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How AI turned William James into a Drug Warrior

letter to the editors of New Scientist

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

October 6, 2023



In response to Daniel Cossins' 2018 article about "Discriminating Algorithms:

We need another article from Daniel, this time about "Politically Correct Algorithms" (aka "Philosophically Anachronistic Algorithms").

I recently visited deepai.org where I queried the AI version of William James. I wanted to know what James thought about the ongoing push to outlaw laughing gas in the UK and the US. The use of laughing gas, after all, convinced William James that we must study altered states in order to understand ultimate reality and the true nature of consciousness.

The response of the AI version of William James sounded suspiciously modern. Regarding laughing gas, he suggested that we "limit use to professionals."

That statement reflects a classic Drug Warrior lie: namely, that the only stakeholders in the legalization debate are the impressionable young people whom we fail to educate about substance use. But James was not programmed like that. He did not attend DARE classes as a kid that indoctrinated him in the drug-hating beliefs of Christian Science. He did not watch endless TV shows as a kid whose plots were tweaked by the White House to promote Drug War prejudices. He would have recognized, when pressed for elaboration, that laughing gas could be a godsend for the depressed and a worthy replacement for alcohol. Nor would he have advanced the elitist doctrine that only professionals should use the substance in order to achieve altered states.

AI algorithms put Drug War propaganda into the mouth of William James -- and the technophile materialists at New Scientist could not care less.


You may say that these claims are debatable, but that is my whole point. It is wrong for AI algorithms to put modern answers in the mouths of historical figures by assuming that they would share our modern prejudices.

The AI programmers should instead have the honesty to respond to questions like mine with a humble disclaimer, stating that the query is far too "fraught" to conduce to a quick answer based on the parsing of Big Data.

Instead, they pretend that no answer is too hard for them, even if they have to falsify history in order to keep up that air of omniscience.

*william*

Materialism




In "The Varieties of Religious Experience," William James demonstrated how materialists are blind to the depth and meaning of psychological states of ecstasy and transcendence -- or in other words the states that are peculiar to mystics like St. Teresa... and to those who use psychoactive substances like laughing gas. The medical materialist is dogmatically dismissive of such states, which explains why they can pretend that godsend medicines that elate and inspire have no positive uses whatsoever:

"To the medical mind these ecstasies signify nothing but suggested and imitated hypnoid states, on an intellectual basis of superstition, and a corporeal one of degeneration and hysteria. Undoubtedly these pathological conditions have existed in many and possibly in all the cases, but that fact tells us nothing about the value for knowledge of the consciousness which they induce."


And so materialist scientists collaborate with the Drug War by refusing to see glaringly obvious drug benefits. They acknowledge only those benefits that they believe are visible under a microscope. The Hindu religion would not exist today had materialist scientists held Soma to such a standard. But that's the absurd pass to which prohibition eventually brings us in a society wherein materialist science is the new god: scientists are put in charge of deciding whether we are allowed to imagine new religions or not.

This materialist bias is inspired in turn by behaviorism, the anti-indigenous doctrine of JB Watson that makes the following inhumane claim:

"Concepts such as belief and desire are heritages of a timid savage past akin to concepts referring to magic."

According to this view, the hopes and the dreams of a "patient" are to be ignored. Instead, we are to chart their physiology and brain chemistry.

JB Watson's Behaviorism is a sort of Dr. Spock with a vengeance. It is the perfect ideology for a curmudgeon, because it would seem to justify all their inability to deal with human emotions. Unfortunately, the attitude has knock-on effects because it teaches drug researchers to ignore common sense and to downplay or ignore all positive usage reports or historic lessons about positive drug use. The "patient" needs to just shut up and let the doctors decide how they are doing. It is a doctrine that dovetails nicely with Drug War ideology, because it empowers the researcher to ignore the obvious: that all drugs that elate have potential uses as antidepressants.

That statement can only be denied when one assumes that "real" proof of efficacy of a psychoactive medicine must be determined by a doctor, and that the patient's only job is to shut up because their hopes and dreams and feelings cannot be accurately displayed and quantified on a graph or a bar chart.





  • A Quantum of Hubris
  • Assisted Suicide and the War on Drugs
  • Behaviorism and the War on Drugs
  • Beta Blockers and the Materialist Tyranny of the War on Drugs
  • Common Sense and the Drug War
  • Constructive criticism of the MAPS strategy for re-legalizing MDMA
  • David Chalmers and the Drug War
  • Dogmatic Dullards
  • Every Day and in every way, you are getting more and more bamboozled by Drug War propaganda
  • Five problems with The Psychedelic Handbook by Rick Strassman
  • How AI turned William James into a Drug Warrior
  • How Bernardo Kastrup reckons without the Drug War
  • How materialists turned me into a patient for life
  • How Scientific Materialism Keeps Godsend Medicines from the Depressed
  • I've got a bone to pick with Jim Hogshire
  • In Praise of Thomas Szasz
  • Materialism and the Drug War
  • Materialism and the Drug War Part II
  • Open Letter to Dr. Carl L. Hart
  • Open letter to Wolfgang Smith
  • Science News Unveils Shock Therapy II
  • The Inhumanity of Drug Prohibition
  • The Poorly Hidden Materialist Agenda at Scientific American
  • Unscientific American: the hypocritical materialism of Elon Musk
  • What Can the Chemical Hold?
  • Why Scientists Should Not Judge Drugs
  • William James rolls over in his grave as England bans Laughing Gas
  • Without Philosophy, Science becomes Scientism





  • Ten Tweets

    against the hateful war on US




    In "The Book of the Damned," Charles Fort writes about the data that science has damned, by which he means "excluded." The fact that drugs can inspire and elate is one such fact, although when Fort wrote his anti-materialist broadside, drug prohibition was in its infancy.

    We deal with "drug" risks differently than any other risk. Aspirin kills thousands every year. The death rate from free climbing is huge. But it's only with "drug use" that we demand zero deaths (a policy which ironically causes far more deaths than necessary).

    Cocaine is not evil. Opium is not evil. Drug prohibition is evil.

    Drugs like opium and psychedelics should come with the following warning: "Outlawing of this product may result in inner-city gunfire, civil wars overseas, and rigged elections in which drug warriors win office by throwing minorities in jail."

    In "Psychedelic Refugee," Rosemary Leary writes: "Fueled by small doses of LSD, almost everything was amusing or weird." -- Rosemary Leary In a non-brainwashed world, such testimony would suggest obvious ways to help the depressed.

    Drug use is judged by different standards than any other risky activity in the western world. One death can lead to outrage, even though that death might be statistically insignificant.

    In "The Book of the Damned," Charles Fort shows how science damns (i.e. excludes) facts that it cannot assimilate into a system of knowledge. Fort could never have guessed, however, how thoroughly science would eventually "damn" all positive facts about "drugs."

    "The Harrison [Narcotics] Act made the drug peddler, and the drug peddler makes drug addicts.” --Robert A. Schless, 1925.

    The drug war is being used as a wrecking ball to destroy democratic freedoms. It has destroyed the 4th amendment and freedom of religion and given the police the right to confiscate the property of peaceful and productive citizens.

    Almost every mainstream article about psychology and consciousness is nonsense these days because it ignores the way that drug prohibition has stymied our investigation of such subjects.


    Click here to see All Tweets against the hateful War on Us






    There is nothing to debate: the drug war is wrong, root and branch
    Physics has found a theory of everything


    Copyright 2025 abolishthedea.com, Brian Quass

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