I’m addicted to Help.com.
Anybody want to argue with me…???
No. I meant to post this anonymously.
Oh well. So much for that idea.
A couple hundred years ago, the word “addiction” meant something like “devotion”. It was a positive term in some older literature like Shakespeare. Even older it was a Latin legal term. But, with the meaning of “devotion”, it makes sense both for oxygen and cigarettes. More recently it has taken on negative connotations which would not make sense to apply to breathing. It’s just a word, it does have meaning, the meaning has changed over time. The chemical dependency of nicotine addiction is real. And if it doesn’t have negative connotations then addiction to fresh air is a much healthier thing.
I would always argue anyway because I don’t believe in the nonexistence of things. :/
southern_comfort, IP wrote:
I’m addicted to Help.com.
Anybody want to argue with me…???
I shall pass. :)
president mindhealer wrote:
I would always argue anyway because I don’t believe in the nonexistence of things. :/
Do you believe in the existence of the Easter Bunny? :)
Anonymous
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10 months, 4 weeks ago (16 minutes after post)
There has to be a big component of the substance losing its original effect. and we chase the original effect with determental consequences.
Oxygens effect upon us never changes. We never seek “breathing like it was the first time”. Exercizing would fall into this catagory, since the effect doesnt change, you run your 3 miles 3x a week.. you don’t come home and say “that doesnt make me feel good any more.. I need to run more”
Merriam-Webster definition.
Definition of ADDICTION
1: the quality or state of being addicted addiction to reading>
2: compulsive need for and use of a habit-forming substance (as heroin, nicotine, or alcohol) characterized by tolerance and by well-defined physiological symptoms upon withdrawal; broadly : persistent compulsive use of a substance known by the user to be harmful
So by this definition air is indeed an addiction. Because if you withdraw it I will definitely have some well-defined physiological symptoms….
I guess breathing could be considered an innocuous addiction. But I should think that addictions are primarily a result of voluntary acts. In other words, one has to choose to do an activity that has addictive components in order for it to be deemed an addiction. Similarly, one should be able to voluntarily end the activity. Assuming that this is true, then I could not be possibly be addicted to air because breathing is an involuntary act.
windmills, wrote:
president mindhealer wrote:
I would always argue anyway because I don’t believe in the nonexistence of things. :/
Do you believe in the existence of the Easter Bunny? :)
One way of saying it is that our culture is so addicted to jellybeans that the Easter Bunny must exist, or at least come to exist around eastertime (which is 24/7/365 on my profile.)
windmills, wrote:
I guess breathing could be considered an innocuous addiction. But I should think that addictions are primarily a result of voluntary acts. In other words, one has to choose to do an activity that has addictive components in order for it to be deemed an addiction. Similarly, one should be able to voluntarily end the activity. Assuming that this is true, then I could not be possibly be addicted to air because breathing is an involuntary act.
I don’t disagree with your assessment. But also remember for the first full 8.5 to 9 months of your life, you were receiving oxygen WITHOUT the involuntary need to breathe.
southern_comfort, IP wrote:
I’m addicted to Help.com.
Anybody want to argue with me…???
that is so shared…
in reply to the original post: that person is a jerk give up on em
southern_comfort, IP wrote:
windmills, wrote:
I guess breathing could be considered an innocuous addiction. But I should think that addictions are primarily a result of voluntary acts. In other words, one has to choose to do an activity that has addictive components in order for it to be deemed an addiction. Similarly, one should be able to voluntarily end the activity. Assuming that this is true, then I could not be possibly be addicted to air because breathing is an involuntary act.
I don’t disagree with your assessment. But also remember for the first full 8.5 to 9 months of your life, you were receiving oxygen WITHOUT the involuntary need to breathe.
True. I suppose the only difference would be that, assuming addictions are voluntary acts, after those first few months breathing becomes involuntary whereas all other commonly known addictions remain voluntary.
In that case… Miller Time!!!!!!!!
SoRuthless-Tango wrote:
in reply to the original post: that person is a jerk give up on em
I did this time. Or at least I let him believe that I did. I’m sure he believes he has won the argument, as he most often likes to think.
It seems that the word “addiction” can include actions, in the sense of obsessive-compulsive activity, but closer to the core (original) meaning of “addiction” is just attachment or devotion. So you’d be addicted to a person, place, thing, or action.
president mindhealer wrote:
I would always argue anyway because I don’t believe in the nonexistence of things. :/
What do you mean?
president mindhealer wrote:
It seems that the word “addiction” can include actions, in the sense of obsessive-compulsive activity, but closer to the core (original) meaning of “addiction” is just attachment or devotion. So you’d be addicted to a person, place, thing, or action.
Thank you for the enlightenment, as I was not aware of its original meaning until now. And how interesting it is to now know that once upon a time addiction had a positive meaning.
verge wrote:
president mindhealer wrote:
I would always argue anyway because I don’t believe in the nonexistence of things. :/
What do you mean?
I mean that I believe in the existence of things. I assertions that things don’t exist don’t usually mean much to me. At best I can try to interpret what I think they really mean — Santa Claus doesn’t exist as a human, only as a mythical figure, addiction doesn’t exist as a solid thing you can touch, only a psychological concept to classify a set of behaviors or activities.
