Addiction and psychology, based on ideas from Jordan Peterson

A little background first:  I've been into watching Jordan Peterson's videos about psychology lately, based on an introduction from seeing an interview of him by Joe Rogan, a podcast host that covers a lot of different subject ranges.  His ideas are fascinating.  It's all quite developed work, a bit of a mixed bag, but nothing lightly grounded or swept together quickly.  All related parts are drawn from different sources over a long period of study, and not only from academic exposure.  From the Wikipedia post about him:


Jordan B. Peterson (born 1962) is a Canadian clinical psychologist and tenured professor of psychology at the University of Toronto.[1] His research interests include self-deception, mythology, religion, narrative, neuroscience, personality, deception, creativity, intelligence, and motivation.


This post is about a specific idea that's not at all at the core of his range of work and main projects, so I'll not really get into all that too much.  An introduction comes from citing what that scope covers further from that Wikipedia article:


Peterson’s primary goal was to figure out the reasons why individuals, not simply groups, engage in social conflict, and try to model the path individuals take that results in atrocities like the Holocaust or the Soviet Gulag. Peterson considers himself a pragmatist, and uses science and neuropsychology to examine and learn from the belief systems of the past and vice versa, but his theory is primarily phenomenological. Peterson explores the origins of evil, and also posits that an analysis of the world’s religious ideas might allow us to describe our essential morality and eventually develop a universal system of morality.


That's a fair representation, but his explanation of it and the course I'm following all drifts through layers of basics about how people work (mind, the brain, immediate experience, perception, etc.) that end up being more interesting to me than the conclusions, although that's good stuff too.  The more developed work on how mythology and religious symbolism works is quite informative, and it's not what you'd expect.  I've studied religion in university courses and it's not what I had expected, but it just goes further than what I've encountered, it doesn't contradict it.  I certainly can't summarize all that, but I feel compelled to say something, having brought it up.


A short, mostly incorrect version, too limited to be of a lot of use:  religion isn't doing exactly what it seems to be doing.  It's an afterlife scheme and all that, and an explanation of first causes, but on a deeper level the story lines embed in our view of reality, help shape it.  At first one would think that means we are accepting systems of morality based on religion, that we still draw on those systems' take on good and evil, and there's that, it's true, but it's not what I mean by that.  We pattern our response patterns, our underlying scheme for what we are and how we interact, on paradigms drawn from religion.

Sounds like something from Jung, doesn't it, that archetype business?  It is that, but fleshed out, in a way it goes way beyond capturing images we draw on--father figures, etc., with lots of layers of complexity beyond that-- to explaining how it actually works in practice.  To some extent, at least; there couldn't really be a full explanation, it's all complicated.  Since the point here isn't to treat any of all that I'll move on.

The topic here, about the addiction process

The point here, this following idea, is what I'm going to treat as an isolated fragment, although it is really more embedded in other ideas than I can fill out.  It still works excerpted, I think, or else this will be meaningless if I'm mistaken on that point.  The ideas come from one citation, as follows.


A class lecture from a Maps of Meaning course by Jordan Peterson (a video of one class session) starts into what goes on to enable substance addiction, with some background around 22 minutes in this video, with more on the specific subject from 23:40 up to 30 minutes or so, with the most detailed internal addiction process starting at 27 minutes.

Before going into more background I might also mention that Dr. Peterson is a clinical psychologist, a therapist of sorts, so his ideas are based on having a foot in two different realms, related to the theory and also practice.  It's not an idea or context that comes up here but it's a relevant point.

Jordan Peterson interview (credit and video here)

Starting point:  relation to the general project, what is being explained

At the risk of getting it wrong I'll summarize what he's saying, expanding a bit on the rest of what he's explained prior.  I won't cover in full detail what he says in that 8 minutes, so it might work best to watch that first.  It's part of a larger framework of ideas (a very large one) that he's explaining in the course, in general about meaning.  He builds up what meaning is "made of" starting from how mind and consciousness works, and he's more or less covering part of the latter here.  Getting to the bottom of either of those is too much for any one class, and to some extent human knowledge as a whole doesn't achieve that at this point.  To address that, and still draw on a broad range of ideas, he discusses ideas within a broad scope to map out a path from some basic parts up to what worldviews and related component frameworks are doing.

He's more or less explaining how internal psychological functions work, at this point, explaining meaning as the end goal.  To get there he goes through a lot of basic psychology, related to drives (not exactly how he frames that part, that's essentially a core component of an earlier model he's not relying on), and brain function (more on that in the next video, after the one cited), and on the higher level how meaning systems like religion and ideology work out.

