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Unknowns comments on Two methods on akrasia / unhealthy habits / addictions - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (31)
The problem I see with this is that if, for whatever reason, you do happen to drink that soda one day, your pretense that you are "the sort of person who does not drink soda" is totally blown to pieces and you cannot continue to follow your system because you are no longer capable of deceiving yourself.
Likewise if you happen to fight the Boss.
Basically a system like that is very strong as long as their are no failures at all. But it seems better to me to have a system that will allow you to recover even if you fail on occasion, as you will.
"Safe fail, not fail-safe." I get it. We will see how it works for me after the first defection. I think re-surrendering can work... I am using terms like "nanoreligion" and "microreligion" for a reason, I am actually borrowing techniques from there (ob. atheist or else this sentence would be formulated entirely differently) because they are excellent at mind-programming, even if in a dark-arts way. So perhaps re-surrendering takes the equivalent of a confession, remorse and penitence. This may also work as a reconstruction of the identity.
Incidentally, I never understood why even smart people of old religions (Aquinas) took justice e.g. punishment as balancing some cosmic ledger instead of something purely instrumental. Perhaps, at least on the penitence level, it acts as reconstructing an identity, if one submits voluntarily to punishment / penitence.
Maybe you're right. Confession does work just like that for Catholics. For example if you have a Catholic guy who normally does not masturbate (because it is against Church teaching), and then one day he lapses, it is common that in the following days he will find it very difficult to resist constant repetition of the behavior -- basically because his identity is ruined in the way that I said. But as soon as he goes to confession he can suddenly stop masturbating; he gets the identity back.
About the justice question, I think it is simply to justify the doctrine of hell, which does not fit well at all with the idea of justice as instrumental (because many people do not believe in hell anyway and because if it is a question of deterrence, surely a billion years of torture would be enough).
AFAIK it has more to do with poetry (Dante) than a firm doctrine but I may be mistaken.
Only if you choose to make that response to a lapse part of your system. But why would you do that? A soda is just a soda. All else is the meaning you attach to it.