Psychoneural Identity Research Articles

Psycho-neural Identity as the Basis for Empirical Research and Theorization in Psychology: An Interview with Mario A. Bunge

Mario Bunge is one of the most prolific philosophers of our time. Over the past sixty years he has written extensively about semantics, ontology, epistemology, philosophy of science and ethics. Bunge has been interested in the philosophical and methodological implications of modern psychology and more specifically in the philosophies of the relation between the neural and psychological realms. According to Bunge, functionalism, the philosophical stand of current psychology, has limited explanatory power in that neural processes are not explicitly acknowledged as components or factors of psychological phenomena. In Matter and Mind (2010), Bunge has elaborated in great detail the philosophies of the mind-brain dilemma and the basis of the psychoneural identity hypothesis, which suggests that all psychological processes can be analysed in terms of neural and physical phenomena. This article is the result of a long interview with Dr. Bunge on psychoneural identity and brain-behaviour relations.

O problema mente-cérebro em Freud

Em suas obras posteriores, Freud abandona a pretensão do Projeto de uma psicologia (1895) de formular hipóteses específicas sobre o fundamento neural do psíquico, mas continua a conceber esse fundamento como real. Não adotou uma posição dualista sobre o problema mente-cérebro, como pode ser comprovado por inúmeras citações. Isso não o leva, entretanto, a buscar substituir conceitos psicológicos por conceitos fisiológicos, mas permite atribuir ao psíquico uma causalidade natural, uma dimensão quantitativa e uma estrutura espacial (tópica). A concepção freudiana da relação mente-cérebro pode ser considerada como uma teoria do duplo aspecto ou da identidade psiconeural.

Is the reduction of mental phenomena an attainable goal?

In science, whenever a lower level explanation is sufficient, it becomes paramount. This paper addresses the proposition that the same will happen for human behaviour. The author considers differen...

Self‐awareness and the mind‐brain problem

Abstract The prima facie heterogeneity between psychical and physical phenomena seems to be a serious objection to psychoneural identity thesis, according to many authors, from Leibniz to Popper. It is argued that this objection can be superseded by a different conception of consciousness. Consciousness, while being conscious of something, is always unconscious of itself. Consciousness of being conscious is not immediate, it involves another, second‐order, conscious state. The appearance of mental states to second‐order consciousness does not reveal their true nature. Psychoneural identity can thus be considered a valid hypothesis. Related views of Kant, Freud, Shaffer, Bunge and others are considered. “Naive psychical realism” is criticised. Consciousness of mental events is considered as the result of the action of a cerebral system that observes the neural events hypothetically identical to mental events. The theory combines a materialist view with a due consideration of subjective experience.

The creative loop: how the brain makes a mind

PART ONE THE UNIVERSE: The I and the It What It Has Done for Us - the anthropic principle Spontaneous Animation - origin of life Creative Animation - End Before Cause - The March of the Androids, The Indigenous Android and the Promethean Gene. PART TWO BODY AND MIND: McCulloch's Query - Why the Mind is in the Head The Nuts and Bolts of Mind - The Senses, Neurons, The Neural Net, Up and Down - Sensors and Effectors, S and R, Searching for the Pinnacle, Artificial Nets Vision - Early Processing - Up the Visual Pathway, ...and down Perception, Imagery, and Creativity - Perception, The Internal Sketchpad and the Creative Loop, Imagery and Creativity. PART THREE IMAGE AND REALITY: Images of Reality - Reality of Images - The Picture-in-the-Head, Alopex - A Mechanism for Pattern Generation, Unreal Images Dynamics of Brain and Mind - Time and Space in Brain and Mind, Chaos and Determinism, Psychoneural Identity? A Progression of Mirrors - The Joycean Machine, Beyond the Self-horizon. PART FOUR THE WORLD SHE SANG: The Elusive Self - Choice and Selfhood, Take Me to Your Leader, Dividing the Indivisible One, Beam Me Up, Scottie! The Wedge of Consciousness - What is Consciousness?, Is Consciousness Real?, The Mysterious Monitor, Four Attributes, The Model, Chance with a Purpose Man and Machine - Homo ex Machina - Magic Trick, Does the Brain Compute?, The Turing Test, How Do We Think? The Measure of All Things or Don't Copy That Floppy. Appendices: Hill Climbing and the Optimization Problem The Alopex Optimization Algorithm The Picture-in-the-Head as an Optimization Problem.

Multiple Realization and the Metaphysics of Reduction

INTRODUCTION It is part of today's conventional wisdom in philosophy of mind that psychological states are “multiply realizable”, and are in fact so realized, in a variety of structures and organisms. We are constantly reminded that any mental state, say pain, is capable of “realization”, “instantiation”, or “implementation” in widely diverse neural-biological structures in humans, felines, reptiles, mollusks, and perhaps other organisms further removed from us. Sometimes we are asked to contemplate the possibility that extraterrestrial creatures with a biochemistry radically different from the earthlings', or even electro-mechanical devices, can “realize the same psychology” that characterizes humans. This claim, to be called hereafter ‘the Multiple Realization Thesis’ (“MR”, for short), is widely accepted by philosophers, especially those who are inclined to favor the functionalist line on mentality. I will not here dispute the truth of MR, although what I will say may prompt a reassessment of the considerations that have led to its nearly universal acceptance. And there is an influential and virtually uncontested view about the philosophical significance of MR. This is the belief that MR refutes psychophysical reductionism once and for all. In particular, the classic psychoneural identity theory of Feigl and Smart, the so-called “type physicalism”, is standardly thought to have been definitively dispatched by MR to the heap of obsolete philosophical theories of mind. At any rate, it is this claim, that MR proves the physical irreducibility of the mental, that will be the starting point of my discussion.