It's particularly interesting how nihilism compares to those last two, with the three covering a similar function in different ways.  It's just a basic definition, but nihilism is embracing the idea that one's own world and experience don't have much inherent meaning (or none, but even stopping at "not much" starts into some contradictions).  Unless I'm characterizing it wrong he presents different alternatives for locating meaning, to reject it altogether, which doesn't work, to base it in an ideology or developed external system, which he says doesn't work, or to frame it in a more normal way, embedded in somewhat received formats as a unique personal project framework, or maybe more as a running underlying theme.  That last part really deserves more complete explanation and investigation than this mention provides.

He never does go into how to resolve the problem of addiction here, only talking through how it gets initiated.  The short version is that people build up dependency by positively associating with trying and continuing to use a drug (or alcohol, which of course is a drug).  It sounds so simple put that way; people try a drug and like it.  It's not quite that simple.

Addiction, related to the basic model and reinforcement of any routine activities

Again the citation reference, what I'm talking about here:  a class lecture from a Maps of Meaning course by Jordan Peterson on what goes on to enable substance addiction, with some background around 22 minutes in this video, with more on the specific subject from 23:40 up to 30 minutes or so.


He's explaining about addiction, the process of trying a substance or drug and how that leads on to addiction.  In particular how "liking it" (whatever the substance is) gets reinforced as a validation of whatever led to using that drug, or whatever is associated, so that over time more common-sense perspective related to negative factors and associations tend to be rejected.  He doesn't follow the ideas to a further conclusion, to exactly where this leads to a breakdown, and what forms that would be likely to take, but of course a lot of reasonable perspective could and would eventually be rejected.  Something like going to jail might come up, or losing a lot of whatever else a person had going on in their life.

It's not so simple to explain the whole model, or to break out just the piece about addiction.  In part it's not going to work really well to extract and deal with one relatively narrow idea--8 minutes worth of a 20-some hour video series--but that's the plan.

Instead of talking directly about the models of how we work (layers of them), a specific example works as an intro.  He discusses what happens when we get a drink of water (again I'm not going to find that in this video series, but watching a few hours worth of video would, and I think it might come in the next one).  A primitive part of the brain triggers the impulse to drink water based on monitoring hydration levels, a completely subconscious activity.  In his description that occurs in our mind as an impulse, perhaps of an image of use drinking water, visually, but in some form of awareness of the desire to get a drink.  As he describes it this is initiation of a micro-personality, of an internal sub-routine that conducts the related reactions, getting a drink.

We tend to not use the concept of "personality" in this way, but it makes sense.  It's not a simple conditioned response, but instead a response set of behaviors that involves a trigger, a perspective context, intentions, response action approaches, and reactions to hindrances to pursuit.

So we can dispense with drives, as an independent set of internal competing goals, since there is a whole layer of decision making going on below the one we are aware of.  Individual goals get activated, in whatever ways they do (here it works to just put that out of scope) and what we might think of as a sub-routine takes over, just a complicated version of one.

As we keep having experiences, making choices, pursuing goals on different levels, and having related successes and failures an interesting thing happens.  Minor set-backs are not exactly irrelevant but not so important within the system.  Significant interruptions or major setbacks play a special role, in that when these occur we have to then question if we are making decisions and taking actions appropriately, or question if our model of the world, our goals and basis for evaluation, are inherently flawed.  He calls these "anomalies."  I'll put all that aside for now, and move on to the role of more positive feedback.

One related running theme is that we are basically designed to ignore most of what goes on around us, that filtering helps us identify what requires our focus.  That really works on more than one level, related to immediate perception, and for the most part of course we really don't need to know how we work.  One simple idea is all we really need for getting part of this model:  positive outcomes--getting what we want--reinforce both the immediate causes of the decisions that just led to what caused those, and to the larger system in general, and of course those lead to repetition of the whole cycle.

There is more I might say about normal experience / sensation filtering, related to how it might be possible to turn it off, and what that experience would be like, but this has too many tangents and asides in it now.  The short version:  that wouldn't work out, at all, and normal experience would break down to an unmanageable, chaotic mess if we even briefly tried to interrupt that process, for example, through use of drugs.

Quitting, special problems related to that

Dr. Peterson touches on the idea of how this reinforces associations with other things or activities, which can lead directly to taking up drug use again after initially moving clear of it through rehabilitation.  All that is familiar even to a cigarette smoker, how everyday activities like waking up, going to sleep, eating, driving, and stress reactions become connected to smoking, so that even a few weeks or months past quitting these still tend to trigger a craving.

