The things your nonverbal parts are doing are often bad strategies for achieving reasonable goals, and so there’s an inference problem to solve in figuring out what the underlying reasonable goal is. A lot of the things your nonverbal parts do are pica in a metaphorical sense (pica in a literal sense is e.g. eating ice cubes because of an iron deficiency). Your desire to eat a bag of chips, for example, might reflect an underlying goal of getting more salt or fat in your diet, because in the ancestral environment those things were rarer, but if you already have too much salt and fat in your diet then that’s not super helpful.
A more pica-like example: suppose you catch yourself watching a lot of TV. Depending on the content of the TV, this might reflect an underlying goal of having more social connection (say if you catch yourself watching a lot of How I Met Your Mother, where the main characters form a tightly-knit group of friends). TV’s not social connection, but it sort of vaguely resembles it closely enough to be kind of satisfying but not really. I think this is more what “akrasia” looks like a lot of the time.
The things your nonverbal parts are doing are often bad strategies for achieving reasonable goals, and so there’s an inference problem to solve in figuring out what the underlying reasonable goal is. A lot of the things your nonverbal parts do are pica in a metaphorical sense (pica in a literal sense is e.g. eating ice cubes because of an iron deficiency). Your desire to eat a bag of chips, for example, might reflect an underlying goal of getting more salt or fat in your diet, because in the ancestral environment those things were rarer, but if you already have too much salt and fat in your diet then that’s not super helpful.
A more pica-like example: suppose you catch yourself watching a lot of TV. Depending on the content of the TV, this might reflect an underlying goal of having more social connection (say if you catch yourself watching a lot of How I Met Your Mother, where the main characters form a tightly-knit group of friends). TV’s not social connection, but it sort of vaguely resembles it closely enough to be kind of satisfying but not really. I think this is more what “akrasia” looks like a lot of the time.