a philosophical discussion of the fascinating series on Curiosity Stream
by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
January 19, 2024
American University Psychology Professor Arthur Shapiro hosts a fascinating series on Curiosity Stream called "Illusions." The following is an open letter to the professor on the topic -- which the patient reader will find to have a connection to the subject of... "drugs!" (insert ominous orchestral fanfare here)
I'd like to thank you for the fantastic episodes on Illusions that I have watched repeatedly now on Curiosity Stream1.
If you have a moment, I'd also like to share a little philosophical speculation on the topic.
In reading the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, I begin to wonder if the very word "illusion" is not, at very least, somewhat misleading2. Let me take a specific example in order to attempt to make this point.
In the Ames Room, we see two "equally tall" individuals who appear to be different sizes3. But what do we mean when we say that this is an illusion? I think we are saying the following: "Had we seen these two people in the settings that are familiar to us, these individuals would appear to be the same size; therefore it is an illusion to see them as two different sizes." But this is in effect to argue that the individuals have a specific size that, by rights, should show up in any reference frame, and that their failure to do so therefore constitutes an illusion.
It seems to me, therefore, that the very idea of "illusion" is based on the anti-Whiteheadian assumption that there is an individual "out there" separate from perception, one of a specific length, which our perceptive equipment morphs into various illusory sizes when not viewed in the appropriate reference frames. Although perhaps not entirely analogous, this situation suggests an Einsteinian case in which two spatially separated observers disagree as to the moment that a super-fast train exits a tunnel, and even disagree as to the length of the train. Neither observer however is seeing an illusion, but rather what they by rights SHOULD see given their reference frame. That is to say, there is no universally legitimate absolute length for this train; there are only lengths that can be calculated from various reference frames.
Seen in this light, the only bothersome thing about the Ames Room is that it makes us forget what we normally take into account: namely, the reference frame from which we are beholding nature. Even little children do not cry out in astonishment when their distant grandpa approaches them as a little dot on the horizon. There are no cries of: "What happened to grandpa? He's so tiny!" Nor would adults generally refer to this as an "illusion," since it is really just the way the world works: we perceive things from a given perspective and must naturally take that into account in daily life. The Ames Room prevents us from taking that fact into account and so we blame the incongruous result on the image itself, calling it an illusion. It seems to me, however, that the image is not illusory; what is illusory is the idea that we can understand the world without taking account of the perspective from which we're beholding it. (In fact, the word "illusion" would come to mind for the adults only if the grandfather was NOT the size of a dot on the distant horizon. Only then would they have a sense of strange incongruity.)
I trust that I am not "mincing words" here. It's just that, from the Whiteheadian point of view, the term "illusion" seems inappropriate since it implies that objects exist "out there in space" separate from our perceptions of them and that these objects have specific sizes that are valid (or should be valid) in all reference frames. Whitehead, of course, would disagree. What we perceive are the qualities of the object as they appear to us in a given reference frame, not the atoms that the materialist tells us are "really out there." However, I believe that materialism is still the reigning paradigm in academia, so the point may be moot for now - but maybe someday the word "illusions" will at least require an asterisk leading to a disclamatory footnote on this topic.
To recap these speculations:
Since in Whitehead's view, there is no object "out there" apart from our perception of it, there is no standard by which we can say that any visual phenomenon is an illusion, i.e. that it is different from what it "should" be. It follows that, as stated above, any surprises that we encounter in viewing an object will not be due to an illusion, strictly speaking, but rather to our failure to properly take into account our reference frame as a viewer. What we call "illusions" therefore might better be described as "perceptions from unusual reference frames." They're not really illusory - they only appear so because we have failed to take into account our reference frame as a viewer - often because the image creator has purposefully made this task difficult, so much so that our mental equipment, geared as it is to making sense of the world, will sometimes flip between hypothetical viewpoints, in a seemingly desperate effort to make the image sensical from the standpoint of a pragmatic human being (as in the ball dropping illusion in Season 1, "Brightness and Contrast," in which a falling ball appears to move left, but only when viewed from a specific reference frame).
I will not go into the topic of the potential shortcomings of using the word "illusion," but I wonder if it does not help us pathologize the creative thinker who sees things that we say are not there - but which are actually as real as anything else, except that they are seen through a reference frame that no one else has used before, whether thanks to various drugs and/or neural quirks and/or a unique upbringing.
Just some thoughts on this interesting topic. Again, thanks for the series! I hope there will be more episodes coming soon!
