The corridor narrowed

Addiction is a corridor narrowed faster than alternatives could be widened.

A pathway repeatedly activated raises a noise floor around the site. The receptors recalibrate. The prediction of reward updates. The people around the person adjust their expectations.

The noise floor is what every other pathway must compete against to register as available.

As it rises, alternatives drop below it. Not absent. Not removed. Unavailable to the person’s modelling at the resolution the modelling now runs at.

That is the corridor narrowed. R holds the prior coupling’s changes against the present modelling. Override is still real. It is operating inside the corridor the prior coupling built.

Withdrawal is the same contraction at a different timescale. The architecture has been holding itself at a configuration the substance supplied. Remove the substance and the substrate cannot recalibrate fast enough to stay viable without outside support. For some substances the mortality risk during acute withdrawal is not trivial.

This is the short edition of Ø Applications — a summary. Where a step is compressed here, the original carries it in full. The original book (PDF) · This edition (PDF)

The same page on the420code.org: the420code.org/models/applications/07-cognitive-sovereignty-and-addiction/