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How Thomas Nagel Reckons Without the Drug War

a philosophical review of Mind and Cosmos

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

February 18, 2023



In 2012, the American philosopher Thomas Nagel published "Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False." His purpose in writing this politically incorrect book was "to defend the untutored reaction of incredulity to the reductionist neo-Darwinian account of the origin and evolution of life." For, according to Nagel, "it is prima facie highly improbable that life as we know it is the result of physical accidents along with the mechanism of natural selection." Nagel argues that the latter notions have become doubtful in light of what we now know about the astonishing complexity of cellular life and the genetic code. "Certain things are so remarkable," the author tells us, "that they have to be explained as non-accidental if we are to pretend to a real understanding of the world."

Of course, Nagel could get away with saying that in 2012, if only just. Not only was he one of America's best known philosophers, but he was nearly 80 years old at the time of publication and a lifelong atheist into the bargain. It wasn't easy for origin scientists to dismiss his ideas out of hand or to shame Thomas by labeling him a creationist. Thomas Nagel is still listed as a bona fide philosopher in Wikipedia despite his apostasy. That said, however, the researchers who helped inspire his book have not fared so well. Michael Behe, Stephen Meyer and David Berlinski have all been libeled as pseudoscientists in Wikipedia, apparently with the help of an organized hit team of digital materialists who police the Wiki platform to ensure that non-materialist explanations of life are never taken seriously by readers. In "Mind and Cosmos," Nagel decries such ad hominem attacks as "manifestly unfair."

By this time, of course, the wide-awake reader (you, perhaps?) are asking themselves: What does this have to do with drugs?

Well, just this: Nagel tells us that he does not believe in a divine being. He says that he lacks the "sensus divinitatis" that seems to naturally incline some people toward such belief. (He champions what philosophers call "neutral monism" instead.) But here's the problem. Nagel, like almost all philosophers (and scientists too, for that matter) reckons without the Drug War. I mean that, if Nagel were to imbibe certain psychoactive substances, he could very well have an experience that would inspire him with this sensus divnitatis, which he now so glibly tells us that he lacks, as if that shortcoming (assuming that it is one) was predetermined and unchangeable, world without end, amen.

But if our modern-day accounts of psychedelic experiences prove one thing (the accounts of drug researchers like James Fadiman and Stanislav Grof), it's that such seemingly unchangeable aspects of one's personality and understanding of life can be changed under the properly guided influence of psychedelic substances - obviously not always and for everybody, but they can be changed.

My views about the origins and meaning of life were certainly influenced by the mesoamerican imagery that I saw "in my mind's eye" during my peyote trip four years ago in Arizona. The mental slide show of pre-Columbian iconography suggested to me very strongly that life and consciousness were somehow a unified whole and that I was not a brain in a vat and that life is, indeed, far more than the sum of its parts. Why else would the consumption of a cactus give me visions of a bygone culture that I never thought about consciously in my waking life? To be sure, my psychedelic experience did not "prove" that the world was a unified whole, that consciousness was in some sense fundamental, but it gave me plenty of experienced-based reasons to think so.

But Nagel, again like almost all philosophers, would never even THINK of using the word "philosophy" and "drugs" in the same sentence, except perhaps with the goal of tossing off some throwaway line designed to cast the latter term in a dubious light in fealty to the Christian Science metaphysic of the Drug War. The idea that drug use could tell us something about the world is entirely alien to Nagel*, who seems never to have even heard of the well-documented psychedelic research referenced above, which dates back to the 1950s, when LSD was successfully being used to fight alcoholism. This, incidentally, is why the Drug War has lasted so long: because scientists are blind to the censorship (and self-censorship) that substance prohibition naturally imposes upon science and philosophy. When you outlaw and demonize substances for a long enough time, the world forgets that such substances ever had positive uses in the first place, especially when you give the children of such cultures teddy bears and gold stars for "saying no" to time-honored medicines that had inspired entire religions in the past.

