> Are humans not in control of what they get addicted to?

When you see an attractive woman, do you have a choice about whether you think she's attractive?

I would say that is so instinctual as to not be a choice, even though different people have different opinions about who is attractive. And yet we know that men in particular go to great lengths to be with attractive women, some to the point where it becomes an obsession.

What about food? Do you not like things that have a bit of fat, sugar, and maybe some crunch to it? There are clearly people who, despite having all the necessary information, will eat too much, to the point where they become ill from it. How is that a choice?

Every decision that we make, at every moment in our lives, is exactly how an LLM chooses the next token to output - at the end of our thought chain, there is allways one that wins with the highest probability.

Its highlighted well in the psychological effect of tossing a coin when you are not sure about something, not to make the choice for you, but to see how you feel about the outcome, which tells you what you really want.

So for someone that overeats, and then feels ill, knowing that would happen, is simply a case of them valuing the enjoyment of food over feeling ill. If they were perfectly logical, without emotions, they would overeat, feel ill, and then not complain about feeling ill because they understood that they did it to themselves and this is a necessary sacrifice for the enjoyment of prior. But because humans are emotional we react to feeling ill with negative emotion, which externally makes it seem like we made the wrong choice, but we didnt.