Is life nothing more than a series of serotonin and dopamine fluctuations?

You go to Walmart, you're starving, and you have a new credit card with a 20% interest rate. You see all these wonderful items, food that makes you salivate, shiny electronic devices that look like they're worth a million dollars each, the smell of fresh leather...the pleasure takes you on a dopamine high and you just have to have these things. You feel incomplete without them because you're addicted...a process that takes anywhere from the first few seconds you see them to several years of conditioning by advertisements. You buy everything in sight and excuse yourself by saying, "It's not that big a deal. I have the money. I have a $2,000 credit limit." You spend all your cash, max out all your credit cards, and take all your new goodies back to your car, where you barely have enough room for all this. Suddenly it hits you that your wife or husband isn't going to take this well, so you plan on how you're going to ease them into the news and justify what you've done. You find it ends up being easier than you thought...at least for now. But they're laying people off at work and you're not getting any overtime anymore and you're three months behind on the mortgage payments. You and your family are arguing more and more as the bills get larger when you thought they would get smaller as the dopamine levels plummet faster and faster, sapping your motivation. You blow up at your boss who treats you like dirt anyway because his serotonin has been low for years, and he's been looking for an excuse to fire you anyway(the only reason you lasted this long was because of seniority), so you get canned, you lose the house, and your wife or husband takes off and mails you the divorce papers. Your serotonin levels plummet even deeper than your dopamine, and you find yourself in a bitter, hopeless depression. Not long after, you take up shoplifting to sustain the addiction you can no longer afford, as serotonin and dopamine are no longer barriers to your desire to break the law. You get caught, land in jail, where you have a quasi-nervous breakdown/quasi-religious experience, where you find God. Your serotonin shoots up sky high and you feel like loving everyone. As the dopamine levels follow closely behind, you find yourself spreading the "good news", and it's no coincidence that you do this when things are really bad--when you need that dopamine boost the most. You're on top of the world and nothing can stop you, and you get released from jail on good behavior, where you get another job, go to Walmart, and max out your credit cards to sustain the dopamine high.





(this took longer than I thought it would, hehe)|||If it's not serotonin and dopamine (and epinephrine and testosterone and endorphin, etc. etc.) then what is it? What's driving our chemical manifestations? A soul? A vibrating string? Nothing? Where does self awareness come from? Does it not really exist? Does it inherently exist? How? Where?





Believe it or not you're not the first one to ask, but the fact of the matter is that it's something we can never prove one way or another, it's metaphysical; it's 'beyond physics'. The best we can do is come up with something that makes sense to us. The guy above me seems to think he has it figured out.|||basically.|||That's great. The best explanation of modern life I have ever read.|||Obsess much?|||Thats how it works, though I am paid off on my credit cards and avoid Wal-mart in the area I live :D.|||Looks like a learning experience to me.|||Soul creates the body of flesh to learn. Life is a learning lesson. Seems you are then not learning the lessons as presented to you and choosing to blame them on the chemicals of the brain. Most choose to not take responsibility for their own actions and choose to blame something or someone else for their problems. Such as why does God allow bad things to happen. Man creates these problems not God. Should be why does man allow this to happen.