Gary Williams responds

Here’s part of his response:

“Harman doesn’t seem to realize that Metzinger is not the only one to present the “feeble” argument that the self is not a thing, but rather, a function. Julian Jaynes said the same thing. So has Daniel Dennett, Bernard Baars, Jesse Prinz, Robert van Gulick, David Armstrong, William Lycan, just to name a few (out of dozens). Moreover, there are thousands of articles on Global Workspace Theory and Multiple Drafts theory, which Metzinger takes up and modifies in terms of his functionalist phenomenal self-model theory. Is Harman really that naive to think that he can ‘dispatch’ decades of rigorous argumentation and scientific theorization in a few pages? Has Harman even read the necessary background literature to adequately critique functionalism as a theory of mind? Has he ever read Daniel Dennett? Or Bernard Baars? Does Harman realize that there are thousands of articles published in the field of consciousness studies every year? I find it humorous that Harman thinks he is competent enough to dismiss 30 years of functionalist theorizing as ‘feeble’ when he doesn’t even have a detailed account of the mind, except to say that the mind is an object”

“Harman doesn’t seem to realize that Metzinger is not the only one to present the ‘feeble’ argument that the self is not a thing, but rather, a function.” Of course I realize it. This simply means that Metzinger’s argument is no more original than it it is convincing.

My article is on Metzinger, not on the history of functionalism. Metzinger doesn’t actually give a very sophisticated argument in favor of functionalism, despite the 634-page length of his book. (It would be almost impossible to take more detailed notes on the book than I did.) His arguments consist of a few drive-by shootings of Descartes and Kant, and a number of sneers at “folk psychology.”

As usual when I argue with people of this camp, Gary is trying to dump a whole reading list on me rather than trying to make his own case for functionalism. (Last time I had a discussion with such a person, he flew off the handle and started saying “DRETSKE CHURCHLAND DRETSKE CHURCHLAND CHURCHLAND” or something of the sort, rather than making an argument.) Furthermore, the reading list in favor of the necessity of substance is a lot longer than “30 years” and more voluminous than “thousands” of articles. Has Gary read Francisco Suárez on formal causation? Has he read Zubíri on substance? It’s unlikely, since he wasn’t even aware of my own article in which I criticize functionalism. His claim that one must read “thousands” of articles on the topic before critiquing it sets a new standard in the insulation of one’s own position from critique. Metzinger certainly didn’t read “thousands” of articles on phenomenology before treating it as his whipping boy. There doesn’t seem to be any first-hand familiarity in his book even with the Logical Investigations. Zahavi is quite right about this in his review of the book, and since Gary has tried to throw Zahavi at me in other arguments, I wonder if he’s familiar with that review. (But as already noted, I can only go so far with Zahavi in that piece, since he upholds the phenomenological evasion of the realism question.)

It always astounds me how touchy the Metzengerians become when under fire. They have an almost religious devotion to that book— and indeed, I’m not the first to suspect that scientism often draws the same sort of personality type that might have given rise to the religious zealot in a different era: dogmatic, quick to blow a fuse (even while regularly praising logic over emotion), and even quicker to judge people according to whether or not they agree with one’s own ideology.