Illusions, Star Trek And Biochemistry

First, let's start with something beautiful.

I don't typically cry at sad or tragic things. I can shrug those off and see what's beyond them. Beautiful things bring me to tears and, looking at that image, I'm all choked up right now.

The look on the girl's face speaks volumes. She knows mommy loved her so much that she fought the most horrible demons imaginable because she couldn't bear to be apart from her little girl. As that little girl grows up, her appreciation for her mom will only grow as her understanding of just how desperate the battle really was matures.

That image might as well be Aquinas' 6th proof of the existence of God as far as I'm concerned.

As I continue to fight my own battles with addiction, I've increasingly turned to ChatGPT to understand what's happening inside of me. Why does my emotional side take over sometimes and overrule my rational side? Recently, I asked it to tell me about the long-term effects of heavy drinking on moods and emotions. Here's what it said.

Heavy drinking significantly disrupts the brain's delicate balance of neurotransmitters, the chemical messengers responsible for regulating mood, emotions, and behavior. Two of the most affected neurotransmitters are serotonin and dopamine, which play critical roles in maintaining mental health.

1. Serotonin Disruption (Anxiety and Depression):

• Serotonin is often referred to as the "feel-good" neurotransmitter because it helps regulate mood, sleep, and emotional stability.
• Alcohol initially boosts serotonin levels, creating feelings of relaxation and euphoria. However, with regular heavy drinking, serotonin production is suppressed, leading to low baseline levels.
• This can result in persistent anxiety, irritability, and depression, especially when alcohol is not present in the system.
• Over time, this creates a vicious cycle where a person drinks to feel better, but the alcohol ultimately worsens their mood when it wears off.

2. Dopamine Disruption (Reward and Motivation):

• Dopamine is associated with pleasure, motivation, and reward. Drinking alcohol stimulates dopamine release, which creates that "high" feeling people associate with drinking.
• Chronic alcohol use depletes dopamine stores and reduces the brain’s ability to produce it naturally.
• As a result, people may feel unmotivated, joyless, and emotionally flat during periods of sobriety, making it harder to resist drinking again.
• This also leads to tolerance, where more alcohol is required to achieve the same dopamine-driven high, increasing dependence.

Anxiety and depression are regular visitors in my life these days. They create illusions that are very, very real to me. It reminds me of the Talosians in the original Star Trek pilot. The inhabitants of Talos IV had the ability to create utterly convincing illusions in the minds of the Enterprise crew and with those illusions, control their actions. Note that this episode was the one Roddenberry used to pitch the series to Paramount and had cast members not in the eventual series.

Anyway, here's one of the scenes that keeps coming to mind.

My serotonin and dopamine systems have been so wrecked by years of drinking that my life is regularly invaded by illusions telling me things are worse than they really are. I react to those illusions as if they were real.

When I work hard and achieve things in my job, when I take care of my family through substantial sacrifice, when my colleagues and family show me love and appreciation, the illusions can make me see things that aren't there. It's like this scene from that same pilot episode.

I'm not always seeing reality. I don't even know when I'm seeing reality and when I'm seeing illusions. If my serotonin and dopamine systems are whacked, how can I be sure that my emotional responses to events are ever appropriate?

This is what I was on about when I said that our moral system must be universal, objective and ordered. It lives in a world of biochemistry where our emotions can be hijacked by addiction. The hijacking may be undetectable, causing you to rationalize behaviors and responses that aren't driven by reality at all, but driven by you being loaded or sober.

What is right and what is wrong must exist outside of you because you cannot always trust what you perceive. If you author your own ethical system, you have no idea if that system was based on total nonsense because your perception of reality has been warped by potentially invisible things beyond your control. Things like biochemistry.

Optimism

My conversation with AI have been eye-opening and encouraging. Everyone has their own mechanisms for success and mine have always hinged on me being able to see what is going on, to see the future.

Now that I see that my emotional rollercoaster isn't real, it's just an illusion placed in my head by the Talosians, I can at least partially dismiss it. Writing this blog post further cements that insight in my head. I am fighting the dull, foggy, warped illusions from my wrecked biochemistry with a bright, true wisdom that comes from understanding.

I can see the future much better now.