What do you think?
Rate this book
The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness
For Mark Solms, one of the boldest thinkers in contemporary neuroscience, discovering how consciousness comes about has been a lifetime’s quest. Scientists consider it the "hard problem" because it seems an impossible task to understand why we feel a subjective sense of self and how it arises in the brain.
Venturing into the elementary physics of life, Solms has now arrived at an astonishing answer. In The Hidden Spring, he brings forward his discovery in accessible language and graspable analogies.
Solms is a frank and fearless guide on an extraordinary voyage from the dawn of neuropsychology and psychoanalysis to the cutting edge of contemporary neuroscience, adhering to the medically provable. But he goes beyond other neuroscientists by paying close attention to the subjective experiences of hundreds of neurological patients, many of whom he treated, whose uncanny conversations expose much about the brain’s obscure reaches.
Most importantly, you will be able to recognize the workings of your own mind for what they really are, including every stray thought, pulse of emotion, and shift of attention. The Hidden Spring will profoundly alter your understanding of your own subjective experience.
Venturing into the elementary physics of life, Solms has now arrived at an astonishing answer. In The Hidden Spring, he brings forward his discovery in accessible language and graspable analogies.
Solms is a frank and fearless guide on an extraordinary voyage from the dawn of neuropsychology and psychoanalysis to the cutting edge of contemporary neuroscience, adhering to the medically provable. But he goes beyond other neuroscientists by paying close attention to the subjective experiences of hundreds of neurological patients, many of whom he treated, whose uncanny conversations expose much about the brain’s obscure reaches.
Most importantly, you will be able to recognize the workings of your own mind for what they really are, including every stray thought, pulse of emotion, and shift of attention. The Hidden Spring will profoundly alter your understanding of your own subjective experience.
432 pages, Hardcover
First published January 28, 2021
468 people are currently reading
6687 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 171 reviews
July 10, 2021
Oh boy.
Summarizing this one on GR feels like rendering the sistine chapel on a postage stamp.
The book is a swinging from the fences summary of a massive, sprawling, audacious theory.
Summarizing it further is going to be a challenge.
ʱܲ�.
Theres a WHOLE lot of it I just don’t actually completely fuckin� understand.
And I’m 100% not going to re-read this monster.
Not for a while anyway.
As much as I loved it.
Mostly because I’m uncertain about some of the claims.
As I mentioned, Solms ‘swings from the fences� in his theory of consciousness.
Meaning, he BOLDLY goes for the whole enchilada on a HARD problem.
Namely, the hard problem of consciousness.
So caution is advised.
Plus his theory is a bit outside of the current paradigm.
Which could be good.
Time (and the peer review process) will be the judge.
The basic claim is really simple:
1. Consciousness is a natural phenomena, that is emergent from evolutionarily conditioned biological substrates, and is ultimately wholly describable in physical terms.
That part is not original or all that controversial.
Lots of (most) experts in the field of consciousness studies hold to this opinion.
Including Sir Francis Crick.
After he co-discovered DNA he went into consciousness studies.
In his 1994 book, the Astonishing Hypothesis he made the claim that the entirety of conscious phenomena is an emergent property of the brain (i.e. souls and ghosts don't exist, just brains and nature).
This position, sometimes referred to as monism (as opposed to dualism), denies the duality between matter and consciousness.
In other words, there is only one reality, not two.
Anything and everything (how ever magical, including consciousness and thoughts and feelings and the like) must have a naturalistic, physical basis and (ostensibly) explanation. Even if we don’t currently know what that explanation is.
Most scientists and serious intellectuals are monist.
And more and more regular folks are monist too.
I know I am.
But some (legitimate thinkers and researchers) believe that consciousness is not reducible to physicality or subject to material explanations.
This is essentially the dualist perspective.
Mind and matter are two separate things.
Mind is not reducible to material substrates.
Mind is a ‘non-physical� phenomena.
Philosophers including Thomas Naglel and David Chalmers are skeptical regarding some or all of the monistic position, arguing that explaining consciousness in terms of it’s neuro-corelates is the “easy problem�, but explaining how (exactly) those mechanisms give rise to the phenomenological experience of being...now that’s the “hard problem� of consciousness.
Solms does a stupendous job of reviewing and clarifying Chalmers position on the Hard Problem of Consciousness, and by the way...
HE CALIMS TO HAVE SOLVED IT.
Yep.
You heard me right.
Solms claims to have solved the hard problem of consciousness.
If this is true, then he will be regarded in the future along side figures like Newton or Einstein.
Thats the main reason why I’m guarded about some of his claims.
They are intergalactic in their epicness.
Anyway.
Another claim Solms makes is:
2. Consciousness is fundamentally affective (not cognitive) in nature, and as such, is emergent from deep brain structures (e.g. the brain stem, or more precisely the periaqueductal gray) as opposed to neocortical regions.
Meaning, consciousness (at its most basic) is more about feelings than thoughts.
That one is somewhat more of a minority position, but Solms is not alone.
His good company includes, to name a few: (a) Jaak Panksap, the brilliant, maverick affective neuroscientist who is perhaps most well known to the general pubic as the guy who tickles rats for research purposes, and (b) Antonio Damassio, another superstar in the field of affective neuroscience, most well known for his breakthrough 1994 book Descartes Error.
A lot (maybe most) researchers assume cognitive functions are responsible for consciousness.
I have to admit, I was fairly seduced by Solm’s (affect=consciousness) argument.
It's pretty convincing.
�.
Another one of Solms claims is:
3. Subjectivity is important to study scientifically.
That one might sound like a no duh.
But the way Solms explores the issue is novel and profound.
I’m here for it.
Another one of Solms claims is:
4. Consciousness is governed via the Friston free-energy principle.
This is where the book gets opaque for me.
Thefree energy principle is complicated.
But here goes.
The second law of thermodynamics states that the universe tends toward entropy (lukewarm, dead, undifferentiated slag) in the long term.
Friston’s free energy principle asserts that all life, from bacteria to human brains are governed by the common imperative to resist entropy by minimizing “free energy�.
Or, stated in another way, living things seek to minimize differences between their evolutionarily conditioned “expectations� and their current conditions (which tend toward chaos and entropy).
If all of that Fristoniean stuff sounds kind of wanky, it’s because its technical proxy language for what is better represented in mathematical equations.
Or so I’m told�
I should have payed attention in high school.
By the way.
If you’re exhausted by now.
I completely understand.
I am too.
Solms is kind of a beast.
And if this review is a hot mess, and it is.
I have to say.
So is the book.
But in the good way.
And it gets even wilder.
In addition to being a brilliant neuropsychologist, Solms is a formally trained, practicing Neo-Freudian psychoanalyst (which is really unusual now-a-days).
In fact he’s pimping his own brand of psychoanalysis called (you guessed it) Neuro-psychoanalysis whichadapts and modernizes psychoanalytic constructs and practices based on contemporary neuroscience, particularly affective neuroscience.
If all of this is a little too much.
I feel you.
I’m staying poolside until the water is a little less brown.
But I have to admit.
I’m excited for someone to snatch the jewel out of the psychoanalytic dungheap.
There is so much of value in the psychoanalytic tradition.
It would be great if someone (necessarily smarter and more energetic than me) could clarify, modernize and revive it.
Additionally, it would be great if someone solved (or at least made progress on) the hard problem of consciousness.
If Solms can do one or both.
Then power to him.
I’m just not 100% sure he's done either based on what I’m reading.
I simply haven't invested enough of my free energy into understanding a few of his claims.
None the less, this is an exciting and thought provoking book.
And Solms is a beyond brilliant and way ballsy dude.
Mad respect.
5 stars.
Summarizing this one on GR feels like rendering the sistine chapel on a postage stamp.
The book is a swinging from the fences summary of a massive, sprawling, audacious theory.
Summarizing it further is going to be a challenge.
ʱܲ�.
Theres a WHOLE lot of it I just don’t actually completely fuckin� understand.
And I’m 100% not going to re-read this monster.
Not for a while anyway.
As much as I loved it.
Mostly because I’m uncertain about some of the claims.
As I mentioned, Solms ‘swings from the fences� in his theory of consciousness.
Meaning, he BOLDLY goes for the whole enchilada on a HARD problem.
Namely, the hard problem of consciousness.
So caution is advised.
Plus his theory is a bit outside of the current paradigm.
Which could be good.
Time (and the peer review process) will be the judge.
The basic claim is really simple:
1. Consciousness is a natural phenomena, that is emergent from evolutionarily conditioned biological substrates, and is ultimately wholly describable in physical terms.
That part is not original or all that controversial.
Lots of (most) experts in the field of consciousness studies hold to this opinion.
Including Sir Francis Crick.
After he co-discovered DNA he went into consciousness studies.
In his 1994 book, the Astonishing Hypothesis he made the claim that the entirety of conscious phenomena is an emergent property of the brain (i.e. souls and ghosts don't exist, just brains and nature).
This position, sometimes referred to as monism (as opposed to dualism), denies the duality between matter and consciousness.
In other words, there is only one reality, not two.
Anything and everything (how ever magical, including consciousness and thoughts and feelings and the like) must have a naturalistic, physical basis and (ostensibly) explanation. Even if we don’t currently know what that explanation is.
Most scientists and serious intellectuals are monist.
And more and more regular folks are monist too.
I know I am.
But some (legitimate thinkers and researchers) believe that consciousness is not reducible to physicality or subject to material explanations.
This is essentially the dualist perspective.
Mind and matter are two separate things.
Mind is not reducible to material substrates.
Mind is a ‘non-physical� phenomena.
Philosophers including Thomas Naglel and David Chalmers are skeptical regarding some or all of the monistic position, arguing that explaining consciousness in terms of it’s neuro-corelates is the “easy problem�, but explaining how (exactly) those mechanisms give rise to the phenomenological experience of being...now that’s the “hard problem� of consciousness.
Solms does a stupendous job of reviewing and clarifying Chalmers position on the Hard Problem of Consciousness, and by the way...
HE CALIMS TO HAVE SOLVED IT.
Yep.
You heard me right.
Solms claims to have solved the hard problem of consciousness.
If this is true, then he will be regarded in the future along side figures like Newton or Einstein.
Thats the main reason why I’m guarded about some of his claims.
They are intergalactic in their epicness.
Anyway.
Another claim Solms makes is:
2. Consciousness is fundamentally affective (not cognitive) in nature, and as such, is emergent from deep brain structures (e.g. the brain stem, or more precisely the periaqueductal gray) as opposed to neocortical regions.
Meaning, consciousness (at its most basic) is more about feelings than thoughts.
That one is somewhat more of a minority position, but Solms is not alone.
His good company includes, to name a few: (a) Jaak Panksap, the brilliant, maverick affective neuroscientist who is perhaps most well known to the general pubic as the guy who tickles rats for research purposes, and (b) Antonio Damassio, another superstar in the field of affective neuroscience, most well known for his breakthrough 1994 book Descartes Error.
A lot (maybe most) researchers assume cognitive functions are responsible for consciousness.
I have to admit, I was fairly seduced by Solm’s (affect=consciousness) argument.
It's pretty convincing.
�.
Another one of Solms claims is:
3. Subjectivity is important to study scientifically.
That one might sound like a no duh.
But the way Solms explores the issue is novel and profound.
I’m here for it.
Another one of Solms claims is:
4. Consciousness is governed via the Friston free-energy principle.
This is where the book gets opaque for me.
Thefree energy principle is complicated.
But here goes.
The second law of thermodynamics states that the universe tends toward entropy (lukewarm, dead, undifferentiated slag) in the long term.
Friston’s free energy principle asserts that all life, from bacteria to human brains are governed by the common imperative to resist entropy by minimizing “free energy�.
Or, stated in another way, living things seek to minimize differences between their evolutionarily conditioned “expectations� and their current conditions (which tend toward chaos and entropy).
If all of that Fristoniean stuff sounds kind of wanky, it’s because its technical proxy language for what is better represented in mathematical equations.
Or so I’m told�
I should have payed attention in high school.
By the way.
If you’re exhausted by now.
I completely understand.
I am too.
Solms is kind of a beast.
And if this review is a hot mess, and it is.
I have to say.
So is the book.
But in the good way.
And it gets even wilder.
In addition to being a brilliant neuropsychologist, Solms is a formally trained, practicing Neo-Freudian psychoanalyst (which is really unusual now-a-days).
In fact he’s pimping his own brand of psychoanalysis called (you guessed it) Neuro-psychoanalysis whichadapts and modernizes psychoanalytic constructs and practices based on contemporary neuroscience, particularly affective neuroscience.
