how reductive materialism ruins American healthcare
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
June 16, 2023
David Chalmers is the author of The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. It is in that book that Chalmers avers that reductive materialism 1 can explain almost everything -- except consciousness. Brian counters that, yes, reductive materialism CAN explain almost everything, but not necessarily in ways that are productive of human health and happiness.
Dear David:
I hope you have time for a quick comment.
You say that reductive explanations can be given for almost anything. That is no doubt true -- but the question is, what are the effects of these reductive explanations in the real world?
Reductive explanations have a body count when it comes to mental health care, and I speak from experience. Reductive explanations have been responsible for keeping me from using godsend medicines for my depression for the last 40+ years. Everything that could have helped me has been outlawed, in part with the help of reductive materialism.
Dr. Robert Glatter is the poster child for how reductive materialists harm patients like myself by denying us godsend medicine. He wrote an article in Forbes in 2019 entitled "Can Laughing Gas Help People with Treatment-resistant Depression?" (His answer was a very nervous and a highly qualified "maybe.")
The fact that Glatter even asks this question shows that the reductive approach has left him purblind to common sense. He is like Mr. Magoo, stumbling around for the answer that is staring him in the face, namely that laughter is the best medicine, just like the Reader's Digest has been telling us for the last 100 years. Laughter HAS to help, by definition.
But Glatter does not care if I laugh exorbitantly under the influence of laughing gas or if I enjoy looking forward to using it and thereby improve my health.
No, Glatter wants me to have a "REAL" cure for my depression -- that is to say, one based on reductive evidence.
And so his absurdly cautious ideas on this topic help enact laws that keep millions from using godsends like N2O on the grounds that laughing gas is not a "REAL" cure.
This purblind reductive approach has worked in tandem with the fear-mongering Drug War over the last 40 years to outlaw all substances that could definitely and obviously help me with my depression, from chewing the coca leaf to using MDMA .
Indeed, the reductive approach to medicine is responsible for the psychiatric pill mill 2 thanks to which 1 in 4 American women take an SSRI every day of their life. The pills were created by doctors like Glatter, who were looking for "REAL" cures. Such researchers don't care if the patient reports being happy -- they want molecular data and numbers that can be shown on a chart. All medicines that do not work according to reductive criteria are demonized as "crutches."
So yes, there is a reductive explanation for almost everything -- but that does not mean that it's the explanation that leads to sane outcomes.
I would like to remind you in closing that the philosophy of William James was inspired by his use of laughing gas , and as James wrote in "The Varieties of Religious Experience":
"No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded."
It is ironic that we DO have to disregard these forms of consciousness today thanks to the Drug War -- a Drug War supported by reductive materialists who tell us that outlawed medicines are not "REAL" cures, even though some of them have inspired entire religions.
In light of these facts, it's little wonder that materialism is the reigning philosophy these days in academia. After all, prohibition has outlawed precisely those substances whose use can conduce to other far more holistic ways of seeing the world around us.
Author's Follow-up: June 16, 2023
Chalmers tells us in "The Conscious Mind" that "materialism is a beautiful and compelling view of the world." I cannot agree. Materialism is the science of "nothing but-ism." It looks at a sunset and tells us it's really nothing but the scattering of gasses and particles in the air. The materialist qua materialist is like Leslie Nielsen standing before an exploding warehouse shouting "Nothing to see here!" Materialists only wax poetic when they are forgetting their principles. If they want to be REAL materialists, they should listen to Richard Dawkins and keep reminding themselves that, appearances notwithstanding, everything in the world is just physical manifestations that could not have been otherwise thanks to causal laws. The materialist qua materialist embraces the morbid doctrine of Francis Crick that we're nothing but "a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules." That's not beautiful, that's dreary.
Author's Follow-up: July 22, 2023
I kind of feel bad for putting David through this. Even as we speak, he is no doubt struggling with his conscience: "Shall I maintain this pregnant silence with respect to Brian's admittedly well-aimed sally, or shall I respond?" I've forced him to pit his knee-jerk academic disdain against the long-term needs of futurity, thereby vouchsafing him sleepless nights full of pitiless self-cross-examination: "Is my failure to respond to Brian but a fitting snub to a non-entity in a debate that I, quite frankly, OWN... or does my silence in this quarter betray a desire to deflect all criticism, lest in responding I inadvertently publicize the existence of a trenchant qualification (if not an outright rebuttal) to my current views: to wit my almost unqualified belief in the diagnostic power of methodological naturalism?" I can see David tossing (and sometimes even turning) on his Australian bed as the ruthless catechism continues. One wants to write a letter of apology, but then one would first have to explain the many subtle inferences wherewith one has (or so one definitely believes) divined the angst for which one is seeking expiation. For now, Chalmers and I will have to continue our colloquy through this website, with me typing my no doubt nerve-plucking adumbrations and with Chalmers' rebuttals being inferred on my part through a variety of sensually empowered psychological processes, the precise nature of which, however, are well beyond the scope of this essay.
