Bunge’s Emergent Materialism

Philosopher and physicist Mario Bunge rejects any “separate mental entity,” calling it “a stumbling block to progress.” It is “unwarranted by the available data and the existing psychological models,” he says, and it collides “head-on with the most fundamental ideas of all modern science.” Rather, Bunge argues that the mind-body problem requires a psychobiological approach, based on the assumption that behavior is an external manifestation of neural processes—an approach that also abandons ordinary language in favor of a “state space language, which is mathematically precise and is shared by science and scientific philosophy” (Bunge, 1980, 2014). More broadly, he presents a systematic model of mankind as a “biopsychosocial entity,” and he favors “the multilevel approach” over “the holistic, the analytic, and the synthetic approaches” (Bunge, 1989).

Defining Emergent Materialism

Upfront, Bunge defines his idiosyncratic position: ‘‘I am an unabashed monist’’—his objective is “to reunite matter and mind”—and ‘‘I am a materialist but not a physicalist.’’ By the latter distinction, Bunge means that while the material world is all there is (i.e., there are no nonmaterial substances), the laws of physics cannot explain all phenomena (i.e., “physics can explain neither life nor mind nor society”) (Bunge, 2011; Slezak, 2011).

Bunge calls his theory, or more precisely, his “programmatic hypothesis,” about the mind-body problem “emergent materialism”—his core concept being that “mental states form a subset (albeit a very distinguished one) of brain states (which in turn are a subset of the state space of the whole animal).” The hypothesis is unambiguously materialist, even though “biosystems, including their mental states, have properties that are not reducible to their physical and chemical properties.” Mind, according to Bunge, “is just a collection of functions (activities, events) of an extremely complex central nervous system.” Mental states are distinguished from brain states broadly in that mental states reflect only those brain states that exhibit neural plasticity, especially learning, in contrast to brain states that are more phylogenetically fixed (Bunge, 1980, 2014).

Emergence, Systems Theory, and Critiques

Approaching the mind-body problem as a general systems theorist, Bunge shows, in particular, “how the concept of a state space can be used to represent the states and changes of state of a concrete thing such as the central nervous system.” He stresses the concept of emergence—he defines an emergent property as “a property possessed by a system but not by its components.” He then focuses on the level where such emergence occurs, arguing that “the mental cannot be regarded as a level on a par with the physical or the social.” The upshot, he says, is “a rationalist and naturalist pluralism.” While he rejects Dualism as both untestable and contradictory to science, he also rejects Eliminative Materialism and reductive materialism “for ignoring the peculiar (emergent) properties of the central nervous system.” He opts for “emergentist materialism” as a variety of “psychoneural monism,” but cautions that it needs detailed mechanisms, especially mathematical ones (Bunge, 1977).

Bunge trains his delightfully acerbic guns on choice theories: computationalism (“a sophisticated version of behaviorism,” “brainless cognitive science”); studying higher level mental phenomena rather than neuroscience and ‘‘objective brain facts’’ (“Cartesian mind-body dualism,” “psychoneural dualism”); philosophical zombies (‘‘responsible people do not mistake conceptual possibility, or conceivability, for factual possibility or lawfulness; and they do not regard the ability to invent fantasy worlds as evidence for their real existence’’); and panpsychism (‘‘illustrates the cynical principle that, given an arbitrary extravagance, there is at least one philosopher capable of inventing an even more outrageous one’’) (Slezak, 2011; Bunge, 2011).

Development, Evolution, and Synthesis

Bunge also criticizes that “the division of scientific labor has reached such a ridiculous extreme that many workers in neuroscience and psychology tend to pay only lip service to the importance of studies in development and evolution for the understanding of their subject.” Such neglect of development and evolution, he says, has had at least three undesirable consequences: 1) overlooking the biological maturation of the central nervous system (e.g., the corpus callosum takes up to a decade to develop); 2) exaggerating leaps at the expense of graduality (particularly of the information-processing variety); and conversely, 3) exaggerating continuity at the expense of quantitative novelty (animal psychologists who claim that human mental abilities differ only in degree from prehuman ones) (Bunge, 1989).

In sum, to explain behavior and mentation in scientific terms, Bunge calls for a synthesis or merger of neuroscience and social science rather than for a reduction, “even though the behavioral and mental processes are neurophysiological.” Put philosophically, “this is a case of ontological reduction without full epistemological reduction” (Bunge, 1989).