At the highest level this doesn't sound like much that's new.  It's a common idea that different types of associations are a problem related to addiction, more than a physical craving brought directly on by the drug addiction, the biological response.  It seems to me that doesn't seem to be interpreted beyond that activity-level association I just mentioned, and to personal relationships with friends that also use the same drugs (or alcohol, or it could apply to smoking, or I suppose the same general process could relate further beyond drug use, to other forms of habits and behaviors).

The novel part is how this gets coded (integrated) into a broad and deep set of associations that make up a world-view within his ideas.  Breaking those associations wouldn't be as easy as just learning new habits.  Even returning to an old set of associations, going back to a worldview and momentary behaviors that existed prior to taking up the drug use, might not really work well.

Per his other content, which I also won't cite here, stopping an associated behavior relates to coding a separate response that nullifies a conditioned response.  He speaks of the same process in terms of a sub-routine (a computer analogy) but perhaps more accurately related to his other characterization as associated with a micro-personality (tied to that earlier special use of that concept), just in this case more a mechanism related to offsetting that response cycle.  Clear?  It's not a critical point anyway, if not.

It's not so simple to map that onto how all that would play out with addiction, how patterns of behavior of using drugs would evolve, and where it might lead.  The behavior / association reinforcement process he described could lead to triggering an ongoing response mechanism that would barely ever stop, potentially.  It would amount to an unusual form of break-down of the normal impulse and reward system.

Anyone who has known an alcoholic has witnessed an example of that.  I worked with two people that couldn't take a break from getting drunk during working hours, and it wasn't ideal in either case.  One guy "held his liquor" really well, and the one woman didn't, but he was compelled to drink the equivalent of a half-dozen drinks during working hours, enough for the average person to become good and drunk.

Another friend took it much differently; he drank almost to the point of losing basic bodily functions if he touched alcohol.  It's not so easy to map onto these other ideas but that friend--a roommate in this case, and a really good guy--said that he felt somehow he really enjoyed or connected with achieving the goal of getting alcohol, of obtaining it, more than the part that came later, getting really, really drunk.  Another friend started drinking by noon every day, passing most of his life over to that experience.  Even if there were some common mechanisms and shared ground in their experiences it all played out differently.  It does seem like I knew a lot of people really into drinking, for whatever reasons, part of a longer story.

The alcoholic or drug addict's concerns might relate more to un-doing the process and associations than understanding how it all worked.  I don't have much depth of experience in that.  I would expect that re-writing their life might be a requirement.  One might naturally wonder to what extent going back to a former lifestyle (perspective and set of responses) would or would not be an option, typically.  At a guess since the addiction evolved along with changes in habits and perspective that may not work well, since little by little that previous framework (worldview, set of responses, perspective, etc., but really on the immediate response level most critically) had given way to a revised approach.  If it somehow related to participation in two completely different lifestyles, in two different social circles, or related to living in two different places, for example, then maybe it would tend to work better.

I did smoke cigarettes at one point and have experience in switching that habit over to just not doing it, which seemed to work better coupled with a physical move, to living in a different place.  It didn't help with completely cutting off the associations and craving but it seemed to work better that way.  It still took months for the stress-response trigger to wear off, or maybe around year for it to more completely dissipate.

Maybe it's more relevant talking about going back to school (university studies), related to how that mapped back onto restoring an earlier lifestyle and perspective, and to what extent it didn't.  I mean this in relation to the idea that an addict might simply go back to seeing things as they had before, to that set of responses.  I did so in my 30's, so it was quite a break from a different lifestyle, and well removed from my first experience from the age of 17 to 21.  In some broad senses I did restore my life to a student's experience but it was far different from the first set of experiences.  I could never really just be that person again.  I was older, and it was a different place, different schools (two, really), and relationships and connections were different.  It's hard to map that back onto how an alcoholic, for example, might restore a more limited set of responses from not drinking, to drinking, then back to not drinking.

The more general point is that we experience ourselves through those types of immediate associations, almost as them, in a sense, and the coding and uncoding isn't so simple.  I never really felt like a 22 year old student, although it did all fit back together in a sense, but I think it would be much harder project to change only one set of responses within that same set of conditions.  It wouldn't be the same type of thing.

I've really walked off the map quite a bit, since the original idea was that immediate, conditioned response, so recovery and re-conditioning is a completely different point, and one I have no background to address.  I would expect the general range of recommended recovery planning would be to "make changes," and I probably shouldn't go beyond that here.  I only found this one point interesting, about how addiction develops, and although it was a bit messy trying to break out that idea along with limited background that was the idea.