Well thats... a take. Do you believe you have any agency at all in your life? Or is everything controlled by the puppet master?
Yes, we have agency. But it's not absolute. For instance, you don't have the agency not to use the toilet for days on end (or end up going somewhere less sanitary) if you're eating and drinking.
If you're on your third day without food, you don't have complete agency not to eat whatever food is put in front of you, even if there's some negative consequence to it. Yes, technically you can choose not to. But even if you know, without a doubt, that you will have another opportunity to get food before you would literally starve to death, there are biological and neurological processes at work that make it very, very, very hard to choose not to eat the food in front of you.
I have ADHD. In a very real sense, I am "addicted to doing engaging tasks". I don't always have full agency to choose to do a task that I know will be stressful and unrewarding. My brain treats it as if it is painful and dangerous.
Many games create a dopamine loop that is very hard to break out of. Many game companies have done neurological research to understand how to make that even stronger.
Agency is not a binary thing: you aren't either completely free of outside influence, or completely under the control of another. There are influences all around us all the time, some of which are heavy and obvious like near-starvation, others of which are much more subtle like advertising.
However much you may think you are immune to outside influences, you're not. None of us are. That's just an undeniable fact of how human brains work.
I understand that we do not live in a vacuum. Yes of course we respond to stimuli, that's part of what it means to be alive. What I am advocating for is more agency in your own life.
You are the one in the drivers seat. Act like it and your life will be better. Pretend you don't have agency and your life will get worse. It's really that simple. I think that's why your original comment triggered me so much.
Aside from that, people like you make me sick. Acting like everyone who has an addiction, or a mental illness, just has to "act like they're in the driver's seat" and everything will be all better.
It just makes it painfully obvious how privileged you are, and how you take that privilege as proof of your rightness and completeness—and other people's lack of that privilege as proof of their inferiority.
Question. The addict you mentioned. Do you believe they more or less likely to recover if they believe they have agency rather than believing "informed choice is an illusion" as the other commenter so eloquently put it?
The question is rhetorical. The answer is obvious.
Choice is either fully in our hands, or fully an illusion.
We either have full agency, or no agency.
I understand full well about the importance of a growth vs entity mindset, but that's not going to stop the very powerful dopamine-seeking urge of the brain. At best it can keep you moving forward toward something that will (eg, rehab, ADHD medications, parental controls that prevent you using gambling apps on your own phone). But unless you've experienced one of these genuine mental disorders, preaching at people who do or have had them about how easy it is to get out of it, you just have to believe you can do it, is nothing but condescending bullshit. However many "vices" you have.
I never said it was easy, and I never even said you can get out of it at all. I simply said you're better off believing one thing over another.
>that's not going to stop the very powerful dopamine-seeking urge of the brain
This is our fundamental disagreement. Plenty of people have their urges under control. Believing you are somehow "different" or your brain is "broken" is the ultimate toxic mindset. You can't fix your life until you fix your mind
Bye now.
> As long as it's not a forced choice, the user/player downloads the game at their own will, knows exactly what they are getting
Most ads are not about informing us but manipulating into buying their crap.
You would also need to prove to me that a deterministic universe where individuals do not have the capacity to calculate the future is somehow distinct from a non-deterministic universe from the individual's perspective