Author's Follow-up: October 22, 2023
I think we can take it as a given now that Chalmers has resolved to reply explicitly to my qualms, at least in the fullness of time, for what man so harried by the nuanced misgivings detailed above could prevent his own two hands -- will they or nill they -- from reaching out spontaneously (yea, even in defiance of the conscious will itself) for the nearest possible notepad in order to set matters straight at once (at least according to his own materialistic lights) by penning a firm if not an actually angry rejoinder?
My delayed receipt of the same was therefore, I admit, quite puzzling to me at first, until I reflected that a delayed response is precisely what one would expect from a troubled mind which has decided to give one's initial email a closer second read with an eye toward composing the ultimate comeback. One can actually conclude from the untoward delay of said comeback that the initial cocksure spirit in which David almost certainly undertook it at first has given way to a no doubt uncharacteristic onset of self-doubt such that he, David, is now on the tippy tippy point of yielding valuable philosophical ground to me. Perhaps he is even preparing to definitively abjure that irritating materialistic triumphalism of his for which I have so diplomatically chided him above. Who shall say?
I look forward to the continuation of this fascinating colloquy, even if Chalmers has somewhat unfairly tasked me with the job of divining his part of the conversation from various subtle considerations, the precise nature of which, however, remain well beyond the scope of this web page.
Author's Follow-up: August 15, 2024
It actually hurts me to think how many sleepless nights I have probably caused for Chalmers, how many sunsets I have probably ruined. Sometimes I wish that my conjectures about the shortcomings of materialism were not so absolutely "spot on," as the Brits would say. And yet I challenge anyone to construe my adumbrations in this quarter into anything short of a philosophical gauntlet tossed down at the self-satisfied feet of science itself! If I was a materialist, I would certainly be at a loss for a rejoinder. Imagine, a scientist trying to tell me, for instance, that MDMA 3 and laughing gas 4 cannot help the depressed, as they are, indeed, obliged to do by modern theory which refers all efficacy to the microscopic. I'd be like: "But whence consciousness and volition, my friend? Whence consciousness and volition?" That one example alone would keep me up at night if I were an unrepentant materialist. I'd be saying to myself: "Ooh, Brian, but aren't the logical consequences of your materialism ridiculous in the real world? Are they not self-refuting by dint of the sheer idiocy that they entail?"
I would be sorely tempted to ignore the messenger rather than giving him free rein to undermine my entire world view like that!
Fortunately, however, David's mom probably did not raise him like that. "The truth," she probably told him on many occasions, "is sacrosanct, young man," or words to that probable effect. True, it has been over a year since my first unsuccessful attempt to beard the lion in his den, but genius works according to its own schedule. Besides, one first has to lick one's wounds before determining whether they were, in some sense, self-inflicted. I can see David walking toward his writing desk even as I type. He seems to be saying something to himself along the lines of: "Let's finally DO this at long last!" In short, the odds of a considered reply from David reaching me from Australia in the next few months are so high that it might well be called a certainty in general parlance. If mathematicians demur, it is only because they lack access to the intuitive conduit through which this certainty of mine is being piped -- the precise nature of which, however, remains well beyond the scope of pretty much anything short of a full-blown book, and a big one at that.
Many of my essays are about and/or directed to specific individuals, some well-known, others not so well known, and some flat-out nobodies like myself. Here is a growing list of names of people with links to my essays that in some way concern them.
Don't the Oregon prohibitionists realize that all the thousands of deaths from opiates is so much blood on their hands?
After over a hundred years of prohibition, America has developed a kind of faux science in which despised substances are completely ignored. This is why Sci Am is making a new argument for shock therapy in 2023, because they ignore all the stuff that OBVIOUSLY cheers one up.
Meanwhile, no imaginable downside could persuade westerners that guns and alcohol were too dangerous. Yet the DEA lies about almost all psychoactive drugs, saying there are no good uses. That's a lie! Then they pass laws that keep us from disproving their puritanical conclusion.
The "acceptable risk" for psychoactive drugs can only be decided by the user, based on what they prioritize in life. Science just assumes that all users should want to live forever, self-fulfilled or not.
And where did politicians get the idea that irresponsible white American young people are the only stakeholders when it comes to the question of re-legalizing drugs??? There are hundreds of millions of other stakeholders: philosophers, pain patients, the depressed.
There would be almost no recidivism for those trying to get off drugs if all drugs were legal. Then we could use a vast variety of drugs to get us through those few hours of late-night angst that are the bane of the recidivist.
We're living in a sci-fi dystopia called "Fahrenheit 452", in which the police burn thought-expanding plants instead of thought-expanding books.
Imagine someone starting their book about antibiotics by saying that he's not trying to suggest that we actually use them. We should not have to apologize for being honest about drugs. If prohibitionists think that honesty is wrong, that's their problem.
Psychiatrists prescribe drugs that muck about with a patient's biochemical baseline, making them chemically dependent and turning them into patients for life.
Many prohibition haters have their own list of drugs that they feel should be outlawed. They're missing the point. Drugs cannot be judged up or down. Prohibition is the problem. Say otherwise and you open the door to endless substance demonization by politicians.
Don't the Oregon prohibitionists realize that all the thousands of deaths from opiates is so much blood on their hands?