If all of this is a little too much.
I feel you.
I’m staying poolside until the water is a little less brown.
But I have to admit.
I’m excited for someone to snatch the jewel out of the psychoanalytic dungheap.
There is so much of value in the psychoanalytic tradition.
It would be great if someone (necessarily smarter and more energetic than me) could clarify, modernize and revive it.
Additionally, it would be great if someone solved (or at least made progress on) the hard problem of consciousness.
If Solms can do one or both.
Then power to him.
I’m just not 100% sure he's done either based on what I’m reading.
I simply haven't invested enough of my free energy into understanding a few of his claims.
None the less, this is an exciting and thought provoking book.
And Solms is a beyond brilliant and way ballsy dude.
Mad respect.
5 stars.
March 25, 2021
South African neuroscientist Mark Solms thinks scientists owe Sigmund Freud an apology. Solms, who himself took the unique step of training as a Freudian psychoanalyst in mid-career, says that some of the latest experimental research in brain science suggests that Freud was closer to the truth than anyone realized.
I had forgotten that Freud began his career in biological science. After earning a medical degree in 1881 from the University of Vienna, he went on to work at the Vienna General Hospital, where he became interested in neuropathology. His later development of psychoanalysis would eclipse his background in science, but as Solms reminds us: Freud was fundamentally a reductionist who believed that it was only a matter of time before scientists would be able to locate precisely where in the brain each feeling a patient experienced originated. Questions of feelings, dreams, and consciousness all come down to physics and chemistry, he said. But Freud also realized that he lived in a day when the existing technology would not allow for the kind of scientific investigation required to figure out the biological mechanisms of such elusive phenomena as dreams, feelings, and consciousness. And so he turned to psychoanalysis as a means to probe the inner workings of the human mind.
Fast forward a hundred years. Science has come a long way, but experts are still debating these issues-- especially that of consciousness.
Most scientists and philosophers—but not all—have rejected Cartesian dualism, which posits two distinct substances in the world: bodies, which obey the laws of physics and are mechanistic; and minds, which are non-physical. But even among scientific reductionists, who accept that “mind� can be explained in materialist terms, there remains resistance in accepting that our subjective experience and sense of self is widely shared among other animals. For example, in Peter Godfrey Smith’s new book, Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind, he reckons that most people, if asked, would restrict consciousness to Primates almost certainly, and maybe to other Mammals. But why is this? It was Descartes who argued that physical bodies are mechanistic, and only the human mind that experiences feelings, or has a soul. Godfrey-Smith makes the point that while scientists have mainly pushed aside the notion of mind as something non-materialistic, they still cling to the idea that animals do not have feelings, don’t experience pain and are without “sentience,� which is perhaps a better term than “mind.� And this has had devastating consequences for the animals. You will cringe to learn that until quite recently, scientists were performing amputations on octopus limbs without any pain relief, because they did not recognize that animals feel pain as we do.
Solms points out how our brains are something like an archaeological site: with the oldest part being down in the bottom parts and more recent additions formed on top. As you would expect, the lower down in the brain we go, the more our minds have in common with other animals. Feelings, he says arise “in a very ancient part of the brain, in the upper brainstem in structures we share with all vertebrates.�
And it is down in this ancient “hidden spring� of our brains, down in our brainstem, where Solm is trying to locate not just our dreams and feelings but our consciousness.
His book begins with a moving story about his childhood, when he witnessed his younger brother take a catastrophic fall from a roof and suffer a terrible brain injury. Solms recounts how after the fall, while his brother still looked like his pre-injury self, he seemed different, not just in terms of his cognitive abilities but his personality as well. This led Solms, in his childhood, to ponder questions like: If my brain were damaged, would I be a different person? Where would the original version of me go?
Solms is perhaps best known for his work in the science of dreams. In research conducted with patients who suffered severe brain injuries, he realized that dreams are not associated with REM sleep or the frontal cortex in the way scientists previously believed. Seeing the way that patients whose injuries prevented REM sleep still had dreams, he came up with his hypothesis that dreams originated in the brainstem and were related to the psyche’s reward system. Just as Freud suspected.
And from this, he began to view not just dreams but consciousness itself as connected to our emotions, which are themselves part of an organism’s survival skillset. Anger and fear in the face of danger; lust for procreation; and play and curiosity for being better attuned to the world. This radical decoupling of intelligence from emotion, dreams and consciousness really turns the Cartesian worldview on its head; for in this scientific paradigm, animals are as sentient as we are. And what of our dreams? Well, they are how the body mediates our needs and fears with the pressures of the external world.
This all might sound intuitive: sure, we know dogs dream and crows can use tools and recognize their image in a mirror. And seeing feelings and emotions at the core of consciousness, rather than in our ability to engage in critical reasoning doesn’t seem too far-fetched. What is so ground-breaking about his new book is not the “what� or “how,� but the “where� of consciousness; for in locating it in the brainstem, Solms is doing something new. And this brings us back to Freud in an ironic way, perhaps; since what Freud termed the “unconscious� might be precisely where we might find consciousness.
Considering “consciousness� in terms of scientific reductionism—or what Godfrey-Smith calls biological materialism—Solms, like Godfrey-Smith, likens the rise of “mind� to the way organisms have adapted to cope with the world and something that directs bodily activities.
And this all leads us back to Freud!
Fantastic book!!!!
I had forgotten that Freud began his career in biological science. After earning a medical degree in 1881 from the University of Vienna, he went on to work at the Vienna General Hospital, where he became interested in neuropathology. His later development of psychoanalysis would eclipse his background in science, but as Solms reminds us: Freud was fundamentally a reductionist who believed that it was only a matter of time before scientists would be able to locate precisely where in the brain each feeling a patient experienced originated. Questions of feelings, dreams, and consciousness all come down to physics and chemistry, he said. But Freud also realized that he lived in a day when the existing technology would not allow for the kind of scientific investigation required to figure out the biological mechanisms of such elusive phenomena as dreams, feelings, and consciousness. And so he turned to psychoanalysis as a means to probe the inner workings of the human mind.
Fast forward a hundred years. Science has come a long way, but experts are still debating these issues-- especially that of consciousness.
Most scientists and philosophers—but not all—have rejected Cartesian dualism, which posits two distinct substances in the world: bodies, which obey the laws of physics and are mechanistic; and minds, which are non-physical. But even among scientific reductionists, who accept that “mind� can be explained in materialist terms, there remains resistance in accepting that our subjective experience and sense of self is widely shared among other animals. For example, in Peter Godfrey Smith’s new book, Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind, he reckons that most people, if asked, would restrict consciousness to Primates almost certainly, and maybe to other Mammals. But why is this? It was Descartes who argued that physical bodies are mechanistic, and only the human mind that experiences feelings, or has a soul. Godfrey-Smith makes the point that while scientists have mainly pushed aside the notion of mind as something non-materialistic, they still cling to the idea that animals do not have feelings, don’t experience pain and are without “sentience,� which is perhaps a better term than “mind.� And this has had devastating consequences for the animals. You will cringe to learn that until quite recently, scientists were performing amputations on octopus limbs without any pain relief, because they did not recognize that animals feel pain as we do.
Solms points out how our brains are something like an archaeological site: with the oldest part being down in the bottom parts and more recent additions formed on top. As you would expect, the lower down in the brain we go, the more our minds have in common with other animals. Feelings, he says arise “in a very ancient part of the brain, in the upper brainstem in structures we share with all vertebrates.�
And it is down in this ancient “hidden spring� of our brains, down in our brainstem, where Solm is trying to locate not just our dreams and feelings but our consciousness.
His book begins with a moving story about his childhood, when he witnessed his younger brother take a catastrophic fall from a roof and suffer a terrible brain injury. Solms recounts how after the fall, while his brother still looked like his pre-injury self, he seemed different, not just in terms of his cognitive abilities but his personality as well. This led Solms, in his childhood, to ponder questions like: If my brain were damaged, would I be a different person? Where would the original version of me go?
Solms is perhaps best known for his work in the science of dreams. In research conducted with patients who suffered severe brain injuries, he realized that dreams are not associated with REM sleep or the frontal cortex in the way scientists previously believed. Seeing the way that patients whose injuries prevented REM sleep still had dreams, he came up with his hypothesis that dreams originated in the brainstem and were related to the psyche’s reward system. Just as Freud suspected.
And from this, he began to view not just dreams but consciousness itself as connected to our emotions, which are themselves part of an organism’s survival skillset. Anger and fear in the face of danger; lust for procreation; and play and curiosity for being better attuned to the world. This radical decoupling of intelligence from emotion, dreams and consciousness really turns the Cartesian worldview on its head; for in this scientific paradigm, animals are as sentient as we are. And what of our dreams? Well, they are how the body mediates our needs and fears with the pressures of the external world.
This all might sound intuitive: sure, we know dogs dream and crows can use tools and recognize their image in a mirror. And seeing feelings and emotions at the core of consciousness, rather than in our ability to engage in critical reasoning doesn’t seem too far-fetched. What is so ground-breaking about his new book is not the “what� or “how,� but the “where� of consciousness; for in locating it in the brainstem, Solms is doing something new. And this brings us back to Freud in an ironic way, perhaps; since what Freud termed the “unconscious� might be precisely where we might find consciousness.
Considering “consciousness� in terms of scientific reductionism—or what Godfrey-Smith calls biological materialism—Solms, like Godfrey-Smith, likens the rise of “mind� to the way organisms have adapted to cope with the world and something that directs bodily activities.
And this all leads us back to Freud!
Fantastic book!!!!
March 20, 2021
Being both neuroscientist and psychoanalyst, Mark Solms has so much to offer to those interested in the nature of consciousness. Here he argues that consciousness lies not in the cerebral cortex, but in the core of the brain stem. 'The Hidden Spring' is not easy going. There is so much neurological detail that I found myself having to read, reread and spend time digesting paragraphs before finally getting to understand the central claim. I felt good about being smart enough to get the core of the argument, but bad about not being smart enough to assess its value. I guess that understanding will come after twenty or thirty more books. Fascinating read that took me a little further along that road.
July 5, 2022
A lot to unpack in this one. I won't pretend I have the educational background to understand all of 's proposed answer to the perpetual mystery of the what and how of consciousness. But his theory makes sense, it is laid out quite clearly (even to a complete layperson like myself) and his explanations are not inconsistent with the little we already know about the elusive concept of "consciousness". Or rather the little that scientists agree upon.
I was especially impressed by the concept of consciousness as a free-energy-minimizing tool, and the assertion that the brain aspires to zombie-dom. This latter is a tough one to digest, and I refused to accept it. At first. Definitely worth a re-read, but only after my impressions have settled a bit.
I was especially impressed by the concept of consciousness as a free-energy-minimizing tool, and the assertion that the brain aspires to zombie-dom. This latter is a tough one to digest, and I refused to accept it. At first. Definitely worth a re-read, but only after my impressions have settled a bit.
March 13, 2021
I will begin this book review with a micro-review of another recent book. In "A Thousand Brains", Jeff Hawkins lays out a convincing understanding of how the cerebral cortex - the mammalian seat of intelligence - works. He absolutely nails it. What an important step in understanding our brains.
Now turning to "The Hidden Spring", Solms notes right at the beginning, "Since the cerebral cortex is the seat of intelligence, almost everybody thinks that it is also the seat of consciousness. I disagree; consciousness is far more primitive than that. It arises from a part of the brain that humans share with fishes. This is the ‘hidden spring� of the title." Solms is correct. Thus what Hawkins has done is solve "the easy problem" (ala Chalmers). Solms seeks the solution to the "hard problem" - given how the brain works, how can we then understand what it feels like to be conscious? I do believe Solms, if not actually having solved the hard problem, has at least untangled its main mysteries. This is amazing stuff.
Without exaggeration, I will say the hottest topic at the crossroads of physics and biology right now is non-equilibrium statistical mechanics. That is, life is recognized as a unique event which, contrary to other things in the universe, continually pumps entropy away from itself into the environment, to keep itself alive. Here, entropy is understood in both the thermodynamic and Shannon information-theoretic perspectives. Together with intellectual powerhouse Karl Friston, Solms has put together a "Free Energy" understanding of consciousness, which he deftly presents in Chapter 7. The heart of this model is a self-organizing Markov Blanket which serves as a sensory/motive boundary which sequesters everything inside from the world at large, yet allows for proper sampling of said world.
