Excellent paper here about addiction and meaning
It forms the link between meaning and addictive bahaviours.
This model of addiction links Friston’s predictive processing (i.e. the brain’s function to avoid uncertainty or surprise) by choosing paths (seeking relevance) towards a goal (e.g. substance or state of mind or a feeling of certainty) which can become habitual and therefore ‘addictive’.
This active movement towards ‘reducing uncertainty’ is linked to the dopaminergic release because end state (taking the substance) was not a surprise in the end. It feels like the completion of navigating from one state to a desired future state successfully – and it is. The fact that this limited path towards a fake ‘certainty’ in the context of uncertainty gives the impression of successfully navigating uncertainty towards a goal. The neurochemical release is therefore signalling that the brain did successfully what it was designed to find this path. And in the face of further uncertainty (everyday life!), this limited path towards uncertainty can become habitual (done over and over again).
But the entire feedback loop has become delusional because the habit is bad in the long term for the person’s survival because they lose perspective on other things that are important for long term survival – connections, sustenance, relationships etc. It is therefore a bad habit or an addiction even though the person feels that they have atuned to their environment.
The way out of this delusional cycle is the realisation of this maladapation to survival (a shock realisation of reality) and the openness to finding the things that really matter. It is therefore a new way of a life (a new path that needs to be found).
This links a lot of the work that we did on the Dopaminferno with finding meaning. In many ways, addiction is a type of ‘inverse just cause’ at the human level.
Written by Mark Miller et al (colleague of Vervaeke, I believe)