not “feeding” the urge to smoke. He said, “If you don’t feed a stray cat, it quits coming to your door.” I like this metaphor, with its suggestion that, somewhere within you, there’s an animal that needs taming. After all, the modular model of the mind holds that, in a sense, there are a number of animals in your mind—modules that have a certain amount of independence and sometimes struggle with one another for dominance. What’s more, I’ve just suggested that, as with animals, the behavior of modules is shaped by positive reinforcement; if they keep getting rewarded for something, they’ll do
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