There is the linchpin insight that solves the hard problem. Such a boundary is what gives us license to take an inner subjective perspective in the first place. Another crucial point, as Solms says, "The answer [to why feelings arose via evolution] starts from the fact that needs cannot be combined and summated in any simple way. Our multiple needs cannot be reduced to a single common denominator; they must be evaluated on separate, approximately equal scales, so that each of them can be given its due." That is, how could you quantify "hunger" vs "warmth" - "need to eat" vs "need for heat" - etc? You can not, hence we have feelings, aka affective consciousness. Affective consciousness naturally precedes cortical consciousness, and in fact is what gives the cortex consciousness.
I'm not sure what else there is to say in a review at this point. Solms has more to say; the book does not end with these insights. Yet, we have arrived at the pièce de résistance. So please, read this book, and take a moment to marvel at what has been done.
Now turning to "The Hidden Spring", Solms notes right at the beginning, "Since the cerebral cortex is the seat of intelligence, almost everybody thinks that it is also the seat of consciousness. I disagree; consciousness is far more primitive than that. It arises from a part of the brain that humans share with fishes. This is the ‘hidden spring� of the title." Solms is correct. Thus what Hawkins has done is solve "the easy problem" (ala Chalmers). Solms seeks the solution to the "hard problem" - given how the brain works, how can we then understand what it feels like to be conscious? I do believe Solms, if not actually having solved the hard problem, has at least untangled its main mysteries. This is amazing stuff.
Without exaggeration, I will say the hottest topic at the crossroads of physics and biology right now is non-equilibrium statistical mechanics. That is, life is recognized as a unique event which, contrary to other things in the universe, continually pumps entropy away from itself into the environment, to keep itself alive. Here, entropy is understood in both the thermodynamic and Shannon information-theoretic perspectives. Together with intellectual powerhouse Karl Friston, Solms has put together a "Free Energy" understanding of consciousness, which he deftly presents in Chapter 7. The heart of this model is a self-organizing Markov Blanket which serves as a sensory/motive boundary which sequesters everything inside from the world at large, yet allows for proper sampling of said world.
There is the linchpin insight that solves the hard problem. Such a boundary is what gives us license to take an inner subjective perspective in the first place. Another crucial point, as Solms says, "The answer [to why feelings arose via evolution] starts from the fact that needs cannot be combined and summated in any simple way. Our multiple needs cannot be reduced to a single common denominator; they must be evaluated on separate, approximately equal scales, so that each of them can be given its due." That is, how could you quantify "hunger" vs "warmth" - "need to eat" vs "need for heat" - etc? You can not, hence we have feelings, aka affective consciousness. Affective consciousness naturally precedes cortical consciousness, and in fact is what gives the cortex consciousness.
I'm not sure what else there is to say in a review at this point. Solms has more to say; the book does not end with these insights. Yet, we have arrived at the pièce de résistance. So please, read this book, and take a moment to marvel at what has been done.
October 26, 2021
Human consciousness, the awareness that that our perceptions are unique to ourselves, is the subject of this book. It’s dense and difficult to read because of the technical research terminology that’s involved, and I can’t say I understood it all. But it was intriguing enough to keep me interested to the end.
It’s Solms' contention that the nature of consciousness my be the most difficult topic in science. What makes consciousness and its study so difficult and controversial, are two puzzles. One is how the mind relates to the body, the so-called “mind/body problem�. How does the physical brain produce your experience of phenomena? The second is how the non-physical stuff control the physical body.
“It seems reasonable to expect a theory of consciousness to explain the fundamentals of why you feel the way you do. It should explain why you are the way you are,� Solms writes. Why does any of this matter? It’s beyond the scope of Solm’s book but if consciousness is understood, then it may mean we are in greater control of our lives.
Solms� ideas are particularly interesting as he is a proponent of some b asic Freudian theories and has a psychoanalytic background as well as doing neuro science research. He thinks that Freud got a lot of things right, things that a hundred years later are being borne out by neuro research. Freud’s contribution was to emphasize the role that unconscious impulses control our behavior.
Solms agrees with this and argues that almost all of our actions, ones we normally think are controlled by reason and rationality, are actually influenced more by the unconscious. Information processing is accomplished by unconscious habitual means. How has Solms come to this conclusion which doesn’t agree with that of other researchers? Here is where the book is at its most technical, explaining and summarizing research conclusions.
If I understand Solms, he is saying that what we call consciousness is not something “cognitive� such as our awareness of vision, but something “affective,� tied up with feelings. Common sense is wrong, for example, in believing that memory is a conscious brain function. Solms disputes this common sense notion by pointing that research has proven that activities such as reading, face recognition, color perception, movement perception, space recognition, and the like, all take place simultaneously in different parts of the brain. They are not controlled by any conscious effort, but pulled together in a unity independent of any cognitive effort.
The brain and its handling of these perceptions work this way because of efficiency. We function well in all kinds of ways precisely because we do not have to consciously and repetitively do the work; it is done for us unconsciously, and all we do, consciously, is FEEL.
Another question arises � can a device be created that has consciousness? Solms thinks so. Once all of the sources of psychic activity and their mechanisms have been identified and fed into a computer, feeling will arise naturally and there will be a low level of consciousness. But the implications of this are many and still to be worked out.
Solms� conclusion is not a simplified and satisfying common-sensical one; rather it is that consciousness, based on complex neural research comes from our interior.. At its source is a stream of feelings for which exact causes are still unknown. Solms doesn’t answer any final questions but he is very thorough in describing the issues and problems in the research.
It’s Solms' contention that the nature of consciousness my be the most difficult topic in science. What makes consciousness and its study so difficult and controversial, are two puzzles. One is how the mind relates to the body, the so-called “mind/body problem�. How does the physical brain produce your experience of phenomena? The second is how the non-physical stuff control the physical body.
“It seems reasonable to expect a theory of consciousness to explain the fundamentals of why you feel the way you do. It should explain why you are the way you are,� Solms writes. Why does any of this matter? It’s beyond the scope of Solm’s book but if consciousness is understood, then it may mean we are in greater control of our lives.
Solms� ideas are particularly interesting as he is a proponent of some b asic Freudian theories and has a psychoanalytic background as well as doing neuro science research. He thinks that Freud got a lot of things right, things that a hundred years later are being borne out by neuro research. Freud’s contribution was to emphasize the role that unconscious impulses control our behavior.
Solms agrees with this and argues that almost all of our actions, ones we normally think are controlled by reason and rationality, are actually influenced more by the unconscious. Information processing is accomplished by unconscious habitual means. How has Solms come to this conclusion which doesn’t agree with that of other researchers? Here is where the book is at its most technical, explaining and summarizing research conclusions.
If I understand Solms, he is saying that what we call consciousness is not something “cognitive� such as our awareness of vision, but something “affective,� tied up with feelings. Common sense is wrong, for example, in believing that memory is a conscious brain function. Solms disputes this common sense notion by pointing that research has proven that activities such as reading, face recognition, color perception, movement perception, space recognition, and the like, all take place simultaneously in different parts of the brain. They are not controlled by any conscious effort, but pulled together in a unity independent of any cognitive effort.
The brain and its handling of these perceptions work this way because of efficiency. We function well in all kinds of ways precisely because we do not have to consciously and repetitively do the work; it is done for us unconsciously, and all we do, consciously, is FEEL.
Another question arises � can a device be created that has consciousness? Solms thinks so. Once all of the sources of psychic activity and their mechanisms have been identified and fed into a computer, feeling will arise naturally and there will be a low level of consciousness. But the implications of this are many and still to be worked out.
Solms� conclusion is not a simplified and satisfying common-sensical one; rather it is that consciousness, based on complex neural research comes from our interior.. At its source is a stream of feelings for which exact causes are still unknown. Solms doesn’t answer any final questions but he is very thorough in describing the issues and problems in the research.
May 6, 2024
This book is mind-blowing. Basically, Mark Solmns sets out to solve the Hard Problem: how human consciousness rises from the material stuff, i.e. our brain. His views are these: feelings come before consciousness and consciousness is derived from feelings; feelings are generated from the brain stem, not the cortex; consciousness can be explained by physics, i.e. entropy, the second law of thermodynamics, and the Free Energy Principle; consciousness is not intelligence, and the Turing Test has gotten it all wrong.
I’d like to write a detailed review, but I need to read it again, probably multiple times, to get more out of it. Right at this moment, Mark Solms’s experiment of creating an artificial consciousness (note: it’s NOT artificial intelligence) is still ongoing. Here is a video where he discusses artificial consciousness:
I’d like to write a detailed review, but I need to read it again, probably multiple times, to get more out of it. Right at this moment, Mark Solms’s experiment of creating an artificial consciousness (note: it’s NOT artificial intelligence) is still ongoing. Here is a video where he discusses artificial consciousness:
May 16, 2021
I was with Solms for a good part of the book where he explains the subcortical origin of consciousness, but seeing early on that he was ultimately attempting to "prove" that "consciousness is engineerable", I could not help but roll my eyes again and again.
Ok, so what's the problem with this frankly balderdash idea? Well, the ridiculous claim that reality is at root quantitative - all numbers, 0s and 1s. The author tries to pass this off as it is not a contestable idea, but it purely is. Philosophically, there is no being - no subjectivity - to determinate the reality of a 0 and 1 universe. There is simply force; energy; change. In fact, one could better see that as a qualiative reality, rather than the reverse.
Second, because of this bias towards the impersonal numberness of reality, Solms interprets phenomenal experience as "really" a bunch of 00011110 that the brain is "computing". But this is patently absurd. He is putting all the work on the brains end and acting like you can have a phenomenal experience without a continuous tensegrity of structure moving from the sun, to the earth, to the objects which refract light in certain wavelengths. Again, its a pure solipstistic Freudian bias to see this as a one-part process, and not inherently contrapuntal - point-counterpoint. You cannot have phenomenal experience without light; the electromagnetic energy in the external environment is as much "shaping" the world to be seen as the nervous systems regulatory dynamics are correlating its patterns with that world. The phenomenal experience then should be interpreted as emergent; as entailing both sides of the equation. This idea gets emphasis in Thomas Fuchs "The Ecology of the Brain" where he rightly recognizes that the brains projections, or pejoratively, "hallucinations", are actually about what is actually out there - its constantly about being aligned with the real-life effects of real objects. The sunflower seeds I'm eating are really there; as is the oatmeal, as is the table. The entire world is not an arbitrary construction; even if the brain is "modelling" the informational streams, it is not willnilly "constructing" it. It is absolutely correlated to the reality of the Real; what it 'represents' is the gestalt of what is essentially needed to survive. This means the arrow - seeing the brain can only be understood in terms of the dialectical contrapuntal flows between organism and world, and therefore, in terms of origin of life research and cell behavior - is really outward-inwards; the inwards-outwards "expectation" is always just following what the world has already told it; what the world has 'granted' it vis-a-vis what keeps its metabolic structures moving forward.
This conception of unity course goes against the hyperbolic and frankly promethean fantasies of Karl Friston and the the other AI obsessed cohorts of cognitive science, but that is because their motivation as scientists isn't purely scientific: they're more technologists trying to 'recreate' consciousness - ala Frankenstein, than philosophically honest thinkers. If Solms were to be completely honest with his readers, he'd admit that he is subscribing to an affectless image of the cosmos where 'pure numbers' somehow sit about waiting to be found by humans. He adopts John Wheelers vantage point of a participatory universe, but one can't help but wonder what this really means; how can humans discover some transcendental number domain - how can such a domain be real without some sort of transcendental 'revelation' as to the ontological primacy of such numbers? If you admit to this religious bias, fine. All is dandy. But I think a person seeking more objectivity would be interested in the facts of such a persons development, which in Solms case could not be anymore problematic: a German colony in Namibia owned by de-beers diamond company? Does that sound like a healthy developmental context able to produce the type of 'mood' - or sensitivity to the 'otherness' of the world outside you - that my critique is based in? Given the cultural context and pernicious racism/classism of that period of time, and the irreversible affects on the persons mood - core affecting 'knowing' about the world around him, that is, recognizing that day-to-day relations in such a colony would have made his parents hardened and cold to the perception of human suffering, an effect that wouldn't be 'contained' towards blacks, but would have become generalized in the relations to their children (the author admits that his dad was affectless; almost seeming to imply that the author has reached the right level of affective awareness). Thus, in other words, we perceive the world through the very processes Solms so expertly describes in his book. Our values precede us; we're enculturated and enframed by the others who install their experience of 'being' - their values - in us. And since I consider that developmental context which shaped Solms (and is in other ways behind the lives of so many schizoid scientists) to be a perversion of true human nature - that is, with the the ontogenetical primacy of love - and with that rejection Freuds one person emphasis in his theory of human personality as well as the predictive coding paradigms (not the idea that organisms predict, or project, the meaning of a prospective signal) obsession with the 'engineerability' of mind, I must reject Solms reasoning on the grounds of an ontological nihilism (or nominalism) that has its roots in the contextual effect on a human beings development.
