Einstein's relativity, one
could easily travel faster than the speed of light". Chaos theory describes
the real world, better in this regards than other theories we have. It's not
enough to just discard it: you will end up with faulty reasoning...

------
superkuh
If anyone is interested more in the latest science of teasing apart the neural
substraits of wanting and liking I highly recommend taking a look at the
review papers written over at Berridge lab,
[http://www.lsa.umich.edu/psych/research&labs/berridge/resear...](http://www.lsa.umich.edu/psych/research&labs/berridge/research/affectiveneuroscience.html)

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menacingly
The new popular oversimplifications tend to be really patronizing to the
previous ones

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jypepin
Is there some kind of war between The Verge and Business Insider? The article
mentions 3 times that Business Insider mistakenly called dopamine the pleasure
chemical just in the intro.

~~~
dingo_bat
Nah it's just verge being a crappy example of journalism.

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chrischen
What’s the purpose of a distinct pleasure chemical and a “compulsion”
chemical, evolutionarily? Wouldn’t a pleasurable response already compel you
to repeat the action?

~~~
robbrown451
I can't see any way of defining pleasure, in an objective way, without it
being part of motivation. "Reinforce the recently followed decision paths"
sort of thing.

~~~
chrischen
Then it's semantics, if that's true, and dopamine may as well be "pleasure".
For what it's worth the expert's explanation of how cocaine "compels" you to
do work didn't sound intuitive. The common understanding is that it alleviates
your brain's need for "pleasure" so you can focus on long term goals instead
of short term goals (distractions). It's intuitive because it's analogous to
satisfying one's pressing immediate needs so that one can do other higher
level stuff.

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wetpaws
>dopamine cells

The quality of the article is horrifyingly low

