The problem with talking about behaviors’ physical substrate is that we can’t talk about cause/effect across the physical and social realms. Neurotransmitters d

The problem with talking about behaviors’ physical substrate is that we can’t talk about cause/effect across the physical and social realms. Neurotransmitters don’t have causal effects on the “mind” any more than the wake of a ship has causal effects on its plotted course. Sure, dopamine levels change in response to addictive behavior, but they don’t cause it, and talking about causes in this realm is probably not as helpful or expedient as talking about cause I’d the personal/social realm. Reducing behaviors to neurotransmitters discards all the more complicated things we do during addiction like experiencing shame, changing lifestyle, eating, or sleeping habits, or even the higher level frameworks through which we rationalize and put value on things in the world. Case in point: how can we possibly describe quitting cold turkey in a chemical framework? People do it all the time, yet it seems to be more of an act of moral courage than of basic, biologically driven behavior. An insidious side effect of brain chemical teleology is that it victimizes us in an unnecessarily deterministic manner. “You can hardly help yourself, see, your brain is literally working against you by producing evil chemicals in insufficient/inappropriate quantities. Take $x mi drug to correct yourself!” Instead of simplified and erroneous medical speak we might as well talk of the cold-turkey-quitter as having cast off a demon from their soul. At least in that framework the individual retains agency.