This oversight is glaring in Solms work, where he gives essentially short-shrift to the processes of psychological development. How exactly is this book an example of 'neuropsychoanalysis'? Nothing truly human and complex is spoken about. It's really just an effort to push a promethean fantasy about the engineerability of consciousness. Just a few moments ago I was basking in the beautiful sun in the backyard, soaking up its rays. How does my consciousness of this experience 'fit' within the predictive processing paradigm? Even better; my nephew comes outside. I look at him; he's 3 years old; I feel awe that just 2 years ago he was an infant. This year he can actually go out and enjoy the world - discover the world, on his own two legs. What is this awe I'm experiencing? And how come this awe triggers in me a gratitude - a love - for being able to perceive this, and bear witness to the beauty of being? How does the so-called "zombied" default that our bodies are really seek jibe with this description of my experience? I am certainly conscious of this awe; I am certainly conscious of this love - this gratitude. And contrary to what Solms thinks, there is nothing exhausting or tiring about it. It is quite the reverse: it is an enormously efficient and proficient way to relate to the signals around you. If anything - if one could look at the world in a positivistic sense, it would be that the predictive paradigms correlation - or rather, Solms correlation - between consciousness and "precision" is all about leading to this understanding - to this sensibility of ones existential and ontological unity with the Other. Clearly, of course, this is not the philosophical presupposition that Solms 'mood' provides him with. He perhaps doesn't ascribe - probably because he doesn't experience very deeply - the sort of meaning that I'm describing here. The interplay between the awe that an existential awareness of an external object elicits (my nephew); and the subsequent melding of this awe with a deep love - a gratitude, a joy in being-with-the-other. To nurture them. To bear witness to their Being.
Ok. Since this phenomenological and therefore philosophical sensibility is not present, the issue becomes, how can you engineer consciousness without using the same materials evolution has used? This consideration exposes the fantastical nature of the whole enterprise. In "A World Beyond Physics", Stuart Kauffman notes that the universe beyond the 92 elements of the periodic table is non-ergodic - not ergodic, as the authors sacred "consciousness equation" has it. That is, the ergodicity or nonergodicity of consciousness is not a question of whether the "gist" of what an organism does to stay consciousness can be "collapsed" into a formula, but whether it is thermodynamically workable. Life is living because it can die. If you want to make consciousness, you would first have to engineer life. And as the author of Equations of Life Charles Cockell notes, you cannot make living beings without carbon: silicon will simply not do. It does not possess the properties that carbon does.
So, where does this leave the authors theory about the engineerability of consciousness? Let me go one by one through his theory. More or less, he doesn't think a system needs to be intrinsically thermodynamic in the sense that carbon-based organisms are. The mongrel-demon creature Solms and his friends have in mind would work like this: first, it would 'fight against thermodynamics' through silicon; instead of seeking food to exist like all living organisms do, it would seek electricity - presumably, electrical outlets. They would thus need to 'build into' the machine the need to reenergize itself; but this would require a 'fatigue' detector; a 'pain detector' that could keep track of damages. Solms then makes the imaginative jump to seeing this as forming the ground of an 'anxiety' detector; Fully in idealization mode now, Solms then says that such machines would then form bonds with other machines like it - and so 'care' will emerge. Think of how makeshift and unseemly this entire process is. Only a person who has spent some time studying origin of life research and understands the insurmountable complexities researchers in this field have had in generating a self-reproducing autopoietic systems can look at this intellectual charade and wonder what kind of being - if such a being could exist - would be. First, it wouldn't truly be thermodynamic because unlike in real creatures, where each cell is literally a homeostat that us synergistically integrated with the functioning of an autonomic nervous system which hierarchically responds to the bodies parameters and then adjusts its parameters to meet the bodies needs, this machine-bot creature would not have parts that are operating in such a way; it would have detectors external to the silicon chips that 'read' its states; this differs fundamentally from life insofar as living beings like bacteria and unicellular organisms - in short, organisms without nervous systems - have long been living and acting 'cognitively' withoout recourse to any external neuronal regulation of its energy needs. Nervous systems are emergent properties of living systems; the 'information processing' they supposedly do are ineluctably guided by the thermodynamics intrinsic to every atom, molecule and cell which makes up the system. Furthermore, and even more to the derangement motivating such scientists, living organisms with nervous systems have evolved in a milieu - in an ecological context - which has enabled it to progress in its evolution. Without the inherent compatibility between inner and outer - between the nucleic acids for instance, that living organisms like ourselves continuously receive from external sources like bacteria and viruses, we wouldn't be viable. We are living because of the invisible network of interpenetration that subsists between organisms with nervous systems and the biotic environment overall.
The author cites experiments which show that because a few hundred or so neurons can be replaced with a computer chip that sends radio waves to receiving neurons, that the whole system can in turn be replaced in exactly just a way. But this in no way follows. Just because a very small portion of a house can be replaced with silly puddy without compromising the stability of the house doesn't imply that you can keep doing that. Phase transitions and thresholds are fundamental to how nature operates. The author also says nothing about follow ups about this experiment? How long does this 'replacement' silicon chip last? Is there any damage to surrounding tissues given that our cells have not evolved with reference to errant radio waves? The experiment also deals with the most technically manageable part of the nervous system: motor neurons. And not just that, the nervous system is composed of 86 billion neurons. Its astonishing that so paltry a number could be replaced and the author could then go on to claim that this "proves in principle" that you could replace all neurons with silicon chips without problems. The arrogance is astounding. Imagine the problems that would inevitably arise at each juncture. It's like jenga; take out one piece and the system begins to wobble; take out more and even though you're putting in 'silicon' chips, such chips didn't have billions upon billion of years of adaptive assimilation to reduce errors. The goal, essentially, is to match with computers and silicon what nature could go within with carbon. But to do this, - or rather, to pursue this promethean fantasy - at the expense of the natural world and the environment at large, given what kind of resources would be required to keep such an artificial enterprise going (science and technology today feeds off the surplus created by the neoliberal economy; Solms thinking evidently doesn't go that far).
Ok, so what's the problem with this frankly balderdash idea? Well, the ridiculous claim that reality is at root quantitative - all numbers, 0s and 1s. The author tries to pass this off as it is not a contestable idea, but it purely is. Philosophically, there is no being - no subjectivity - to determinate the reality of a 0 and 1 universe. There is simply force; energy; change. In fact, one could better see that as a qualiative reality, rather than the reverse.
Second, because of this bias towards the impersonal numberness of reality, Solms interprets phenomenal experience as "really" a bunch of 00011110 that the brain is "computing". But this is patently absurd. He is putting all the work on the brains end and acting like you can have a phenomenal experience without a continuous tensegrity of structure moving from the sun, to the earth, to the objects which refract light in certain wavelengths. Again, its a pure solipstistic Freudian bias to see this as a one-part process, and not inherently contrapuntal - point-counterpoint. You cannot have phenomenal experience without light; the electromagnetic energy in the external environment is as much "shaping" the world to be seen as the nervous systems regulatory dynamics are correlating its patterns with that world. The phenomenal experience then should be interpreted as emergent; as entailing both sides of the equation. This idea gets emphasis in Thomas Fuchs "The Ecology of the Brain" where he rightly recognizes that the brains projections, or pejoratively, "hallucinations", are actually about what is actually out there - its constantly about being aligned with the real-life effects of real objects. The sunflower seeds I'm eating are really there; as is the oatmeal, as is the table. The entire world is not an arbitrary construction; even if the brain is "modelling" the informational streams, it is not willnilly "constructing" it. It is absolutely correlated to the reality of the Real; what it 'represents' is the gestalt of what is essentially needed to survive. This means the arrow - seeing the brain can only be understood in terms of the dialectical contrapuntal flows between organism and world, and therefore, in terms of origin of life research and cell behavior - is really outward-inwards; the inwards-outwards "expectation" is always just following what the world has already told it; what the world has 'granted' it vis-a-vis what keeps its metabolic structures moving forward.
This conception of unity course goes against the hyperbolic and frankly promethean fantasies of Karl Friston and the the other AI obsessed cohorts of cognitive science, but that is because their motivation as scientists isn't purely scientific: they're more technologists trying to 'recreate' consciousness - ala Frankenstein, than philosophically honest thinkers. If Solms were to be completely honest with his readers, he'd admit that he is subscribing to an affectless image of the cosmos where 'pure numbers' somehow sit about waiting to be found by humans. He adopts John Wheelers vantage point of a participatory universe, but one can't help but wonder what this really means; how can humans discover some transcendental number domain - how can such a domain be real without some sort of transcendental 'revelation' as to the ontological primacy of such numbers? If you admit to this religious bias, fine. All is dandy. But I think a person seeking more objectivity would be interested in the facts of such a persons development, which in Solms case could not be anymore problematic: a German colony in Namibia owned by de-beers diamond company? Does that sound like a healthy developmental context able to produce the type of 'mood' - or sensitivity to the 'otherness' of the world outside you - that my critique is based in? Given the cultural context and pernicious racism/classism of that period of time, and the irreversible affects on the persons mood - core affecting 'knowing' about the world around him, that is, recognizing that day-to-day relations in such a colony would have made his parents hardened and cold to the perception of human suffering, an effect that wouldn't be 'contained' towards blacks, but would have become generalized in the relations to their children (the author admits that his dad was affectless; almost seeming to imply that the author has reached the right level of affective awareness). Thus, in other words, we perceive the world through the very processes Solms so expertly describes in his book. Our values precede us; we're enculturated and enframed by the others who install their experience of 'being' - their values - in us. And since I consider that developmental context which shaped Solms (and is in other ways behind the lives of so many schizoid scientists) to be a perversion of true human nature - that is, with the the ontogenetical primacy of love - and with that rejection Freuds one person emphasis in his theory of human personality as well as the predictive coding paradigms (not the idea that organisms predict, or project, the meaning of a prospective signal) obsession with the 'engineerability' of mind, I must reject Solms reasoning on the grounds of an ontological nihilism (or nominalism) that has its roots in the contextual effect on a human beings development.
This oversight is glaring in Solms work, where he gives essentially short-shrift to the processes of psychological development. How exactly is this book an example of 'neuropsychoanalysis'? Nothing truly human and complex is spoken about. It's really just an effort to push a promethean fantasy about the engineerability of consciousness. Just a few moments ago I was basking in the beautiful sun in the backyard, soaking up its rays. How does my consciousness of this experience 'fit' within the predictive processing paradigm? Even better; my nephew comes outside. I look at him; he's 3 years old; I feel awe that just 2 years ago he was an infant. This year he can actually go out and enjoy the world - discover the world, on his own two legs. What is this awe I'm experiencing? And how come this awe triggers in me a gratitude - a love - for being able to perceive this, and bear witness to the beauty of being? How does the so-called "zombied" default that our bodies are really seek jibe with this description of my experience? I am certainly conscious of this awe; I am certainly conscious of this love - this gratitude. And contrary to what Solms thinks, there is nothing exhausting or tiring about it. It is quite the reverse: it is an enormously efficient and proficient way to relate to the signals around you. If anything - if one could look at the world in a positivistic sense, it would be that the predictive paradigms correlation - or rather, Solms correlation - between consciousness and "precision" is all about leading to this understanding - to this sensibility of ones existential and ontological unity with the Other. Clearly, of course, this is not the philosophical presupposition that Solms 'mood' provides him with. He perhaps doesn't ascribe - probably because he doesn't experience very deeply - the sort of meaning that I'm describing here. The interplay between the awe that an existential awareness of an external object elicits (my nephew); and the subsequent melding of this awe with a deep love - a gratitude, a joy in being-with-the-other. To nurture them. To bear witness to their Being.
Ok. Since this phenomenological and therefore philosophical sensibility is not present, the issue becomes, how can you engineer consciousness without using the same materials evolution has used? This consideration exposes the fantastical nature of the whole enterprise. In "A World Beyond Physics", Stuart Kauffman notes that the universe beyond the 92 elements of the periodic table is non-ergodic - not ergodic, as the authors sacred "consciousness equation" has it. That is, the ergodicity or nonergodicity of consciousness is not a question of whether the "gist" of what an organism does to stay consciousness can be "collapsed" into a formula, but whether it is thermodynamically workable. Life is living because it can die. If you want to make consciousness, you would first have to engineer life. And as the author of Equations of Life Charles Cockell notes, you cannot make living beings without carbon: silicon will simply not do. It does not possess the properties that carbon does.
