To the tune of I am the very model of a modern major-general, a piece for Eliminativist tenor and chorus of admiring physicalists.



I am the very model of a 'lim'native materialist:
My programme is reduction and my views are quite determinist.
I'll have no truck with qualia or any mental entity--
Their physical relations are just ones of strict identity!
I'll not believe in sights nor sounds, 'raw feels', nor yet subjective pain,
Apart from what we can discern by looking at the subject's brain;
In disputes with my fellows in the theatre and the taxicab,
I will reduce them all to what we study in the physics lab!
Disputing with the others in the theatre and the taxicab,
He will reduce them all to what we study in the physics lab
He will reduce his fellows to what's studied in the physics lab!
Free will? The notion makes me laugh! I'll treat it with the scorn it needs--
I won't be using hopes or fears in order to explain my deeds;
My own illusion of control, and other sim'lar articles,
Are just the machinations of the fundamental particles!
And if you furrow up your brow and talk of folk psychology,
I'll say I'm not convinced it's an engineering reality--
Intentionality's no use for getting at what's going on,
Compared to supersymmetry 'twixt boson and the fermion!
Intentionality's no use for getting at what's going on
Compared to supersymmetry 'twixt boson and the fermion!
The self, itself, and all its brood of putative phenomena--
Their metaphysics will not follow from my prolegomena:
What Descartes failed to understand (and Jean-Paul, existentialist)
Is that their cogitos just fail to show that they themselves exist;
To be is just to be a transient value of a variable
(Ok, so software sometimes may be onticly describable,
I might concede, if I was really really really really pissed)
And so I am ... the model of a 'lim'native materialist?
... er ..?
He might concede, if he was really really really really pissed,
That he is just the model of a 'lim'native materialist;
That's why he's just a model of a 'lim'native materialist!




The views stated are not necessarily those of the author himself, who wouldn't claim in any way to be a model of anything, and who'd like to personally apologise for all violence done to terms in the name of scansion.

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