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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   30931 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 7, 2022

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Why does alcohol 'reveal desires' but other drugs not though? I don't think neuroscience is developed enough to conclude that "alcohol reveals desires" mechanistically.

I literally linked multiple pieces explaining the well studied link between alcohol and suppressing the PFC, and its role.

Your first piece is from an addiction center. In my experience browsing the web, addiction center webpages are often just an amalgam of various science-sounding claims that don't really mean anything but very emphatically suggest that addiction is bad, and scientific, and should be treated. They're just not worth reading. That doesn't mean any individual claim on the website is wrong, just that one shouldn't cite them. Wikipedia is leagues above them.

Alcohol affects the prefrontal cortex first. This part of the brain is responsible for judgment, reasoning, and suppressing impulsive behavior

The prefrontal cortex does a whole bunch of things. Plausibly even most things.

The basic activity of this brain region is considered to be orchestration of thoughts and actions in accordance with internal goals.[2] Many authors have indicated an integral link between a person's will to live, personality, and the functions of the prefrontal cortex.[3] This brain region has been implicated in executive functions, such as planning, decision making, short-term memory, personality expression, moderating social behavior and controlling certain aspects of speech and language.[4][5][6] Executive function relates to abilities to differentiate among conflicting thoughts, determine good and bad, better and best, same and different, future consequences of current activities, working toward a defined goal, prediction of outcomes, expectation based on actions, and social "control" (the ability to suppress urges that, if not suppressed, could lead to socially unacceptable outcomes).

That sounds like it covers all complex human behaviors, honestly (also imo this part of neuroscience is very messy and a lot of it is wrong, given how complicated people and their actions are, what is 'moderating social behavior', exactly, can we really attribute that to a brain region rather than much more complex higher level interaction, blablabla). And if you're suppressing all of that - that's not going to 'reveal true hidden desires', it's just gonna mess everything up. But impulses aren't discrete or ... real in any sense, they're just vague descriptions of complex, useful actions made by a complex system. A desire to be racist - like, if I read a bunch of studies and, like scott alexander, regretfully decide that there probably are racial differences in IQ, am I desiring to be racist? Why is there necessarily an innate desire to be racist component that's distinct from a complex network making decisions, and knocking out some parts of that, making it worse, might lead to things that 'sound racist', but that doesn't tell us anything direct about the desires of a person. Consider tourettes or harm OCD (and I could go on another tangent about that) - these people do not have a suppressed desire to say slurs or kill people in a normal sense, yet 'express' or 'feel' them anyway!

I'd argue that the PFC both 'suppresses impulsive behavior' and 'generates impulsive behavior', but not even in an absolute sense, as part of a really complicated set of interactions we don't really understand. So going from 'alcohol affects PFC + PFC suppresses behavior' -> 'alcohol releases suppressed behavior as a primary and separable effect' just isn't a reasonable conclusion - honestly, 'behaviors' aren't even a fixed thing, and 'suppressing an existing impulse' doesn't necessarily have any meaning outside some useful context. And in particular, concluding that 'in wino veritas' is not justified at all.

Your other source is "DRUNK - How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization - BY EDWARD SLINGERLAND", who is a a Canadian-American sinologist and philosopher. He is Distinguished University Scholar and Professor of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia. Again, not exactly a systematic review.

Slingerland's book actually goes into a great deal of neuroscience research on the topic. It's a great work of pop-sci, I highly recommend it.

A desire to be racist - like, if I read a bunch of studies and, like scott alexander, regretfully decide that there probably are racial differences in IQ, am I desiring to be racist? Why is there necessarily an innate desire to be racist component that's distinct from a complex network making decisions, and knocking out some parts of that, making it worse, might lead to things that 'sound racist', but that doesn't tell us anything direct about the desires of a person.

Desire might be the wrong framing. Belief in racism, which one naturally wishes to express but typically restrains for politeness, might be a better framing?

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