So, where does this leave the authors theory about the engineerability of consciousness? Let me go one by one through his theory. More or less, he doesn't think a system needs to be intrinsically thermodynamic in the sense that carbon-based organisms are. The mongrel-demon creature Solms and his friends have in mind would work like this: first, it would 'fight against thermodynamics' through silicon; instead of seeking food to exist like all living organisms do, it would seek electricity - presumably, electrical outlets. They would thus need to 'build into' the machine the need to reenergize itself; but this would require a 'fatigue' detector; a 'pain detector' that could keep track of damages. Solms then makes the imaginative jump to seeing this as forming the ground of an 'anxiety' detector; Fully in idealization mode now, Solms then says that such machines would then form bonds with other machines like it - and so 'care' will emerge. Think of how makeshift and unseemly this entire process is. Only a person who has spent some time studying origin of life research and understands the insurmountable complexities researchers in this field have had in generating a self-reproducing autopoietic systems can look at this intellectual charade and wonder what kind of being - if such a being could exist - would be. First, it wouldn't truly be thermodynamic because unlike in real creatures, where each cell is literally a homeostat that us synergistically integrated with the functioning of an autonomic nervous system which hierarchically responds to the bodies parameters and then adjusts its parameters to meet the bodies needs, this machine-bot creature would not have parts that are operating in such a way; it would have detectors external to the silicon chips that 'read' its states; this differs fundamentally from life insofar as living beings like bacteria and unicellular organisms - in short, organisms without nervous systems - have long been living and acting 'cognitively' withoout recourse to any external neuronal regulation of its energy needs. Nervous systems are emergent properties of living systems; the 'information processing' they supposedly do are ineluctably guided by the thermodynamics intrinsic to every atom, molecule and cell which makes up the system. Furthermore, and even more to the derangement motivating such scientists, living organisms with nervous systems have evolved in a milieu - in an ecological context - which has enabled it to progress in its evolution. Without the inherent compatibility between inner and outer - between the nucleic acids for instance, that living organisms like ourselves continuously receive from external sources like bacteria and viruses, we wouldn't be viable. We are living because of the invisible network of interpenetration that subsists between organisms with nervous systems and the biotic environment overall.
The author cites experiments which show that because a few hundred or so neurons can be replaced with a computer chip that sends radio waves to receiving neurons, that the whole system can in turn be replaced in exactly just a way. But this in no way follows. Just because a very small portion of a house can be replaced with silly puddy without compromising the stability of the house doesn't imply that you can keep doing that. Phase transitions and thresholds are fundamental to how nature operates. The author also says nothing about follow ups about this experiment? How long does this 'replacement' silicon chip last? Is there any damage to surrounding tissues given that our cells have not evolved with reference to errant radio waves? The experiment also deals with the most technically manageable part of the nervous system: motor neurons. And not just that, the nervous system is composed of 86 billion neurons. Its astonishing that so paltry a number could be replaced and the author could then go on to claim that this "proves in principle" that you could replace all neurons with silicon chips without problems. The arrogance is astounding. Imagine the problems that would inevitably arise at each juncture. It's like jenga; take out one piece and the system begins to wobble; take out more and even though you're putting in 'silicon' chips, such chips didn't have billions upon billion of years of adaptive assimilation to reduce errors. The goal, essentially, is to match with computers and silicon what nature could go within with carbon. But to do this, - or rather, to pursue this promethean fantasy - at the expense of the natural world and the environment at large, given what kind of resources would be required to keep such an artificial enterprise going (science and technology today feeds off the surplus created by the neoliberal economy; Solms thinking evidently doesn't go that far).
September 7, 2021
“Once feelings evolved � that is, the unique ability we have as complex organisms to register our states � something urgently new appeared in the universe: subjective being. . . Feelings are a legacy that the whole history of life has bestowed upon us, to steal us from the uncertainties to come.�
Sealed in the impenetrable darkness of the cranium, there lives an extraordinary couple whose uncanny relationship mesmerized and boggled philosophers and scientists for centuries. The members of the couple, while very different in nature, live closely interconnected, mutually dependent lives. One of them is known as the body; being made of physical material it is slightly better studied and understood of the two. The second one is referred to as the mind; unlike its physical counterpart, it’s built of the intangible stuff, which historically made it much harder to study.
For a long time and with a great deal of struggle, both science and philosophy have tried to understand why the physical body gives rise to the non-physical mind and how, at the same time, the non-physical mind can control the physical body. The conundrum appeared so challenging it’s often been consigned to the realm of metaphysical phenomena, which implied that it had no viable solution. The resulting enigma was termed “the hard problem.�
Through decades of scientific inquiry, various schools of neuroscience continued to tackle the hard problem from different angles and with different tools, digging up new insights in hopes of arriving at an ultimate theory. In The Hidden Spring, a South African neuroscientist Mark Solms leverages those cumulative insights along with years of independent research in an attempt to further lift the curtain on the formidable problem.
Starting from the times of Sigmund Freud, he makes gradual progress to modern days by examining the findings and history of psychoanalysis, behavioral neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and neurophysiology. Along the way, he introduces the knowns and unknowns in our current understanding of the origin and function of consciousness and presents possible solutions for filling in some of the most fundamental gaps.
To that end, Solms makes three notable departures from the conventions of modern neuroscience and mind studies. First of all, he challenges the view that positions cortex as the basis of consciousness and subjective experience. He suggests that, instead, we need to shift our focus to the lower parts of the brain � specifically, to the brainstem. Next, he argues that consciousness is not at all a cognitive phenomenon and it’s not our intelligence but affective apparatus where it originates in the first place. Finally, he holds that, under the right conditions, the selfsame thing we understand as consciousness can be artificially engineered even outside of a purely biological system. To support these arguments, on top of neuroscience and psychology, Solms employs some sophisticated tools and concepts from statistical physics and information theory. The result of his work is a riveting and audacious theory of consciousness, which, while not fully exhaustive, is astoundingly wholistic and which, if successfully confirmed, may very well go down in history among science’s most pivotal discoveries.
Insofar as the hard problem allows, Solms does his best to lay out his propositions in accessible terms. While still fairly technical, the book remains within the reach of comprehension for a curious and patient reader.
The Hidden Spring is undoubtedly an urgent must-read for anyone looking to better understand the enigma of consciousness, which ultimately is about better understanding what makes us who we are. I recommend this book highly.
Sealed in the impenetrable darkness of the cranium, there lives an extraordinary couple whose uncanny relationship mesmerized and boggled philosophers and scientists for centuries. The members of the couple, while very different in nature, live closely interconnected, mutually dependent lives. One of them is known as the body; being made of physical material it is slightly better studied and understood of the two. The second one is referred to as the mind; unlike its physical counterpart, it’s built of the intangible stuff, which historically made it much harder to study.
For a long time and with a great deal of struggle, both science and philosophy have tried to understand why the physical body gives rise to the non-physical mind and how, at the same time, the non-physical mind can control the physical body. The conundrum appeared so challenging it’s often been consigned to the realm of metaphysical phenomena, which implied that it had no viable solution. The resulting enigma was termed “the hard problem.�
Through decades of scientific inquiry, various schools of neuroscience continued to tackle the hard problem from different angles and with different tools, digging up new insights in hopes of arriving at an ultimate theory. In The Hidden Spring, a South African neuroscientist Mark Solms leverages those cumulative insights along with years of independent research in an attempt to further lift the curtain on the formidable problem.
Starting from the times of Sigmund Freud, he makes gradual progress to modern days by examining the findings and history of psychoanalysis, behavioral neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and neurophysiology. Along the way, he introduces the knowns and unknowns in our current understanding of the origin and function of consciousness and presents possible solutions for filling in some of the most fundamental gaps.
To that end, Solms makes three notable departures from the conventions of modern neuroscience and mind studies. First of all, he challenges the view that positions cortex as the basis of consciousness and subjective experience. He suggests that, instead, we need to shift our focus to the lower parts of the brain � specifically, to the brainstem. Next, he argues that consciousness is not at all a cognitive phenomenon and it’s not our intelligence but affective apparatus where it originates in the first place. Finally, he holds that, under the right conditions, the selfsame thing we understand as consciousness can be artificially engineered even outside of a purely biological system. To support these arguments, on top of neuroscience and psychology, Solms employs some sophisticated tools and concepts from statistical physics and information theory. The result of his work is a riveting and audacious theory of consciousness, which, while not fully exhaustive, is astoundingly wholistic and which, if successfully confirmed, may very well go down in history among science’s most pivotal discoveries.
Insofar as the hard problem allows, Solms does his best to lay out his propositions in accessible terms. While still fairly technical, the book remains within the reach of comprehension for a curious and patient reader.
The Hidden Spring is undoubtedly an urgent must-read for anyone looking to better understand the enigma of consciousness, which ultimately is about better understanding what makes us who we are. I recommend this book highly.
February 22, 2022
Billions of little homeostats wrapped in their Markov blankets, desperately fighting entropy
August 3, 2021
"What we are all aspiring to, therefore,
is not pleasure (decreasing need) but zombiedom (no need)."
I came at this as a person who thought the last decent and scientifically acceptable
psychological experiment involved Pavlov's drooling dog. I really liked the idea of
behaviorism, which avoids any kind of subjective mucking around.
So there were some issues and readjusting when it came to getting on board the subjectivity
in science train, which Solms was fully committed to.
But once I let go, and sometimes you just need to, I had a really great time with this book.
Solms redefined what I think of when I think of feelings.
It's not all cry-boohoo feelings. Feelings are basically the body's
way of bringing to your attention a bodily need and guiding you to solve it. Thirst is a feeling.
So is pain. You avoid things that feel "wrong". Feelings are always conscious.
If they're not, they're not feelings.
Solms thinks consciousness in general is feeling*-based, free energy-related, and brainstem-derived.
Even Nagel's What Is It Like to Be a Bat probably should have been What Does It FEEL Like To
Be a Bat?
Solms does not believe that the structures of the human brain possess special biological
consciousness-producing powers, and thinks functional reproduction of particular structures would
suffice when it comes to manufacturing "experience".
Therefore, the author thinks it's possible to build robots that have feelings/consciousness,
and he's working on it right now.
Robots with a self preservation instinct.
Hold on to your Markov Blankets.
is not pleasure (decreasing need) but zombiedom (no need)."
I came at this as a person who thought the last decent and scientifically acceptable
psychological experiment involved Pavlov's drooling dog. I really liked the idea of
behaviorism, which avoids any kind of subjective mucking around.
So there were some issues and readjusting when it came to getting on board the subjectivity
in science train, which Solms was fully committed to.
But once I let go, and sometimes you just need to, I had a really great time with this book.
Solms redefined what I think of when I think of feelings.
It's not all cry-boohoo feelings. Feelings are basically the body's
way of bringing to your attention a bodily need and guiding you to solve it. Thirst is a feeling.
So is pain. You avoid things that feel "wrong". Feelings are always conscious.
If they're not, they're not feelings.
Solms thinks consciousness in general is feeling*-based, free energy-related, and brainstem-derived.
Even Nagel's What Is It Like to Be a Bat probably should have been What Does It FEEL Like To
Be a Bat?
Solms does not believe that the structures of the human brain possess special biological
consciousness-producing powers, and thinks functional reproduction of particular structures would
suffice when it comes to manufacturing "experience".
Therefore, the author thinks it's possible to build robots that have feelings/consciousness,
and he's working on it right now.
Robots with a self preservation instinct.
Hold on to your Markov Blankets.
Read
March 30, 2021Nonfiction about the origin of consciousness, somewhere between a book entirely for laypeople and a book for a more technical audience. I feel like if I put allll my thoughts here, I might as well write an academic kind of book review, and I can't really budget time for that right now.
So I'll just remark that I really liked some aspects of the book (control theory / systems science / etc are really underappreciated in psychology IMO), but near the end I felt increasingly perplexed about why the book did not cite any of the actual empirical results of embodied AI and/or embodied robotics, even though embodied approaches were cited as pure theory. It felt to me like huge chunks of the proposed research program to create artificial consciousness had already been attempted by others. (I might have misread something??) I also missed a discussion of dynamic systems theory approaches, and how they relate to the newly proposed equations - maybe there is something from his colleague Friston? I'm going to go look, because again, this was interesting and thought-provoking.