My personal belief is that there is no philosophically acceptable way for science to escape the mystery of life, despite the ongoing attempts of materialists to look at the universe and soberly tell us: "Nothing to see here. It all had to be this way, after all." Nagel himself said that ultimate reality may be unknowable and that science may have to settle for the notion that life just "had to be that way," i.e., the way that we find it. But no curious mind is satisfied with that answer. It amounts to the materialist positing a causeless cause, or inexplicable initial state of the universe, and that presumption is itself every bit as mysterious as the idea of a deity. An uncaused cause baffles the mind, and yet both materialism 1 and theism ultimately embrace it. It's just that materialists take a sort of "Copenhagen approach" to the problem of first causes, saying that to discuss that topic is beyond their bailiwick. This in itself is not problematic. The problem is that they then go on to talk as if they have explained life, forgetting that they have dogmatically ruled out the discussion of life's principal mystery, namely, how did we get something out of nothing in the first place?

It's all well and good to say that such questions are "meaningless," but that's a philosophical conclusion, not a scientific one - in other words, it's a conclusion that is open to credible refutation.

Nagel, it might be said, is coming to the anti-materialist idea of wholeness the hard way. Instead of being experientially convinced of the concept by drug use and/or a sensus divinitatis, he has reasoned his way thither by cold logic and brave honesty. And this is to be commended in a world where non-materialists are regularly libeled as "creationists" by diehard materialists.

This is a truth that I learned to my cost at a summer retreat one year ago. I had woken up on the wrong side of the bunk bed one morning, so when I joined the crew at breakfast, I launched into a less-than-lighthearted monologue about my pet peeve: namely, the fact that neo-Darwinists would not calmly debate evolution with their critics but rather preferred to yell at them and evince all manner of intolerance toward opposing viewpoints. Little did I realize that the dude sitting across from me that morning was a dyed-in-the-wool neo-Darwinist himself.

The bad news is: he yelled at me and evinced all manner of intolerance toward my opposing viewpoints.

The good news is: he thereby proved that I wasn't crazy, that my complaint about neo-Darwinism was justified, and that Thomas Nagel was right: materialists were indeed being "manifestly unfair" toward their philosophical opponents.

*This is less excusable than it might at first sound, considering the fact that the philosophy of William James was inspired and based on his experiences with psychoactive substances such as laughing gas 2 .

Author's Follow-up: February 18, 2023


Nagel refers to the religious motivations of Behe and Meyer, but reminds us that their arguments must be accepted on their own terms. He might have said the same thing about the materialists, however, like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett. The ferocity with which they defend materialism seems inexplicable unless one considers that they are fighting to defend a world view and not simply a scientific theory. Materialism as they champion it seems to be a religion itself, insofar as it is held to contain (either potentially or actually) the answer to every single question about the world. True, this religion does not worship a god, but it comes close to worshiping nature in a kind of animism, so great is the materialist's belief in the power of inanimate objects to coalesce and ultimately produce wonders: wonders that boggle the mind -- the latter, however, being a mere epiphenomenon according to the consciousness-spurning gospel of materialism.

Author's Follow-up: May 3, 2023


Materialism is an unindicted co-conspirator in the Drug War, for the reductionism that it champions tends to pooh-pooh the use of holistic medicine, medicines that simply work without having been proven to affect any supposedly relevant brain chemicals. This has blinded us to endless wonderful uses of drugs under the purblind assumption that non-reductionist cures do not "really" work. For just one of endless examples, one could use opium 3 every other weekend (like the 19th-century poets in "a series of magnificent quarterly carouses4") -- and thereby improve one's mood overall. Your mood improves, not just through the chemical action of the drug, but thanks to the anticipation that such a protocol would generate. You thereby have created a virtuous circle, psychologically speaking But anticipation is subjective and one of those touchy-feely aspects of life that the materialist shuns. "Talk to me about brain chemicals," says the Big Pharma drug maker, "not anticipation." The result? Today, 1 in 4 American women are dependent for life on Big Pharma 5 6 meds, generated by this reductionist approach, one which fails to work even on its own terms, since the attempt to chemically end depression has created the biggest pharmacological dystopia in human history, all while failing to put a dent in the numbers of Americans who self-report as depressed. To the contrary, those numbers seem to be rising higher still -- and this in a country that outlaws substances that could cure most depression overnight!

