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Without Philosophy, Science becomes Scientism

by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

May 7, 2020



When Stephen Hawking observed that philosophy is dead (which itself is a philosophical statement, of course, being insusceptible of inductive proof), he was saying so triumphantly, as if this were a good thing. The reality however is that when science ignores philosophy it becomes mere scientism.

Take the search for modern anti-depressants. The logic behind this venture is roughly as follows: find a chemical trait that is held in common by the maximum number of depressed individuals and then seek to change that trait by targeted chemical intervention.

To a materialist scientist, this statement sounds like pure science, but the fact is that it makes sense only if the scientist who affirms it is holding at least one major philosophical assumption about psychopharmacological intervention, namely that we can chemically intervene at some precise point in the causal process of a psychological condition without regard for the larger picture, i.e. without any proof that this similarity that we are thereby treating is a real cause of pathology as opposed to a mere symptom of it.

Many people suffering from headache are known to wrinkle their eyebrows. We do not know why, exactly, but we have noticed that almost all headache sufferers do this. We could come up with an intervention that keeps the patients' eyebrows straight, will they or nil they, but that intervention is based on an assumption: namely, that we are actually intervening at a meaningful and relevant location in a causal chain. Likewise, we can notice that many depression sufferers have a similar type of brain chemistry. We can intervene at this level too and attempt to correct the patient's brain chemistry, but as with the headache, we can only do this by assuming that we are intervening in response to a germane causative factor viz the patient's depression. If we intervene chemically to change a non-causative factor, we are doing no more than straightening eyebrows. In the case of the depressed patient, we are actually causing harm however because we are playing around with brain chemistry that had no need of adjustment in the first place, the anomalous chemistry being a mere symptom of a far more relevant upstream causal factor (or factors) of which we are ignorant.

Of course, in the case of depression, Robert Whitaker has already documented how the anti-depressants of Big Pharma actually cause the chemical imbalances that they purport to treat. But even if we accept that depressed people share a specific brain chemistry, it does not follow that we should intervene by brute force, as it were, to change that specific chemistry. And if we do so, we are not proceeding by the mere dictates of science, but rather we are proceeding under the philosophical assumptions of materialist reductionism.

This is why psychedelic therapy for depression is generally scorned by the scientific community, not because such treatment is non-scientific but because its success would pose an implicit challenge to modern materialism 1, according to which psychopharmacological interventions are "scientific" (and therefore valid and potentially useful) only to the extent that they are chemically pinpointed and quantifiable.

When modern scientists say that "philosophy is dead," they're essentially saying: "We believe so strongly in the materialist approach that we will no longer even acknowledge that it is based on premises that are susceptible of debate." In other words, to say that "philosophy is dead" is to declare victory in the war of approaches to healing. It's an intolerant statement, to put it mildly, because it says to its opponents (those, for instance, who wish to use psychedelics for psychological healing): "There's no more debate allowed. Materialism is ontologically true and therefore we will proceed according to that understanding, straightening as many eyebrows as we need to in order to make our point!"

This would be funny but for the fact that materialist reductionism already has a body count: It is responsible for the fact that 1 in 8 American males and 1 in 4 American females are addicted to Big Pharma meds -- substances that were created and justified under the materialist assumption that depression sufferers are basically identical clones who are amenable to a one-size-fits-all therapy that involves intervening at the most microscopic level possible.

Such an approach has been a colossal failure, of course, since during its ascendancy over the last 50 years, America has become the most depressed and addicted country in the world. But scientists will never learn from these mistakes if they believe, like Hawking, that materialist reductionism is above criticism, that it is no longer just a way of seeing the world but THE way of seeing it.

There is a word for this kind of arrogant materialist belief that willfully ignores its own debatable premises: that word is "scientism."

Author's Follow-up: September 24, 2022



It's hard to tell the full truth about America's befuddled views on drugs, because, ironically, drug-hating Americans really believe in the psychiatric pill mill 2 . I have female friends who could spend hours chatting with their cronies about the collection of SSRIs that they are currently "on" and how their therapist is thinking of trying a new one, and how the apparent effects of one differ from the apparent effects of another, etc. etc.

This would only make sense, however, if there were no other drugs on the planet than the ones created by Big Pharma . But such discussions sound inane to me when I consider that almost all of the competition for Big Pharma 3 4 meds is outlawed. Surely, these chat sessions should be about ending the Drug War (or this drug apartheid, as Julian Buchanan calls it), rather than cheerfully making a virtue of the necessity of choosing among a paltry list of highly habituating substances, substances that were created based on the philosophical presumption that human beings are interchangeable robots when it comes to their experience of sadness.