___________
Source of the book: Lawrence Public Library
So I'll just remark that I really liked some aspects of the book (control theory / systems science / etc are really underappreciated in psychology IMO), but near the end I felt increasingly perplexed about why the book did not cite any of the actual empirical results of embodied AI and/or embodied robotics, even though embodied approaches were cited as pure theory. It felt to me like huge chunks of the proposed research program to create artificial consciousness had already been attempted by others. (I might have misread something??) I also missed a discussion of dynamic systems theory approaches, and how they relate to the newly proposed equations - maybe there is something from his colleague Friston? I'm going to go look, because again, this was interesting and thought-provoking.
___________
Source of the book: Lawrence Public Library
March 21, 2021
Highly interesting, highly technical but clearly written, and highly thought provoking. Mark Solms' analysis of affect's role in consciousness is convincing and his extrapolation of human experience out of the basic mechanisms of a self-organising system seeking to defy entropy, and the problems to which that gives rise after a certain point of complexity is reached, in terms of interpreting the plasticity of needs and wants on the back of bare survival, is illuminating (essentially, it's neurosis, confirmed as a core part of the human condition).
But to my mind Solms has not, in any way, solved the "hard problem" of consciousness. He has shunted the question down a level, from consciousness to feeling, but remains unable to suggest how matter 'feels' in the first place.
"Self-organising systems survive because they occupy limited states; they do not disperse themselves. This survival imperative led gradually to the evolution of complex dynamical mechanisms that underwrite intentionality. Critically, the selfhood of self-organising systems grants them a point of view." But why/how did that "intentionality" arise, suffused with feeling, as against an automatic electrochemical mutual reaction, triggered by physical forces between entities, eventually reaching its limit in terms of the calculable complexity of needs/demands to be met? I'm with Johannes Muller: there's some non-physical element caught up in this, a fundamental constituent part of reality, not yet captured in our reckonings because not yet identifiable let alone measurable.
But to my mind Solms has not, in any way, solved the "hard problem" of consciousness. He has shunted the question down a level, from consciousness to feeling, but remains unable to suggest how matter 'feels' in the first place.
"Self-organising systems survive because they occupy limited states; they do not disperse themselves. This survival imperative led gradually to the evolution of complex dynamical mechanisms that underwrite intentionality. Critically, the selfhood of self-organising systems grants them a point of view." But why/how did that "intentionality" arise, suffused with feeling, as against an automatic electrochemical mutual reaction, triggered by physical forces between entities, eventually reaching its limit in terms of the calculable complexity of needs/demands to be met? I'm with Johannes Muller: there's some non-physical element caught up in this, a fundamental constituent part of reality, not yet captured in our reckonings because not yet identifiable let alone measurable.
June 11, 2021
For the most part, this was a very readable book and I really enjoyed the author's biographical digressions and patient case studies. It was a shame that at times it diverged into some complex and formal work. I strongly agree with one of the fundamental claims - that the origin of consciousness is to be found in feelings rather than perception or cognition, and that consciousness science should thus be focussing more on affect. I just didn't see why this then had to be framed in terms of the free energy principle, which just seemed to me to needlessly add complexity.
August 1, 2024
When I read books on consciousness I am frustrated in most cases because I think what people are saying is obviously wrong. To some extent this has to do with the fact that when you reach a certain age your mind is not flexible enough to grasp new concepts. But mostly, I think, it is because they are obviously wrong.
It was a real pleasure then to read this book that actually managed to modify my views on the subject.
Solms spends some time on Chalmers and his powerful meme of the hard problem and his strange version of dualism. This seems to me entirely correct but also not very interesting.
What is his positive contribution? He says that Chalmers is wrong because he thinks, following Crick, that consciousness is something cognitive. There is, for example, unconscious vision and conscious vision. And when you find the difference between the two, you have consciousness. That was what Crick was suggesting. Why, Chalmers asks, is information processing accompanied by experience?
To Solms the fundamental conscious property is not experience or perceiving but feeling. Unconscious feeling would be an oxymoron. (p. 265) And what he is trying to do with this shift to feeling is to demystify consciousness. The biological feeling of hunger, he says, is not especially difficult to explain.
Solms makes four claims. 1) Consciousness is generated in the upper brainstem (not in the cortex), 2) it is fundamentally affective, 3) it is an extended form of homeostasis 4) it follows the Free Enegery Principle. (p. 295)
The underlying concepts are pretty difficult, but Solms explains not only how consciousness works in practice but also why it is useful (and this in turn explains why it was developed.) I am using an example that comes from one of his lectures: The functional mechanism of feeling is Homeostasis. It is the mechanism that guarantees that we stay in our viable ranges for example our temperature. We need to stay within certain bounds. If we get to cold we die, if we get too hot we die. This is normally done automatically by reflexes. If it gets hot you start to perspire. The regulation is done by what Solms calls prediction. If it gets hot the prediction is that producing sweat will help and then you do it. But what if you are in a situation where reflexes do not work anymore? This is where feelings come in. You get an unpleasure feeling. What happens if you are in a burning house and can’t breath? The unpleasure feeling (air-hunger) is an error signal and it causes you to change the situation by trial and error go up, go down. (And these actions are by definition voluntary.) The purpose of feeling is to navigate us through areas of uncertainty. If you feel (a pleasant) relief - you are getting air, you are in your comfort zone again. There are of course many different feelings, thirst, need to urinate, fear, rage.
The error signal in other words causes you to update your predictive model and you learn something for a simular situation. Things get more complicated when there are conflicting error signals. You are hungry, in need of fresh air, you feel lust. “Which need is the most salient right now? The answer is provided not only by the relative magnitudes of the competing error signals, but also by the differences between the categories (modes or states), the salience of which must be assessed in context.� (p. 195) Technically, the question would be what action minimizes my free energy? (I hope, I understood that correctly.)
It all makes a lot of sense. Interestingly, Solmes is trying to build an artificial conscious system. It does not have to be intelligent. But it should register error signals and act upon them to maintain homeostasis.
There are many more fascinating subjects in the book e.g. on Freud or hehaviourism. For example that feelings must have valence. It is good to live, bad to die etc. The basic feelings include a sort of default feeling that he calls seeking, meaning an interest in the world. This is working whenever we are not in the grip of some other affect. There is also a basic need to play.
Solms provides a solid foundation to the question of consciousness. The only thing I am unhappy with is that he leaves no room for the difference between the basic consciousness that he describes and what I would call higher consciousness, or self-consciousness. That is consciousness that sees the “I� as the originator of all actions and emotions. So rage is explained with the Solms Consciousness. But what about hate? I think this kind of consciousness is based on language, and it builds abstract categories like love or God. If you hate, you can have your dreams of revenge without putting yourself in danger to carry them out. So this would be another building block on top of the basic consciousness to make you even better equipped to deal with unusual situations. But it could also lead to seemingly absurd actions like wanting to die for an abstract idea.
9/10
It was a real pleasure then to read this book that actually managed to modify my views on the subject.
Solms spends some time on Chalmers and his powerful meme of the hard problem and his strange version of dualism. This seems to me entirely correct but also not very interesting.
What is his positive contribution? He says that Chalmers is wrong because he thinks, following Crick, that consciousness is something cognitive. There is, for example, unconscious vision and conscious vision. And when you find the difference between the two, you have consciousness. That was what Crick was suggesting. Why, Chalmers asks, is information processing accompanied by experience?
To Solms the fundamental conscious property is not experience or perceiving but feeling. Unconscious feeling would be an oxymoron. (p. 265) And what he is trying to do with this shift to feeling is to demystify consciousness. The biological feeling of hunger, he says, is not especially difficult to explain.
Solms makes four claims. 1) Consciousness is generated in the upper brainstem (not in the cortex), 2) it is fundamentally affective, 3) it is an extended form of homeostasis 4) it follows the Free Enegery Principle. (p. 295)
The underlying concepts are pretty difficult, but Solms explains not only how consciousness works in practice but also why it is useful (and this in turn explains why it was developed.) I am using an example that comes from one of his lectures: The functional mechanism of feeling is Homeostasis. It is the mechanism that guarantees that we stay in our viable ranges for example our temperature. We need to stay within certain bounds. If we get to cold we die, if we get too hot we die. This is normally done automatically by reflexes. If it gets hot you start to perspire. The regulation is done by what Solms calls prediction. If it gets hot the prediction is that producing sweat will help and then you do it. But what if you are in a situation where reflexes do not work anymore? This is where feelings come in. You get an unpleasure feeling. What happens if you are in a burning house and can’t breath? The unpleasure feeling (air-hunger) is an error signal and it causes you to change the situation by trial and error go up, go down. (And these actions are by definition voluntary.) The purpose of feeling is to navigate us through areas of uncertainty. If you feel (a pleasant) relief - you are getting air, you are in your comfort zone again. There are of course many different feelings, thirst, need to urinate, fear, rage.
The error signal in other words causes you to update your predictive model and you learn something for a simular situation. Things get more complicated when there are conflicting error signals. You are hungry, in need of fresh air, you feel lust. “Which need is the most salient right now? The answer is provided not only by the relative magnitudes of the competing error signals, but also by the differences between the categories (modes or states), the salience of which must be assessed in context.� (p. 195) Technically, the question would be what action minimizes my free energy? (I hope, I understood that correctly.)
It all makes a lot of sense. Interestingly, Solmes is trying to build an artificial conscious system. It does not have to be intelligent. But it should register error signals and act upon them to maintain homeostasis.
There are many more fascinating subjects in the book e.g. on Freud or hehaviourism. For example that feelings must have valence. It is good to live, bad to die etc. The basic feelings include a sort of default feeling that he calls seeking, meaning an interest in the world. This is working whenever we are not in the grip of some other affect. There is also a basic need to play.
Solms provides a solid foundation to the question of consciousness. The only thing I am unhappy with is that he leaves no room for the difference between the basic consciousness that he describes and what I would call higher consciousness, or self-consciousness. That is consciousness that sees the “I� as the originator of all actions and emotions. So rage is explained with the Solms Consciousness. But what about hate? I think this kind of consciousness is based on language, and it builds abstract categories like love or God. If you hate, you can have your dreams of revenge without putting yourself in danger to carry them out. So this would be another building block on top of the basic consciousness to make you even better equipped to deal with unusual situations. But it could also lead to seemingly absurd actions like wanting to die for an abstract idea.
9/10
January 1, 2025
The Hidden Spring
also here -
I made more detailed notes for The Hidden Spring than any book since *How Emotions are Made* - a review I riff off here (/book/show/2...) . It’s a rare thing to find a book that both blows your mind with its depth of scientific insight and leaves you grappling with philosophical implications long after you put it down.
This too is a book with an ambitious goal - to demystify the origins of consciousness and feelings by grounding them in the free energy principle. And, for my money, it largely succeeds. What’s more, it sheds light on the interplay between biology, physics, neuroscience, and even ethics in ways that feel both dazzling and in some ways deeply unsettling.This puts it right at the top of the list of work on consciousness.
Deconstructing Our Assumptions
The book starts by dismantling the common idea that consciousness is tied to the higher brain functions alone. Instead, it makes a case for feelings as the true bedrock of consciousness - older than memory, language, or even rational thought. We’re shown how these primal sensations are integral to survival, rooted in ancient evolutionary systems dating back to fish. And we have a physical location, a small dense knot in brain stem that is 525m years old. This idea, that feelings are nature’s guiding force, is a profound shift away from the “rational control� narrative most of us have absorbed. The brain is presented as bottom up not top down. We know we take in more information that we can hope to process.
The argument is backed by astonishing (and tragic) examples: children born without a cortex who still display emotional consciousness; mammals engaging in maternal care and play, even when deprived of higher brain functions. It forces a rethink of what it means to be conscious and where we draw the line between instinct and awareness.
Constructing Consciousness
The free energy principle is the backbone of the book’s argument: consciousness is an emergent property of an organism’s need to maintain homeostasis. In simple terms, we need to resist entropy to survive, and feelings are the internal signals that guide us. This mechanism scales from basic survival (e.g., avoiding freezing to death) to the most abstract concepts of human life.
The exploration of feelings as predictions - error signals generated when reality deviates from expectation - is particularly fascinating. It reframes emotions not as irrational outbursts but as finely tuned systems designed to keep us alive. Feelings are the wellspring of consciousness. We know what we feel but not always why. The book beautifully illustrates this with examples, from fear as a protective blessing to how emotions inform decision-making in the face of uncertainty.