Author's Follow-up: January 2, 2024

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up



I add these follow-ups, by the way, because I am one of those people who actually change over time and therefore may even come to a point where he objects to his own arguments -- or at least to the tenor in which they were maintained. Take this essay, for instance. I'm wondering now if I weren't a trifle dismissive -- nay, even presumptuous -- in rebuking Thomas Nagel like this. All I can say in my defense is that I'm a working stiff who necessarily writes this stuff in a hurry and "on the fly." I'm also so used to being ignored by the mainstream (or even by the pseudo mainstream) that I despair of being read by anyone, least of all by the established sources whom I have seen fit to reprove. So it's sometimes hard to keep one's audience in mind when one believes that no audience even exists. Moreover, I am honestly angered by the way that the War on Drugs has prevented me from being all that I can be in this life (while outlawing my religion into the bargain), so it's often not easy for me to write dispassionately on these topics. So while you're welcome to blame me for any undue snarkiness in the foregoing harangue, I think some blame must be reserved for prohibition itself, which refuses to let me "chill out" with godsend medicines and thereby adopt a less strident tone toward the movers and shakers of this world.

I hope that such board-certified brainpans will recognize my occasional stridency for what it is: a cry for help -- for help, that is, in ending America's hateful Christian Science war on godsend medicines.









Notes for essay entitled How Thomas Nagel Reckons Without the Drug War: a philosophical review of Mind and Cosmos:

1: How materialists lend a veneer of science to the lies of the drug warriors DWP (up)
2: Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide DWP (up)
3: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
4: "He took life as young poets take opium: in a series of magnificent quarterly carouses." --'The Last Adventure' by Richard Middleton (up)
5: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
6: LaMattina, John. n.d. “Why Is Biopharma Paying 75% of the FDA’s Drug Division Budget?” Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnlamattina/2022/09/22/why-is-biopharma-paying-75-of-the-fdas-drug-division-budget/. (up)




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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




Addiction thrives BECAUSE of prohibition, which limits drug choice and discourages education about psychoactive substances and how to use them wisely.

Even prohibition haters have their own list of drugs that they feel should be outlawed. They're missing the point. We should not drugs "up or down" any more than we should judge penicillin or aspirin in that way.

NOW is the time for entheogens -- not (as Strassman and Pollan seem to think) at some future date when materialists have finally wrapped their minds around the potential usefulness of drugs that experientially teach compassion.

If religious liberty existed, we would be able to use the inspiring phenethylamines created by Alexander Shulgin in the same way and for the same reasons as the Vedic people of India used soma.

Opium could be a godsend for talk therapy. It can help the user step outside themselves and view their problems from novel viewpoints.

There are a potentially vast number of non-addictive drugs that could be used strategically in therapy. They elate and "free the tongue" to help talk therapy really work. Even "addictive" drugs can be used non-addictively, prohibitionist propaganda notwithstanding.

"Users" can be kept out of the workforce by the extrajudicial process of drug testing; they can have their baby taken from them, their house, their property -- all because they do not share the intoxiphobic attitude of America.

The U.S. Congress considered the following to be a scientific fact back in 1924: "A person taking narcotics regularly impedes evolutionary progress and tends to degenerate backwards toward the brute." -- Richmond Hobson

Americans won't be true grown-ups until they learn to react to drug deaths the same way that they react to deaths from horseback riding and mountain climbing.

Many people take antidepressants believing their depression has a biochemical cause. Research does not support this belief. --Dr. Noam Shpancer, Psychology Today


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






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