“I assertions that things don’t exist don’t usually mean much to me.”
There shouldn’t be an “I” in that sentence, sorry.
Oh okay :) I guess that means that everything we’re capable of imagining has some basis in reality and anything we can’t doesn’t, but that last bit doesn’t matter. It makes sense. Everything, ideas included, come from somewhere and are relevant. Everything is something and means something, but is it all useful? I guess it can all be traced back to make some kind of truth, but aren’t some things so far off that they’re unimportant? I worded this clumsily and vaguely, but I’m not sure I’d be able to do better at this point. Maybe you understand what I made of your answer anyways.
Sure, there are lots of things I am not interested in and don’t care about. The only thing I’m really interested in about nonexistence is the problem of mortality and the interesting way to escape from duality to oneness in an instant by contemplating “nothingness” as being “no-thing-ness”
Also I lost track of this conversatoin because the word “addiction” has negative connotations of wanting to trap me into a slavery that I don’t want, so I automatically forgot to check this post or deeply study our trains of thought.
I think that addiction to stuffed walruses exists merely by the fact that I just wrote this sentence. But the solution can be just as easily written.
president mindhealer wrote:
The only thing I’m really interested in about nonexistence is the problem of mortality and the interesting way to escape from duality to oneness in an instant by contemplating “nothingness” as being “no-thing-ness”
If it wouldn’t be bothersome to clarify this, I’d like to understand what you mean here. I got the rest I think.
verge wrote:
If it wouldn’t be bothersome to clarify this, I’d like to understand what you mean here. I got the rest I think.
Sure, I mean that our minds divide being into a million different things. You can go up the hierarchy of divisions, toward more and more simplicity. Like instead of using fifteen words for snow, you can just say “snow”. Instead of conceiving of different types of weather, there could be just weather. As you move up conceptually, there are fewer and fewer “things”. And eventually there is just “nothingness”. Everything is still here, of course, but conceptually there is no-thing. And this may sound silly, but it happens in various ways normally, like being half asleep and being one with everything, or being totally in the flow at work and divisions drop away.
I’d like to point out for the sake of being relevant to the “religion” post that mills was writing so much on that although I explained this somewhat philosophically, those ideas are most closely related to mystic spiritual traditions.
If I may weigh in on this one.. but Breathing oxygen is an involuntary action. You could also call it a reflex.. Blinking, coughing, sneezing are all involuntary actions, and I wouldn’t say one is addicted to such matters.
Almost anything can become addicting with a certain mindset. People are addicted to cigarettes, yes, alcohol, adrenaline rushes, food, collecting things. All of which are voluntary actions. Even though as an addition it’s more difficult to not do it than to do it at that point. They have yet still make an active choice every time they do it.
Except that the controlling factor for drug addiction is subconscious just like it is for blinking and coughing, etc. It doesn’t come from decisions from the neocortex, it comes from the fact that all neurochemical receptors throughout the brain are retrained to crave the external drug rather than the internal neurochemical. Like nicotine binds directly to the acetylcholine receptors, and in other ways also hijacks basic survival mechanisms. It becomes just as basic as any action inspired by the more primitive regions of the brain. There’s as much choice involved as breathing — you can easily breathe on purpose, it is not so easy to consciously choose to not breathe and hope that it sticks.
I realize that my replies are mostly irrelevant here, sorry about that.
president mindhealer wrote:
to escape duality to oneness in an instant by contemplating “nothingness” as being “no-thing-ness”
Oh I would have understood if I had been reasonable and figured from context that by the second “no-thing-ness” you meant “one-thing-ness”. Lol that would have seemed so obvious to you, but I spent a long time trying to figure it all out.
verge wrote:
president mindhealer wrote:
to escape duality to oneness in an instant by contemplating “nothingness” as being “no-thing-ness”
Oh I would have understood if I had been reasonable and figured from context that by the second “no-thing-ness” you meant “one-thing-ness”. Lol that would have seemed so obvious to you, but I spent a long time trying to figure it all out.
Sure, except that I didn’t. That may be how you can understand it, but that is basic duality, having a symbol and a referent. Nondual states, like pointed to by zen koans, are without the distinction that “thingness” implies. Things are stuff, matter, nouns. It’s like classifying half of life as dead and half as living, or half as matter and half as mind. Dualism. Good and bad, etc. The “no-thing-ness” is just sort of a code word for nonduality, because that’s what it is, but only if you can imagine it. Which isn’t exactly the easiest thing to do.
So, for me to consider believing that addiction doesn’t exist requires me to try to imagine life without any distinction or limitation. :)
Addictions are a spectrum, thats my moderate answer. There couldn’t be a hard and fast line. But breathing is mostly involuntary so I’d say it lacks the necessary intentionality and then the following battle between chemical need and long term planning.
Whay if everything you do starts becoming involuntary?
well i know for a fact that addictions are real, i suffer from alcohol and marijuana use. why not tell your friend to go drink every day for a month and smoke weed. then ask him how he feels?
windmills, closed this post.
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