Author's Follow-up: January 20, 2024
I'm going to spare Professor Shapiro any further reflections on these issues, at least until such time as I receive a reply to the above harangue. It should be understood, however, that this is no merely philosophical issue in the pejorative sense of that term. The American government has been outlawing religions over the past 50+ years based on the implicit rationale that their drug-related experiences are unreal and that there is one true world "out there" that can only be seen by the sober mind (or rather the "sober mind" as hypocritically defined by Drug Warriors, who sign off on the use of SSRIs, caffeine, nicotine and alcohol, and even attend churches in which the latter drug is employed as a part of ritual). In other words, they believe in the materialist doctrine that our pragmatic senses show us what's "really out there" and that "drugs" merely scramble and disarrange the picture of that one true reality.
If Whitehead were around today - and not bullied into silence by the reigning drug mania - he would point out that there is no world "out there" without our perception of it and that to outlaw drug-aided perception is to insist on one single valid interpretation of reality - which is, in fact, the greatest possible crime against mental freedom (not to say religious liberty) imaginable. Certainly, the philosopher William James did not believe that there is one valid reality out there. Here is what he wrote on the topic in "The Varieties of Religious Experience":
"...our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded."4
Yet modern politicians create laws that force us to disregard these other forms of consciousness and, indeed, to deny their validity a priori, without further comment or investigation.
This is why I am "hardcore" about the Drug War (as a Reddit troll once described me). The folks who are softcore have apparently been whistling why the government got rid of the First and Fourth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, and even now, after that horrible fait accompli, do not see what all the fuss is about. So one has to urinate for an employer and avoid naughty medicines. So what?
But that's just it: these medicines are only naughty in the minds of children, and not just any children: the childish kind who titter when beholding the statue of David5. They see drugs as naughty and rather than recognizing this as a sign of their own childishness and ignorance, they use their political power to ensure that the entire world adopt their jaundiced attitude toward drugs. It is the ultimate form of denial - in which one not only refuses to hear the truth, but goes on to insist that the entire world adopts one's own prejudices on a given topic.
The UDV and the Native American Church have succeeded in gaining protection from our drug-demonizing federal government, but the UDV was harassed all the way to the Supreme Court before those justices voted 9-0 for the government to call off the dogs. The Native American Church was likewise harried by both federal and state governments until an act of Congress finally gave them exemption from the hate and slander of their puritanical enemies.
How ironic that America, a country founded by religious dissenters, has now made drug-hating Christian Science the one world religion, to be enforced by harsh penalties, up to and including death.
Author's Follow-up: January 26, 2024
I have a funny feeling that I've irritated Professor Shapiro, than which nothing was further from my mind, of course. I think it was Thomas Mann (or maybe Herman Hesse) who once observed that adults are really like children: they have to be spoken to with utmost diplomacy lest one unwittingly pluck an egotistical nerve, after which they will cut you like an offended prima donna at a gala ball. Of course, let me add quickly that this description applies to myself as well, no doubt in spades. Still, I thought the general tenor of my remarks was upbeat -- but I should have read them through with an ear for potential misinterpretations and implied slights. I did suggest that "illusions," ontologically speaking, do not exist -- but I was not attempting to call him out for his use of the word, which, time out of mind, has been applied by literally everyone to the images in question. Then again, it's still early days, so watch this space. The good professor may yet see fit to respond!
Sometimes I think I have a special kind of reverse super ability. Some super guys can leap tall buildings -- my super ability is the way that I can offend people without even trying. I'll walk up to them and say, "Hey, how are you doing there?" And they'll be like, "What the hell is THAT supposed to mean?"
If psychoactive drugs had never been criminalized, science would never have had any reason or excuse for creating SSRIs that muck about unpredictably with brain chemistry. Chewing the coca leaf daily would be one of many readily available "miracle treatments" for depression.
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.
Weaponizing science is a bigger problem. Even as we speak, Laura Sanders of Sciam is promoting Shock Therapy 2.0 for the depressed, this in a world wherein reductive scientists aren't even sure that laughing gas will help the depressed. https://abolishthedea.com/forbes_magazines_laughable_article_about_nitrous_oxide.php
It's because of such reductive pseudoscience that America will allow us to shock the brains of the depressed but won't allow us to let them use the plant medicines that grow at their feet.