Kant and Darwin

The central theses of Kant's critical philosophy are sometimes said to have been overtaken by evolutionary biology. This paper considers how far this proposition can be sustained. I argue that the ‘architectonic’ or ‘system-building’ character of the mind, the categories and the forms of intuition, can indeed be seen as the outcome of a particular evolutionary lineage in a Darwinian world. I argue, further, that the principal motive energizing the critical philosophy is the 'nightmare' of physical determinism. An alternative escape route from this particular nightmare is rehearsed. If this route is taken, the intricate arguments of the Critiques are unnecessary to save moral action in a world of things. Nonetheless, insofar as 'first philosophy' necessarily starts from within the philosopher's own subjectivity, Kant's work retains its power. I suggest that the Kantian and the Darwinian interpretations are to an extent complementary. If this is so, some form of evolutionarily-informed dual-aspect psychoneural identity theory could combine the essence of the two interpretations.

The brain as agent

It was Sir John Eccles (1953) who said that the brain is the sort of machine a ghost could operate; since then, neurophysiologists have embraced various philosophical positions on the mind-brain relationship problem, including psychoneural identity, dualism, even "trialism."1 In recent years, the ascendancy of the computational approach to problems in the description of brain functioning and "cognitive processes" has encouraged a resurgence of mentalistic and physicalistic modes of reductionism with respect to the analysis of various mental predicates. In this paper, I shall examine several claims made by neurophysiologists about the mind-brain relationship and indicate some conceptual difficulties with them. I shall concentrate upon two basic mental predicates (along with their relevant participles), recognition and thought, in an attempt to show that when such categories are predicated of brains, incoherent conceptual consequences inevitably are entailed. Whatever it is that brains do, they do not recognize anything nor do they think of, about or that anything, although they may enable persons to do these things. It is further argued that the question: how do brains enable persons to do these things? is problematic in several significant respects.

Scientific Reduction and the Mind-Body Problem

IntroductionThe identity thesis (IT hereafter) asserts that for every psychological state P there is a neural state N such that P=N. In the hope of rendering IT clear and plausible many identity theorists have compared psycho-neural identity claims to such theoretical identities as temperature is identical with molecular mean kinetic energy. However such a comparison admits a weak and a strong interpretation. According to the weak interpretation, psycho-neural identities are said to be like theoretical identities in the sense that the former are contingent claims just as the latter are presumed to be. Identity theorists have appealed to the contingent status of IT in order to meet prima facie objections of the following sort. We can imagine ourselves undergoing a pain, although we are not undergoing the neural process which the identity theorist claims is identical with the pain. Indeed we can imagine ourselves being in pain and yet not having a brain at all. Hence IT is false. Identity theorists have replied by arguing that this objection merely shows that IT is not a necessary truth, or that psychological and neurological terms do not have the same meaning.

The Identity Thesis and Neuropsychology

The psycho-neural identity thesis (IT) is roughly the assertion that psychological states are identical with certain physical states of the nervous system. There are, of course, many more precise formulations of IT. In particular, there are two versions of IT depending on whether we take 'states' to refer to types or tokens. Token materialism is a weaker claim than type materialism, assuming that a token of type x may be identical with a token of type y even though x and y are different types. Thus, type materialism entails token materialism, but not conversely. In this paper, IT shall be construed as asserting that psychological states are type-identical with certain neural states. One well-known argument for IT is based on an appeal to the theoretical nature of the claim. Psycho-neural identities are thought of as reduction-functions or bridge-laws necessary for the micro-reduction of psychological theories to neurological ones. Thus, the justification for IT is of the same kind as the justification for such scientific identities as temperature is molecular mean kinetic energy. While there is much to be said about this way of understanding IT, we may simply notice that it presupposes that psycho-neural identities are type-to-type identities.' In a recent paper ([1]), N. J. Block and J. A. Fodor argue that type materialism is very likely false. While they advance three distinct arguments in behalf of this claim, we shall consider only one of these in detail. This argument is based on an appeal to the Lashleyan doctrine of neurological equipotentiality, which holds that any of a wide variety of psychological states can be served by any of a wide variety of neural structures. Thus, a given psychological state may in fact be associated

Consciousness and brain. I. The identity thesis.

An understanding of the relationship of consciousness to brain is integral to the development of a general theory for psychiatry. It is argued that objections to Feigl's psychoneural identity thesis can be countered by considering consciousness as identical with pure which, to an observer, are neurally embodied. Consciousness may be subdivided into contents and the conscious context (consciousness per se) which are respectively identical with representation events that code input to the brain and processing events which do not code input but comprise intrinsic organizations. The phenomenal I, the so-called ghost in the machine, is held to be identical with processing events on the output side of the nervous system.

Biological Foundations of the Psychoneural Identity Hypothesis

Biological foundations of the psychoneural identity hypothesis are explicated and their implications discussed. “Consciousness per se” and phenomenal contents of consciousness per se are seen to be identical with events in the (unobserved) brain in accordance with Leibniz's Law, but only informationally equivalent to neural events as observed. Phenomenal content potentially is recoverable by empirical means from observed neural events, but the converse is not possible. Consciousness per se is identical with events which do not represent anything distal to sensory receptor-transducer systems. Thus, on the psychoneural identity hypothesis, consciousness per se comprises directly physical events-in-themselves rather than being a Euclidean representation of physical events as is the case for phenomenal content. After comparing consciousness per se to “onta,” a paradox is suggested: rather than being irreducible to physical reality, consciousness per se is the only experience congruent with the ultimate nature of physical reality as conceived by contemporary physics.