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Alicorn comments on Experiential Pica - Less Wrong
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I find this suggestion hard to follow. There are far more experiences I don't have than ones I do have, and I think this is true for almost everyone. How would I know where to start? Should I take up dancing? Baking? Painting? Horse riding? Ant farming? Blogging? :-)
If our brains can have a deficiency of some kind of activity, there must be a relatively small number of such activity types. Unless we can figure out what they are we won't make much progress.
Also, unlike pica (where you say at least some sufferers have a craving for iron-rich food, which helps them), we don't know if "positive" akrasia ever drives people to do the thing they lack (because we don't know what it is they lack). Why should we suppose akrasia ever serves to fix a problem except by coincidence?
Not food. Pica is by definition an appetite for non-food; best-case scenario, they're eating actual iron objects or iron-rich dirt or something.
Not knowing what classes of activities exist is a handicap, but we can make guesses - exercise is plausibly one, and one that looks promising for other reasons. I suspect that creative activities, possibly including baking, is another, and there's some evidence that sunlight and fresh air are splendid things to have, so going outside might be useful too.
Exercise and sunlight and so on are definitely good for us. But why do you think they're particularly linked to akrasia? I know they're linked to various mood disorders and so on...
I guess I just don't understand why you're proposing this hypothesis and not another. Is is just the analogy with pica, on the level of "akrasia is a craving to do or not-do X, so maybe its cause is doing or not-doing some unrelated Y"? Does this explain/retrodict some known facts about akrasia that I missed? Or is it just a direction of investigation for now?
I can only propose hypotheses I think of.
It's mostly just a direction of investigation, based on a known thing the brain can do - when some Y is is needed, the brain is known to sometimes ask for unrelated X, which does not eliminate the root problem (need for Y). I'm saying that Tetris et. al. may be the Y in a pattern like this.