a diction

When thinking of my recently revived addiction to video games, I cannot help the urge to ponder the evolutionary function of addictions in general. Fish have fins to swim, birds wings to fly, and almost all humans have addictions or at least the proclivity for them.  But why?  Taking much of Darwin’s theories of natural & sexual selection into account, trying to extract the survival function ( morality here is also seen as a function of survival ) of humanity’s inclination towards addictions can be insightful.

I believe the source of addiction is to be found in architecture, more specifically architectural spaces, and even more specifically, in the grammars of these spaces that govern our respective places.  I am not suggesting that, for example, a boy who grows up in the Catholic church will become addicted to religion and like a robot mimic the actions of Jesus by virtue of existing within the architectural space or ideological grammar of the church.  That would be preposterous.  In fact, history has shown us quite the opposite.  The leaders and nations most addicted to religion have often been the most destructive and ruthless.

But how does addiction inform our species’ survival?  Moreover, how does a nation’s mourning the loss of 13 students in a school massacre on one day, but in the very next day ignoring the massacring of an entire school of elementary children in another nation, inform the perpetuation or destruction of humanity?  The answer lies in the space-time grammar distortion of addiction.

A human’s ability to distort their space-time grammar is called that person’s imagination.  Imagination, when seen as a function of species survival, explains why humans are a particularly versatile species when it comes to surviving.  The more creative species, able to survive in more environments and defend against predators will survive longer and better than a species that cannot do these things particularly well.  When speaking intra-species, the more creative the specimen, the more likely that specimen is to pass on its genes by utilizing more creative and diverse courting methods.

The parenting of addiction by imagination is entirely plausible.  Addiction is nothing more than a dependency on an imagined state.  More importantly, what evolutionary gain does a specimen glean from being dependent upon an imagined state?

None.  Specimens that have more intense addictions are less prepared to survive than those who do not, so why have addiction in the first place?  They are a side-effect of a few million years of evolution paired with a few thousand years of human society.  The same is the case with moths.  They were designed to follow the moon for navigational purposes, because a million or so years ago the moon was the dominant light source in the sky at nighttime.  This aided their survival then, but now, the same genetic traits that were evolved to help the moth survive, instead draws them to an untimely death.  That’s because biological evolution is a lot slower than social evolution.

The same is the case with humans.  The architecture of our various societies has warped our spatial grammar such that the same urge rooted in jealousy and sperm competition that our ancestors once felt a few million years ago with spears and stones, our present day leaders feel but now they have missiles and atomic weapons. 

In short, the various social and biological mechanisms that we once used for survival dominate those mechanisms that would “make for a better world”.  It is hard for a religion or an ideology to stand in the face of millions of years of evolution.  By extension, addiction is simply the result of an imbalance between societal evolution and human evolution.  It is the inability of the mind to distinguish between the warping of the mind’s space-time grammars and the mind’s evolutionary obligations.  The two fuse and become one.

And as I stare down at my glowing controller, I can’t help but to feel like the moth flying dangerously close to the flame, humanity drawn dangerously close to extinction unable to compensate biologically for the existence of current technologies.  

And then I just stop thinking and start playing halo…