Brilliant lol.
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We both recognize that it's vanity we're indulging in here. The word "inevitable" is the absolute truth of these matters.
I've lived in the junkie mire and I can tell you one thing from experience - you will do a lot better if you face the pure nihilism rather than try and appeal to their sense of will power. These people ARE ruled by reason, and its a reason that is possible to decode. That's about the best you can do to extricate yourself from it, and prosper in spite of it.
I think you are saying here that something like behaviorism (or what could probably be termed "mechanismism" around here) is more apparent in a community of addicts. Sure (by no means trying to brush aside your experience - I too spent quite some time among the 'disheveled' but in many cases, it was keeping one of my best friend's alive as often as I was participating).
For our topic here, I think self-extradition is the pertinent point.
My sense of will power, "if only I could just stop..." I wonder if this torment isn't a stand in blocking a greater fear... of pure causality that the self is forced to hallucinate it can control. Thinking you would be saved if only you could quit is so comforting, comforting enough that you don't see the future where you successfully quit and are grinded into pieces by a bus or rot in cancerous decomposition in a ward.
"if only I could just stop..." is a habit. I've seen junkies spontaneously break the loop, have that thought, and really make efforts and have success in stopping as others reinforce the habit and leech the possbility of acting on these opportunitic thoughts of escape. It is an especially difficult pattern to break because of the exogenous (outside the body) factors involved (obviously it's super-convincing that you seem to have no willpower when I'm suddenly high again after breaking the umpteenth resolution to quit).
I'm going to die. It informs every moment of my life and when I forget, I try and reinforce the habit of reminding myself. But I've become committed to the expansion of my conscious experience. So dying able to perceive more than I do now and working towards that, again to the limits (BBT or otherwise) of innate biology, will satisfy me (in a sense, this amounts to constantly forming and breaking sets of habits - I'm obviously not removed from my social circumstance).
If the prostheses can make you smell rats and dead fish every time the ice cream mans sweet methamphetamine melody sounds out, and this leads to you actually successfully resisting the urge, isn't your refusal to use a prostheses a FAILURE of your willpower?
But I have to say, the smell of rats and dead flesh don't seem powerful enough to crush my cravings. Dying flesh in particular doesn't seem pungent enough to put off the smokers shuffling outside the hospital doors, be it there own or anyone elses.
Lol - I tried. Your argument stands, it might be a failure to exercise my willpower not to use a prostheses. I think, there are many other arguments I'd exhaust first before contending with that though because there are so many ways "I" perceive that "I" can affect my experience before I'd feel compelled to resort to prostheses.
I await your riposte, senhor.