David Chalmers says almost everything in the world can be reductively explained. Maybe so. But science's mistake is to think that everything can therefore be reductively UNDERSTOOD. That kind of thinking blinds researchers to the positive effects of laughing gas and MDMA, etc.
"Can I use poppies, coca, laughing gas, MDMA?" "NO," says Jonathan Stea, "We must be SCIENTIFIC! We must fry your brain and give you a lobotomy and make you a patient for life with the psychiatric pill mill! That's true SCIENCE!"
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.
In other words, materialist scientists are drug war collaborators. They are more than happy to have their fight against idealism rigged by drug law, which outlaws precisely those substances whose use serves to cast their materialism into question.
Drug warriors have harnessed the perfect storm. Prohibition caters to the interests of law enforcement, psychotherapy, Big Pharma, demagogues, puritans, and materialist scientists, who believe that consciousness is no big "whoop" and that spiritual states are just flukes.
There are endless drugs that could help with depression. Any drug that inspires and elates is an antidepressant, partly by the effect itself and partly by the mood-elevation caused by anticipation of use (facts which are far too obvious for drug warriors to understand).
But materialist puritans do not want to create any drug that elates. So they go on a fool's errand to find reductionist cures for "depression itself," as if the vast array of human sadness could (or should) be treated with a one-size-fits-all readjustment of brain chemicals.
The search for SSRIs has always been based on a flawed materialist premise that human consciousness is nothing but a mix of brain chemicals and so depression can be treated medically like any other physical condition.
I'd like to become a guinea pig for researchers to test the ability of psychoactive drugs to make aging as psychologically healthy as possible. If such drugs cannot completely ward off decrepitude, they can surely make it more palatable. The catch? Researchers have to be free.
The drug war ideology of substance demonization actually outlaws such investigations. Why don't at least the saner half of the prohibitionists understand that this makes no sense in a purportedly free and scientific country?
Caveat: the experimentation must be done holistically, and not with the presupposition that brain waves and molecular analysis is more important than my perceptions -- for my perceptions are what really matter viz. psychological health.
I don't want purblind researchers telling me when I am happy or optimistic. Materialist researchers need not apply, especially those so immersed in minutia that they cannot even figure out if laughing gas could help the depressed!
To understand why the western world is blind to the benefits of "drugs," read "The Concept of Nature" by Whitehead. He unveils the scientific schizophrenia of the west, according to which the "real" world is invisible to us while our perceptions are mere "secondary" qualities.
This is why we would rather have a depressed person commit suicide than to use "drugs" -- because drugs, after all, are not dealing with the "real" problem. The patient may SAY that drugs make them feel good, but we need microscopes to find out if they REALLY feel good.
This is why the foes of suicide are doing absolutely nothing to get laughing gas into the hands of those who could benefit from it. Laughing is subjective after all. In the western tradition, we need a "REAL" cure to depression.
Both physical and psychological addiction can be successfully fought when we relegalize the pharmacopoeia and start to fight drugs with drugs. But prohibitionists do not want to end addiction, they want to scare us with it. https://abolishthedea.com/four_reasons_why_addiction_is_a_political_term.php
Materialist scientists cannot triumph over addiction because their reductive focus blinds them to the obvious: namely, that drugs which cheer us up ACTUALLY DO cheer us up. Hence they keep looking for REAL cures while folks kill themselves for want of laughing gas and MDMA.
It's "convenient" for scientists that their "REAL" cures happen to be the ones that racist politicians will allow. Scientists thus normalize prohibition by pretending that outlawed substances have no therapeutic value. It's materialism collaborating with the drug war.
In the Atomic Age Declassified, they tell us that we needed hundreds of thermonuclear tests so that scientists could understand the effects. That's science gone mad. Just like today's scientists who need more tests before they can say that laughing gas will help the depressed.
Science today is all about ignoring the obvious.
And THAT's why scientists are drug war collaborators, because they're not about to sign off on the use of substances until they've studied them "up the wazoo."
Using grants from an agency whose very name indicates their anti-drug bias: namely, the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
Buy the Drug War Comic Book by the Drug War Philosopher Brian Quass, featuring 150 hilarious op-ed pics about America's disgraceful war on Americans
You have been reading an article entitled, Illusions with Professor Arthur Shapiro: a philosophical discussion of the fascinating series on Curiosity Stream, published on January 19, 2024 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)
You have been reading an article entitled, Illusions with Professor Arthur Shapiro: a philosophical discussion of the fascinating series on Curiosity Stream, published on January 19, 2024 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)