Originally Posted by
DylanS 
What I know:
- All organisms' primary directives are to a) avoid pain and b) seek pleasure (in that order)
- These directives enhance the chance of survival - the brain's #1 priority
- The greater the pleasure 'hit', the higher on the survival-of-the-species priority the activity goes (e.g. sexual activity provides a big boost of dopamine)
- The brain looks for the greatest pleasure for the least effort (the least 'pain')
- Humans, being too smart for our own good, have made the pleasure hits artificially high for almost no obtain-pain (e.g. think of a drive through fast food restaurant: the 'food' artificially manipulated to be unnaturally high in fat/protein (huge pleasure hit) and almost no 'pain' of obtaining!)
- Drugs, alcohol, foods artificially created to be high in fat/protein and/or sugar, are all items toward which the brain will say, "Hey, this item is super pleasurable and there's very little 'pain' (effort) needed to obtain it so this goes way up on my priority list to obtain!"
- That pain avoidance/pleasure seeking is evolutionarily created and designed for my survival. It is not evil. It is not a demon.
All of the above are more or less correct. No, the midbrain / limbic system is not inherently evil, for the simple reason that it cannot comprehend morality. It simply does what feels good, which usually correlates with survival, but not always.
Originally Posted by
DylanS The problem, as I see it, is that we've artificially enhanced pleasure too quickly for the rat brain to evolve and, if the statistics on drug addiction, alcohol addiction and obesity are any indicator, it's going to be our undoing. We humans are using our incredible creativity to our own detriment: make pleasure greater and greater and the pain of obtaining lower and lower. The rat brain can't resist. It is evolutionarily unable to resist.
Correct. Synthetic, mood-altering hedonic drugs have not been around long enough for them to have a significant effect on human evolution. In short, our brains simply did not evolve to deal with them.
Originally Posted by
DylanS So, to suddenly go back to the dark ages and call it a beast, demonizing it and polarizing the neocortex and the rat brain as outright enemies...
In AVRT, you are not polarizing the entire mid-brain and its normal, healthy survival functions, just the artificially-created drive for drugs and alcohol. As for the dark ages, the ancients may not have had the understanding of biology that we have now, but they certainly did have an intuitive understanding that pleasure-drives rum amok would be one's undoing. Why do you think the Bible has so my injunctions against drunkenness?
Originally Posted by
DylanS I'm seeing it as more of a mindless, childish, impulsive, blind piece of gray matter. Value to my survival? You bet. In a natural environment, over eons of evolution, did it enhance, indeed insure, survival? Absolutely. In this new world, where humans have artificially enhanced pleasure, is it fooled - are the primary survival directives perverted to my own destruction? Without a doubt.
For the purposes of AVRT, it doesn't matter how you look at it. The bottom line is that a new, artificially-created, perverted survival drive has been born, and that instead of pointing north, towards life, points south, towards death. It is this this perverted drive, and only this, that is coined "the Beast" in AVRT. The term may have religious overtones, and indeed those who are religious will intuitively sense this, but it also happens to correlate with basic biology.