The Mind-Body Problem: A Psychobiological Approach

262 Pages·1980·4.061 MB·English

by  Mario Bunge

Foundations and Philosophy of Science
and Technology Series
General Editor MARIO BUNGE
Some Titles in the Series:
AGASSI, J.
The Philosophy of Technology
ANGEL, R.
Relativity: The Theory and its Philosophy
HATCHER, W.
The Logical Foundations of Mathematics
SIMPSON, G.
Why and How: Some Problems and Methods in Historical Biology
WILDER, R.
Mathematics as a Cultural System

THE MIND-BODY PROBLEM
A Psychobiological Approach
by
MARIO BUNGE,
Foundations and Philosophy of Science Unit,
McGill University, Montreal
Epilogue by DONALD 0. HEBB
Professor Emeritus of Psychology, McGill University
PERGAMON PRESS
Oxford • New York • Toronto ■ Sydney ■ Paris ■ Frankfurt
U.K.. Pergamon Press Ltd., Headington Hill Hall,
Oxford 0X3 OBW, England
U.S.A. Pergamon Press Inc., Maxwell House, Fairview Park,
Elmsford, New York 10523, U.S.A.
CANADA Pergamon of Canada, Suite 104, 150 Consumers Road,
Willowdale, Ontario M2J 1P9, Canada
AUSTRALIA Pergamon Press (Aust.) Pty. Ltd., P.O. Box 544,
Potts Point, N.S.W. 2011, Australia
FRANCE Pergamon Press SARL, 24 rue des Ecoles,
75240 Paris, Cedex 05, France
FEDERAL REPUBLIC Pergamon Press GmbH, 6242 Kronberg/Taunus,
OF GERMANY Pferdstrasse 1, Federal Republic of Germany
Copyright © 1980 Mario Bunge
A II Rights Reserved. No pan of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in
any form or by any means: electronic, electrostatic,
magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without permission in writing from the
publishers.
First edition 1980
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Bunge, Mario
The mind-body problem.—(Foundations and
philosophy of science and technology).—
(Pergamon international library).
1. Mind and body
I. Title II. Series
150 BF161 79-40698
ISBN 0-08-024720-2 Hard cover
ISBN 0-08-024719-9 Flexicover
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
William Clowes (Beccles) Limited, Beccles and London
Preface
F rom time immemorial people have grown accustomed to accounting
for their behavior and their subjective experience in terms of a soul or
mind and its putative properties. Thus they say things like ‘I have X on
my mind’, ‘I am of two minds about T, ‘May her soul rest in peace’, and
‘Upon my soul’.
Then, at the beginning of our century, people were told by eminent
psychologists and neurophysiologists that all talk of mind was
nonscientific—a mere remnant of primitive superstition. They were
asked to give up, not only the theological notion of an immaterial and
immortal soul, but also the very ideas of mental abilities, dispositions,
states, and events. And some of them were successfully trained to speak
only of observable facts, whether movements of the whole animal, or of
some of their parts.
This ban on the concept of mind paralyzed some philosophers,
particularly those with positivistic leanings—since, after all, they had
inspired the behaviorist movement. But others went on writing about
minds, intentions, mental images, and the like. This was to be expected,
for most philosophers do not listen to scientists.
In the meantime the eminent Jean Piaget, oblivious of behaviorist
prohibitions, went on investigating the emergence and growth of mental
abilities in children and adolescents. Two decades later another equally
influential rebellion spread: Donald Hebb stated that neuron assemblies
may not only detect and process external stimuli but may also ideate.
And he said loudly that human psychology is about the mind. Shortly
thereafter the linguist Noam Chomsky launched a direct attack on
mindless psychology—without, unfortunately, rescuing the nervous
system. This signaled the beginning of the end of the long and boring
behaviorist night.
IX
X PREFACE
The concept of mind is now back and probably for good. Not only
psychologists and philosophers but also some neurophysiologists dare
now write about it. Even ethologists are discovering that animals other
than men can become aware of what they do, and try to explain some of
their behavior on the assumption that they have mental abilities.
Is this comeback of the concept of mind a mere return of the old
theological idea of an immaterial and possibly endurable entity
hovering above the brain and surviving the dissolution of the latter? In
some cases it is. To be sure, such a resurrection is of no great help to
science: even though we do need the idea of an idea, that idea need not
be idealistic, nay it cannot be if it is to harmonize with science. Because
science deals with concrete entities only, because it acknowledges only
properties of such entities rather than properties in themselves, it has no
use for properties and changes thereof that fail to be properties or
changes of some concrete entity or other, be it atom or neuron, brain or
galaxy. There is no harm in speaking of mental states or events provided
we do not assign them to an immaterial, unchangeable, and inscrutable
entity, but identify them instead with states or events of the brain.
This hypothesis, that mind is a collection of brain functions, is as old
as it is half-baked. It has inspired philosophers, physiological psychol­
ogists, and neurophysiologists, but it has not yet been formulated as a
well-organized theory. Unless it be developed into a theory proper it is
but a poor substitute for the myth of the soul. It is certainly more fruitful
than the latter—which is actually barren at its best—yet so far it has
been only an embryonic conjecture.
The main goal of this book is to try to transform that view—i.e. that
mind is a set of brain activities—into a theoretical framework, and
moreover one compatible with the latest results obtained by neuro­
physiologists and psychologists, and capable of inspiring further ad­
vances in their research. (Neurophysiology is necessary but not sufficient,
for it tends to discard psychological categories such as those of purpose
and thought. And psychology, though equally necessary, is insufficient
as well—unless it is physiological—for it tends to forget about the
nervous system.) That is the constructive part of this book.
This work has also a polemical side. Indeed, it intends to show that
the idea of a separate mental entity is not only unwarranted by the
available data and the existing psychological models, but collides head-
PREFACE XI
on with the most fundamental ideas of all modern science and is thus a
stumbling block to progress.
Data gatherers may care little for either aspect of this book, the
theoretical or the critical. But data gathering, though a part of scientific
research, is not all of it. As Henri Poincare noted long ago, science is not
a heap of facts but an edifice built of facts and hypotheses; and criticism,
far from being alien to science, is the salt of science. This holds
particularly with regard to problems, such as that of the nature of mind,
which are not only scientific but also philosophical and ideological.
In writing this book I have benefited from exchanges with a number
of gifted students as well as with Professors Dalbir Bindra (Psychology,
McGill), Theodore H. Bullock (Neurosciences, California, SD), Victor
H. Denenberg (Biobehavioral Sciences, Connecticut), Jose Luis
Diaz (Investigaciones Biomedicas, UNAM), Bernardo Dubrovsky
(Psychiatry, McGill), Augusto Fernandez Guardiola (Instituto
Nacional de Neurologia y Neurocirugia, Mexico, DF), Rodolfo Llinas
(Physiology and Bio-physics, NYU Medical Center), Michel Paradis
(Linguistics, McGill), Rodolfo Perez Pascual (Instituto de Fisica,
UNAM), Harold Pinsker (University of Texas Medical Branch), Pablo
Rudomin (Centro de Estudios Avanzados del IPN), Paul Weingartner
(Institut fur Philosophic, Universitat Salzburg), and F. Eugene Yates
(Biomedical Engineering, University of Southern California). I am also
grateful to my father, Augusto Bunge, MD (1877-1943), for having
instilled in me a naturalistic, evolutionary, and science-oriented world
view. Last, but not least, I am indebted to my childhood playmates the
dachshund Dacki, the Belgian shepherd Rip, and the monkey Titi, for
having taught me that man is not alone in having a mind.
Mario Bunge