Many of the ideas are backed up from both the other top scientists from today such as Anthony Damasio, and our long dead friends such as Sigmund Freud - who has quite the rehabilitation here. The author has consciousness evolving instead of a memory trace - it's for things where we need to learn from experience, for feeling a way through a situation. Once navigated, we look to automate and speed up the process. Drive vs reflex. Using short term memory, dealing with uncertainty is what can be called hard system 2 thinking, reasoning and intentionality. The largest errors really are our best learning opportunities! (As long as we don't die.)
Highlights and Surprises
The breadth of ideas in The Hidden Spring is staggering. The sections on the Markov blanket, which separates the “self� from the external environment, are revelatory. They describe how organisms model their surroundings and use these models to act - a process that is foundational to subjectivity.
The discussion of perception is equally thrilling. The brain, it turns out, is far less interested in external input than you’d think. Most of what we “see� is a predictive model, informed by past experiences and updated only when reality surprises us. The comparison to generative AI tools is apt - our minds fill in gaps with astonishing efficiency. So much of the language overlaps with AI/ML terminology such as "weightings," "confidence optimizations," "corrections," and "expected strength." The book frames the striking similarities between biological processes and artificial systems, suggesting that both operate as prediction machines adapting to minimize error. It raises fascinating questions about the potential to bridge these domains and what this means for our understanding of consciousness.
Practical and Ethical Implications
As the book shifts into the implications of its theory, it becomes both exciting and troubling. The author is trying to create consciousness in machines, creating conscious programs. Incredibly inventive but the ethical dilemmas are profound. What happens when we build machines capable of feeling? Would their suffering be our responsibility? (Yes). The book doesn’t shy away from these questions, and its answers are worrying. The number one reason why consciousness evolved is to increase the chances of survival. What is the greatest threat to any machine or program we endow with it? Us. This, maybe more than raw intelligence is increasing my pdoom. And we may do it unintentionally.
There’s also an unexpected practicality here. The book’s insights into how emotions and consciousness function provide tools for better living. Understanding that feelings arise from prediction errors helps frame anxiety, fear, and even joy as signals to be worked with rather than battled against.
A Transformative Read
This is first-rate science writing, deeply rooted in evidence yet unafraid to speculate. He gives an answer on "The hard problem" and a reason why it has not been solved (before now?). Great!
The prose is occasionally dense, especially on the physics! but the payoff is worth it. The book builds on How Emotions are Made, subsuming the ideas there while moving us back towards more fundamental emotions that were thrown out in that work. He states that all mammals and birds have 7 core emotions. These two seem to be the poles in the field.
It may not prove to be correct butThe Hidden Spring has the power to spark a revolution in how we understand consciousness and emotion. It feels like the right path, it feels like explanations to consciousness have never been so close. It’s a challenging but rewarding read - one that lingers long after you’ve turned the final page.
also here -
I made more detailed notes for The Hidden Spring than any book since *How Emotions are Made* - a review I riff off here (/book/show/2...) . It’s a rare thing to find a book that both blows your mind with its depth of scientific insight and leaves you grappling with philosophical implications long after you put it down.
This too is a book with an ambitious goal - to demystify the origins of consciousness and feelings by grounding them in the free energy principle. And, for my money, it largely succeeds. What’s more, it sheds light on the interplay between biology, physics, neuroscience, and even ethics in ways that feel both dazzling and in some ways deeply unsettling.This puts it right at the top of the list of work on consciousness.
Deconstructing Our Assumptions
The book starts by dismantling the common idea that consciousness is tied to the higher brain functions alone. Instead, it makes a case for feelings as the true bedrock of consciousness - older than memory, language, or even rational thought. We’re shown how these primal sensations are integral to survival, rooted in ancient evolutionary systems dating back to fish. And we have a physical location, a small dense knot in brain stem that is 525m years old. This idea, that feelings are nature’s guiding force, is a profound shift away from the “rational control� narrative most of us have absorbed. The brain is presented as bottom up not top down. We know we take in more information that we can hope to process.
The argument is backed by astonishing (and tragic) examples: children born without a cortex who still display emotional consciousness; mammals engaging in maternal care and play, even when deprived of higher brain functions. It forces a rethink of what it means to be conscious and where we draw the line between instinct and awareness.
Constructing Consciousness
The free energy principle is the backbone of the book’s argument: consciousness is an emergent property of an organism’s need to maintain homeostasis. In simple terms, we need to resist entropy to survive, and feelings are the internal signals that guide us. This mechanism scales from basic survival (e.g., avoiding freezing to death) to the most abstract concepts of human life.
The exploration of feelings as predictions - error signals generated when reality deviates from expectation - is particularly fascinating. It reframes emotions not as irrational outbursts but as finely tuned systems designed to keep us alive. Feelings are the wellspring of consciousness. We know what we feel but not always why. The book beautifully illustrates this with examples, from fear as a protective blessing to how emotions inform decision-making in the face of uncertainty.
Many of the ideas are backed up from both the other top scientists from today such as Anthony Damasio, and our long dead friends such as Sigmund Freud - who has quite the rehabilitation here. The author has consciousness evolving instead of a memory trace - it's for things where we need to learn from experience, for feeling a way through a situation. Once navigated, we look to automate and speed up the process. Drive vs reflex. Using short term memory, dealing with uncertainty is what can be called hard system 2 thinking, reasoning and intentionality. The largest errors really are our best learning opportunities! (As long as we don't die.)
Highlights and Surprises
The breadth of ideas in The Hidden Spring is staggering. The sections on the Markov blanket, which separates the “self� from the external environment, are revelatory. They describe how organisms model their surroundings and use these models to act - a process that is foundational to subjectivity.
The discussion of perception is equally thrilling. The brain, it turns out, is far less interested in external input than you’d think. Most of what we “see� is a predictive model, informed by past experiences and updated only when reality surprises us. The comparison to generative AI tools is apt - our minds fill in gaps with astonishing efficiency. So much of the language overlaps with AI/ML terminology such as "weightings," "confidence optimizations," "corrections," and "expected strength." The book frames the striking similarities between biological processes and artificial systems, suggesting that both operate as prediction machines adapting to minimize error. It raises fascinating questions about the potential to bridge these domains and what this means for our understanding of consciousness.
Practical and Ethical Implications
As the book shifts into the implications of its theory, it becomes both exciting and troubling. The author is trying to create consciousness in machines, creating conscious programs. Incredibly inventive but the ethical dilemmas are profound. What happens when we build machines capable of feeling? Would their suffering be our responsibility? (Yes). The book doesn’t shy away from these questions, and its answers are worrying. The number one reason why consciousness evolved is to increase the chances of survival. What is the greatest threat to any machine or program we endow with it? Us. This, maybe more than raw intelligence is increasing my pdoom. And we may do it unintentionally.
There’s also an unexpected practicality here. The book’s insights into how emotions and consciousness function provide tools for better living. Understanding that feelings arise from prediction errors helps frame anxiety, fear, and even joy as signals to be worked with rather than battled against.
A Transformative Read
This is first-rate science writing, deeply rooted in evidence yet unafraid to speculate. He gives an answer on "The hard problem" and a reason why it has not been solved (before now?). Great!
The prose is occasionally dense, especially on the physics! but the payoff is worth it. The book builds on How Emotions are Made, subsuming the ideas there while moving us back towards more fundamental emotions that were thrown out in that work. He states that all mammals and birds have 7 core emotions. These two seem to be the poles in the field.
It may not prove to be correct butThe Hidden Spring has the power to spark a revolution in how we understand consciousness and emotion. It feels like the right path, it feels like explanations to consciousness have never been so close. It’s a challenging but rewarding read - one that lingers long after you’ve turned the final page.
June 12, 2024
This is a tough read -at least for me- as I think it tries to solve the hard problem of consciousness. Theories of consciousness are galore, like quantum mechanics, hard to grasp and mostly theoretical. Anil Seth’s Being You is a good introduction clarifying the distinction between intelligence and consciousness (his AI chapter was a delightful ending). Whereas Seth settles on physiological properties with his beast machine, and explains high phi levels with the cortex in mammals, Solms sees that as unnecessary and claims the source of consciousness, hence the hidden spring, is actually in the brain stem. Solms’s emotions based affect theory pushes against the entropy with free energy principle and uses functional formulas to quantify consciousness. I am lost following the formulas maybe even misunderstood earlier parts so have no clue how all that shows artificial consciousness is possible. The Hidden Spring is very interesting and thought provoking but feels like alot still well hidden in this field.
February 28, 2023
Introduction
Solms introduces this (beautiful looking) book with his rationale for exploring the origin point for our consciousness. He disagrees with the general consensus of the cerebral cortex seating consciousness, and instead argues it 'arise from a part of the brain that humans share with fishes.'
The Stuff of Dreamsstarts be describing, briefly, his life and area of upbringing. Then he discusses an incident involving his little brother, whereupon he fractured his skull and his personality radically altered -
- which I can believe.
Firstly, the myriad of cases - most obvious of which being Phineas Gage. But mostly, because I was struck in the frontal lobe when younger and suddenly developed new interests and perspectives; and this incident was repeated as recently as 2022, whereupon two men beat me to unconsciousness on a bus for wearing a skirt and looking at them. The detachment and confusion is... Hard to put into words immediately. Nonetheless, this was an insightful, personal, and wonderful introduction to the topic. I'll keep on subject, now.
He describes behaviourism and conditioning, before segueing into cognitive (and functionalist) psychology, and eventually: cognitive neuroscience.
This describes the way I felt at UoLiverpool, almost down to a 'T'.
Solms then moves onto why he was inclined to study dreaming. He describes the experiments of Aserinsky and Kleitman, the discovery of REM-cycles, beta/alpha waves, and how dreams had barely been touched upon academically - much to my chagrin, too - outside of the guesstimation and occasional experimentation of psychologists like the aforementioned and Freud (who in The Interpretation of Dreams laid out the concept of manifest/latent content in dreams).
And then he gets right into the neurobiology. Acetylcholine has always been fascinating to me (not least of all because the word kicks ass).
It's extremely important we start out understanding - to the best of our abilities - dreaming, before we tackling the macrocosmic narrative it entails.
Hobson 'dismantled' Freudian's view on dreams being motivationally biased, suggesting they are completely neutral and dream analysis is akin to tea-leaf reading or klecksography (which is to say: moreso indicative of the reader).
This part stands out as incredible important to me, even if it is sandwiched between critical information bread on the consciousness and dreaming. The wilfulness for conversation, companionship, and sharing of the inward world shouldn't be underestimated in the ill and scared.
He then denotes lobotomy and describes the 'side-affects' including impairing positive psychotic symptoms (hallucinations and delusions), motivation, and dreaming. We are thrown more figures and terms. But needless to say, this chapter is dense (without being so obtuse to the point of alienation).
Rollercoaster! - and I'm enjoying every turn.
This is all to say his investigations pointed him one place: the brainstem, and eventually psychoanalysis for the subjective reports one can gather in the field.
Before and After Freud
This, alone, has been eye-opening for me. Or, rather, I've always actively defended Freud (having a few odd ideas doesn't erase the million amazing ones he had) and his writings: as luicid, forward thinking, and imaginative as they are. One maybe shouldn't forget the limitations of Freud's times. What he might have done with the technology we have now is, in some ways, almost a moot point. Would we have the technology we have without his writings? Would we use it they way we do, if so? Solms then goes onto focus on psychdynamic drives (the 'source of all psychical energy').
Solms writes about 'confabulation' and incorrect memory consolidation and monitoring, and how this reflects the issues with objective analysis without qualitative belief (further defending psychoanalysis, which in my eyes was common sense until I came to realise how few want to talk). The 'Man Who Live in a Dream' segment - regarding MR. S - is brilliant. Wonderful example of how listening and hearing are different things, and how we must use both in science. However -
The Cortical Fallacy:Solms begins this part with an incredible analysis: if the cortex is where the consciousness maintains - then why do those without brain tissue (hydranencephaly) express and display clear signs of enjoyment, pleasure, and desire? They are neither comatose nor vegetative.
This is quite a heartbreaking chapter in some respects. Particularly the anecdote of the neurosurgeon who suggested, to the mother, that their infant undergo fontanelle closure of the skull without anaesthetic as (without cortex) the child wouldn't feel pain anyway.