For those who still believe that the meds in question actually "cure" depression (presumably by fixing a chemical imbalance), I would ask them, what do you mean by "cure"? If my depression were "cured," I would be up and about, living large, and heading inexorably toward self-fulfillment. I do not consider myself cured by being tranquilized such that I accept my humble lot in life and my failure to achieve my goals. So the medicalization metaphor fails, simply because those materialist who assert they have found a "cure" for depression must be able to tell us what they mean by "cure." If their definition is not my definition, then it doesn't matter how many arguments they adduce about chemical causes of behavior -- their meds do not "cure" my depression, for the simple reason that I do not accept their definition of "cure," which, in the psychological realm, is not an objective concept but rather a subjective one.


October 22, 2022

Then too there are plenty of reasons to believe that SSRIs and SNRIs cause the chemical imbalance they purport to fix. That's why they cause such dependence, because once brain chemistry is altered, the body comes to accept that alteration and, as it were, demand it. For more on this topic, see the works of Robert Whitaker, Irving Kirsch and Julie Holland.

Author's Follow-up: September 21, 2024

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up


These are the kinds of posts that lose me followers. Remember, however, that I am opining on ideal worlds here, not second-guessing any particular choice that you yourself have made in life given the niggardly offerings of the healthcare pharmacopoeia in the age of the Drug War. Everyone will react to that unconstitutional disaster in their own way, and if you got some benefit out of the paltry list of materialist replacements for outlawed medicines, good for you. Those who believe in holistic healing, however, will reject the entire idea of confronting sadness on a strictly molecular basis, especially when those who hawk such treatments enjoy a monopoly on mood medicine thanks to drug law.


What Have We Learned?

September 21, 2024


I learned that...


1) Materialist disdain for philosophy is, in fact, based on philosophical arguments, even if the materialist is not philosophically gifted enough to recognize this fact, much less the precise nature of the assumptions inherent in said arguments.

2) The Drug War privileges the materialist approach to life by outlawing all substances that might provide us with experiential evidence of more productive alternatives.



Notes:

1: How materialists lend a veneer of science to the lies of the drug warriors DWP (up)
2: Antidepressants and the War on Drugs DWP (up)
3: How Drug Company Money Is Undermining Science Seife, Charles, Scientific American, 2012 (up)
4: Why Is Biopharma Paying 75% of The FDA’s Drug Division Budget? LaMartinna, John, Forbes, 2022 (up)


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
  • David Chalmers and the Drug War
  • 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 Bernardo Kastrup reckons without the drug war
  • I've got a bone to pick with Jim Hogshire
  • In Praise of Thomas Szasz
  • Materialism and the Drug War Part II
  • Open Letter to Dr. Carl L. Hart
  • Open letter to Wolfgang Smith
  • Unscientific American: the hypocritical materialism of Elon Musk
  • 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




    Rather than protesting prohibition as a crackdown on academic freedom, today's scientists are collaborating with the drug war by promoting shock therapy and SSRIs, thereby profiting from the monopoly that the drug war gives them in selling mind and mood medicine.

    If NIDA covered all drugs (not just politically ostracized drugs), they'd produce articles like this: "Aspirin continues to kill hundreds." "Penicillin misuse approaching crisis levels." "More bad news about Tylenol and liver damage." "Study revives cancer fears from caffeine."

    The press is having a field day with the Matthew Perry story. They love to have a nice occasion to demonize drugs. I wonder how many decades must pass before they realize that people are killed by ignorance and a corrupted drug supply, not by the drugs themselves.

    That's why we damage the brains of the depressed with shock therapy rather than let them use coca or opium. That's why many regions allow folks to kill themselves but not to take drugs that would make them want to live. The Drug War is a perversion of social priorities.

    Psychedelic retreats tell us how scientific they are. But science is the problem. Science today insists that we ignore all obvious benefits of drugs. It's even illegal to suggest that psilocybin has health benefits: that's "unproven" according to the Dr. Spocks of science.

    By reading "Drug Warriors and Their Prey," I begin to understand why I encounter a wall of silence when I write to authors and professors on the subject of "drugs." The mere fact that the drug war inspires such self-censorship should be grounds for its immediate termination.

    The December Scientific American features a story called "The New Nuclear Age," about a trillion-dollar plan to add 100s of ICBM's to 5 states, which an SA editorial calls "kick me" signs. This Neanderthal plan comes from pols who think that compassion-boosting drugs are evil!

    Politicians protect a drug that kills 178,000 a year via a constitutional amendment, and then they outlaw all less lethal alternatives. To enforce the ban, they abrogate the 4th amendment and encourage drug testing to ensure that drug war heretics starve.

    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.

    If we can go overseas to burn poppy plants, then Islamic countries should be free to come to the United States to burn our grape vines.


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






    Man, you should have seen them kicking Edgar Allan Poe
    America's Invisible Addiction Crisis


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    Copyright 2025, Brian Ballard Quass Contact: quass@quass.com

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