Introduction
T his book deals with one of the oldest, most intriguing, and most
difficult of all the problems belonging in the intersection of science and
philosophy, namely the so-called mind-body problem. This is the system
of ancient questions about the nature of the mental and its relations to
the bodily.
Here are some of the problems belonging to the mind—body problem
circle. Are mind and body two separate entities? If so, how are they held
together in the living organism? How do they get in touch in the
beginning, how do they fly asunder at the end, and what becomes of the
mind after the breakdown of the body? How do the two entities manage
to function synchronically: what does it mean to say that mental states
have neural correlates? Do these entities interact, and if so how? And
which if any has the upper hand?
If, on the other hand, mind and body are not different entities, is the
mind corporeal? Or is it the other way around, namely is the body a
form of the mind? Or is each a manifestation of a single (neutral)
underlying inaccessible substance? In either case: what is mind? A thing,
a collection of states of a thing, a set of events in the thing—or nothing at
all? And whatever it is, is it just physical or is it something more? And in
the latter case—i.e. if mind is emergent relative to the physical level—
can it be explained in a scientific manner or can it be described only in
ordinary language?
The mind-body problem is notoriously a hard nut to crack—surely
even more so than the problem of matter—so much so that some
scientists and philosophers despair of it being soluble at all. We submit
that the problem, though tough, is soluble, and shall outline a solution
to it in this work. But before doing so we shall have to do some
philosophical scouting and conceptual cleansing, because part of the
xiii
Xiv INTRODUCTION
problem is that it is usually formulated in inadequate terms—namely in
those of ordinary language. These are inadequate not only because
ordinary language is imprecise and poor but also because the European
languages are loaded with a preconceived solution to the problem,
namely psychophysical dualism, or the doctrine that mind and body are
separate entities.
To begin with, the very expression ‘mind-body problem’ suggests
that mind and body are two entities on the same footing, like partners in
a common enterprise. Yet we do not speak of the motion-body
problem in mechanics, or of the reaction-substance problem in
chemistry, or of the digestion-digestive tract problem in physiology, or
of the unemployment-unemployed problem in sociology. We do speak,
on the other hand, of the motion of bodies, the digestive function of the
digestive tract, and so on. We do not reify properties, states, or events—
except when it comes to the properties, states, and events of the nervous
system. It is imperative that we close this gap that keeps the study of
mind a scientific anomaly. We propose to do so by abandoning ordinary
language and adopting instead the state space language, which is
mathematically precise and is shared by science and scientific
philosophy.
A first difficulty with the so-called mind-body problem is, then, that
it is usually couched in ordinary language, to the point that even
linguistic philosophers, who do not have the least scientific curiosity,
feel free to speculate about it. (Cf. the essays in philosophical
psychology by Wittgenstein and his followers, notably Anscombe,
Austin, Pears, and Wisdom, none of whom pays any attention to
physiological or to mathematical psychology.) A second difficulty is the
extreme youth of neuroscience: recall that Ramon y Cajal’s neuronal
hypothesis of the brain is less than one century old and was generally
ignored until half a century ago.
There were important sporadic discoveries in earlier times, starting
with Hippocrates’ hypotheses that the brain—rather than the heart or
the liver—is the organ of emotion and thought, and that epilepsy is a
brain disorder. However, it is only in recent years that a concerted
attack at all levels has been launched—in particular through the
Neurosciences Research Program. (See, for example, Worden et al.,
1975.)