repost of a comment

I’ve already posted something similar as a comment on Levi’s FOLLOWING POST, though it won’t be there until he wakes up to approve it, and it’s the middle of the night in Dallas where he is.

This comes from a comment by Gary Williams:

“Now, you can take issue with functionalism as an explanation of mind, but Metzinger is only taking it to its logical conclusion, so if you are going to fault him on this point, then you will need to also confront the huge literature defending functionalist explanations of the mind e.g. Global workspace theory, Dennettian multiple-drafts theory, etc.”

Nonsense. I can just as easily say “Metzinger will need to confront the huge literature defending substance e.g., Aristotle, Suárez, Leibniz etc.” And Metzinger doesn’t do this. Nor does he need to, especially. He makes a philosophical argument for why the self isn’t a thing, and it’s a rather feeble argument, one that can be dispatched in a few pages. You can’t send people to the library every time they corner you philosophically.

Furthermore, Gary isn’t anywhere close to having “confronted the literature” of OOO itself. If he had, he would know my article “Zero-Person and the Psyche,” in Skrbina’s anthology, which defends objects against both functionalism and physicalism. But it hardly matters, because Gary’s whole point is to play the party pooper role. I don’t remember any exchanges with him that actually caught any intellectual traction for either of us. I wouldn’t put him in the Gallery (he’s not rude, exactly) but if I were doing a lesser and more child-friendly book called “The Gallery of Naysayers,” he’s easily qualify for that one.

Conversations are best when there is some give and take: “I follow you on X, but strongly disagree with you on Y.” If you’re always contradicting the other person, then essentially you’re trying to set up a permanent pair of roles where they are always on the defensive against you. It’s a power play from one person on another, rather than a shared disagreement about things that lie outside both of you. And it’s simply exhausting to deal with people like that, because more no’s are always possible in any situation, and Gary certainly never runs out of them.