This is incredibly revolutionary to me, who has been taught a combination of antiquated philosophies on psychology, neurology, etc over the past decade. He's spelt it out as plain as day, there - and I've always felt something similar (how could one reasonably say a vegetative or 'mind-blind' individual is legitimately lacking in consciousness?) and the distinguishment of a two-brain model makes... More than sense. I'm going to have to think about this. Fascinating. I'm with Solms in the opinion that there is a 'person' inside hydrnencephalic individuals, but can understand the issue -
- and I find the interview with Patient B (Patient B., whose insular cortices were entirely destroyed, experienced body feelings as well as emotional feelings) similarly fascinating - he appears entirely self-aware. He then actually mentions the Gage case I eluded to earlier.
This chapter is probably the densest yet, focusing mostly on what denotes the 'human experience' of consciousness - or else, the 'unbearable automaticity of being'.
And we've arrived at the same conclusion presented in the two books I've been reading alongside this one (Blake vs the World & Quantum Psychology) - which is: a panpsychic collective (un)consciousness overhanging our relative dimensions (reality-tunnels) on reality.
He uses this chapter to (rightfully) have a go at psychologists and academics that have ignored the subjective feelings of their subjects as non-data -
It's absolutely incredible how clearly and precise Solms illustrates his arguments. I've wanted to read a book like this for so long - thank you!
In Feelings, Solms explains 'feelings' in a neurological sense, that is the difference between emotional and bodily experiences and how they correlate or are distinguished within the brain.
He then illustrates Panksepp's Taxonomy on instinctual emotions: LUST, SEEKING, RAGE, FEAR, PANIC/GRIEF, CARE, PLAY.
VI. The Source
(continued in comments)
Solms introduces this (beautiful looking) book with his rationale for exploring the origin point for our consciousness. He disagrees with the general consensus of the cerebral cortex seating consciousness, and instead argues it 'arise from a part of the brain that humans share with fishes.'
The Stuff of Dreamsstarts be describing, briefly, his life and area of upbringing. Then he discusses an incident involving his little brother, whereupon he fractured his skull and his personality radically altered -
There is a German word for the feeling this aroused in me, Unheimlichkeit, for which there is no adequate English equivalent. Literally, it means ‘unhomeliness� but it translates better as ‘eeriness� or ‘the uncanny�.
- which I can believe.
Firstly, the myriad of cases - most obvious of which being Phineas Gage. But mostly, because I was struck in the frontal lobe when younger and suddenly developed new interests and perspectives; and this incident was repeated as recently as 2022, whereupon two men beat me to unconsciousness on a bus for wearing a skirt and looking at them. The detachment and confusion is... Hard to put into words immediately. Nonetheless, this was an insightful, personal, and wonderful introduction to the topic. I'll keep on subject, now.
He describes behaviourism and conditioning, before segueing into cognitive (and functionalist) psychology, and eventually: cognitive neuroscience.
The neuropsychology of that time might as well have been called neurobehaviourism. The more I was taught about functions like short-term memory, which was said to provide a ‘buffer� for holding memories in consciousness, the more I realised that my lecturers were talking about something other than what I had signed up for. They were teaching us about the functional tools used by the mind, rather than the mind itself. I was dismayed. [...] ‘Neuropsychology is admirable, but it excludes the psyche.�
This describes the way I felt at UoLiverpool, almost down to a 'T'.
Solms then moves onto why he was inclined to study dreaming. He describes the experiments of Aserinsky and Kleitman, the discovery of REM-cycles, beta/alpha waves, and how dreams had barely been touched upon academically - much to my chagrin, too - outside of the guesstimation and occasional experimentation of psychologists like the aforementioned and Freud (who in The Interpretation of Dreams laid out the concept of manifest/latent content in dreams).
Dreaming, after all, is nothing but a paradoxical intrusion of consciousness (‘wakefulness�) into sleep. [...] Michel Jouvet, in 1965. In a series of surgical experiments on cats, he demonstrated that REM sleep was generated not by the forebrain (which includes the cortex, the upper part of the brain that is so impressively large in humans and partly for that reason is considered the organ of the mind) but rather by the brainstem [...] Acetylcholine causes arousal: it increases the ‘level� of consciousness (for example, it is boosted by nicotine, which thereby helps you concentrate).
And then he gets right into the neurobiology. Acetylcholine has always been fascinating to me (not least of all because the word kicks ass).
Combining these findings with the fact that REM sleep switches on and off automatically, roughly every ninety minutes, like clockwork, Hobson wasted no time in drawing the inevitable conclusion: ‘The primary motivating force for dreaming is not psychological but physiological since the time of occurrence and duration of dreaming sleep are quite constant, suggesting a pre-programmed, neurally determined genesis.�
It's extremely important we start out understanding - to the best of our abilities - dreaming, before we tackling the macrocosmic narrative it entails.
Hobson 'dismantled' Freudian's view on dreams being motivationally biased, suggesting they are completely neutral and dream analysis is akin to tea-leaf reading or klecksography (which is to say: moreso indicative of the reader).
At first, I was a little uneasy about talking to such seriously ill people about their dreams. Many of them were facing, or had just undergone, life-threatening brain surgery, and in the circumstances I feared they might consider my questions frivolous. But my patients were surprisingly willing to describe the changes in their mental life that neurological diseases had brought about.
This part stands out as incredible important to me, even if it is sandwiched between critical information bread on the consciousness and dreaming. The wilfulness for conversation, companionship, and sharing of the inward world shouldn't be underestimated in the ill and scared.
He then denotes lobotomy and describes the 'side-affects' including impairing positive psychotic symptoms (hallucinations and delusions), motivation, and dreaming. We are thrown more figures and terms. But needless to say, this chapter is dense (without being so obtuse to the point of alienation).
It rapidly became clear that neuroscience owed Freud an apology. If there is one part of the brain that might be considered responsible for ‘wishes�, it is the mesocortical-mesolimbic dopamine circuit. It is anything but motivationally neutral. Edmund Rolls (and many others) calls this circuit the brain’s ‘reward� system. Kent Berridge calls it the ‘wanting� system. [...] Hobson was not amused. [...] Then he realised that these developments might vindicate a broadly Freudian outlook on dreams, at which point he wrote to me saying that he was willing to endorse my findings publicly only on the condition that I did not claim they supported Freud. So much for the supposed objectivity of neuropsychology.
Rollercoaster! - and I'm enjoying every turn.
This is all to say his investigations pointed him one place: the brainstem, and eventually psychoanalysis for the subjective reports one can gather in the field.
I hadn’t realised that Freud was a neuroscientist. Now I learnt that he had only reluctantly abandoned neurological methods of enquiry when it became clear to him, somewhere between 1895 and 1900, that the methods then available were not up to the task of revealing the physiological basis of mind.
Before and After Freud
He [Freud] therefore enthusiastically anticipated the day when psychoanalysis would once again join up with neuroscience: 'Biology is truly a land of unlimited possibilities. We may expect it to give us the most surprising information, and we cannot guess what answers it will return in a few dozen years […] They may be of a kind which will blow away the whole of our artificial structure of hypothesis.'
This was not the wildly speculative Freud that I had learnt about as an undergraduate student. [...] But the euphoria lasted only a short time. A month later he wrote: ‘I can no longer understand the state of mind in which I hatched the “Psychology�; I cannot make out how I came to inflict it on you.� Devoid of appropriate neuroscientific methods, Freud relied upon ‘imaginings, transpositions and guesses� to translate his clinical inferences.
This, alone, has been eye-opening for me. Or, rather, I've always actively defended Freud (having a few odd ideas doesn't erase the million amazing ones he had) and his writings: as luicid, forward thinking, and imaginative as they are. One maybe shouldn't forget the limitations of Freud's times. What he might have done with the technology we have now is, in some ways, almost a moot point. Would we have the technology we have without his writings? Would we use it they way we do, if so? Solms then goes onto focus on psychdynamic drives (the 'source of all psychical energy').
Many scientific colleagues advised me not to associate what I was doing with psychoanalysis, given the historical baggage the word carried. They said it was like an astronomer associating himself with astrology. But I considered it intellectually dishonest to not give Freud his due. So, I called my approach ‘neuropsychoanalysis�.
Solms writes about 'confabulation' and incorrect memory consolidation and monitoring, and how this reflects the issues with objective analysis without qualitative belief (further defending psychoanalysis, which in my eyes was common sense until I came to realise how few want to talk). The 'Man Who Live in a Dream' segment - regarding MR. S - is brilliant. Wonderful example of how listening and hearing are different things, and how we must use both in science. However -
it seemed that Freud got the functional relationship between the ‘id� (brainstem) and the ‘ego� (cortex) the wrong way round, at least insofar as feelings are concerned. He thought the perceiving ego was conscious and the feeling id was unconscious.
The Cortical Fallacy:Solms begins this part with an incredible analysis: if the cortex is where the consciousness maintains - then why do those without brain tissue (hydranencephaly) express and display clear signs of enjoyment, pleasure, and desire? They are neither comatose nor vegetative.
n an extensive review of the varieties of what we call ‘consciousness�, neurologist Adam Zeman distinguished two principal meanings of the term: ‘consciousness as the waking state� and ‘consciousness as experience�.9 Anton Coenen later elaborated: ‘Consciousness in the first meaning (consciousness as the waking state) is in this view a necessary condition for consciousness in the second sense (consciousness as experience or phenomenal consciousness).�
This is quite a heartbreaking chapter in some respects. Particularly the anecdote of the neurosurgeon who suggested, to the mother, that their infant undergo fontanelle closure of the skull without anaesthetic as (without cortex) the child wouldn't feel pain anyway.
Let me therefore put this point forcefully: if we are to accept that someone who seems to be conscious actually isn’t, we should require an extremely convincing argument. Merely raising philosophical doubt isn’t enough. We need very good grounds to think that the two sorts of consciousness have come apart in such people, as they seemingly never do in us. [...] That is how the cortex became the organ of the mind � the mind construed as consciousness of memory images � and how the subcortical brain became mindless. [...] odd as it seems, the philosophical distinction between your mind and your body came to coincide with the anatomical distinction between the cortex and the subcortex.
This is incredibly revolutionary to me, who has been taught a combination of antiquated philosophies on psychology, neurology, etc over the past decade. He's spelt it out as plain as day, there - and I've always felt something similar (how could one reasonably say a vegetative or 'mind-blind' individual is legitimately lacking in consciousness?) and the distinguishment of a two-brain model makes... More than sense. I'm going to have to think about this. Fascinating. I'm with Solms in the opinion that there is a 'person' inside hydrnencephalic individuals, but can understand the issue -
Of course, one of the reasons why it is so difficult to know what hydranencephalic patients experience � indeed, whether they have inner experience at all � is that they cannot speak.
- and I find the interview with Patient B (Patient B., whose insular cortices were entirely destroyed, experienced body feelings as well as emotional feelings) similarly fascinating - he appears entirely self-aware. He then actually mentions the Gage case I eluded to earlier.
The subcortical links must therefore provide part of the mental processing that we call ‘apperception� [...] It makes no sense, Freud argued, to draw an artificial line between the subcortical and cortical parts of the processing and claim that only the final product is ‘mental�
This chapter is probably the densest yet, focusing mostly on what denotes the 'human experience' of consciousness - or else, the 'unbearable automaticity of being'.
Computers generate global workspaces and massively integrate information all the time, when they are linked together by the internet. Why, then, should the internet not be conscious? [...] In doing so, they are following the ‘pan-psychist� turn initiated by Thomas Nagel, according to whom all things might be (just a little bit) conscious.
And we've arrived at the same conclusion presented in the two books I've been reading alongside this one (Blake vs the World & Quantum Psychology) - which is: a panpsychic collective (un)consciousness overhanging our relative dimensions (reality-tunnels) on reality.
He uses this chapter to (rightfully) have a go at psychologists and academics that have ignored the subjective feelings of their subjects as non-data -
The extent to which the empiricist philosophers and their scientific heirs, the behaviourists and cognitive scientists, ignored feeling is astonishing. [...] They conducted rigorous experiments, which gave rise to the ‘Law of Effect�. [...] The Law of Effect is in its essence, therefore, nothing other than Freud’s ‘pleasure principle�. [...] B. F. Skinner, for example, notoriously declared that: ‘the “emotions� are excellent examples of the fictional causes to which we commonly attribute behaviour�. [...] If a horse approaches me and I give it a sugar lump, it will (by the Law of Effect) be more likely to approach me again, whereas if I squirt a lemon in its face, it will be less likely to do so. According to Thorndike, the sugar lump and the lemon themselves thereby become rewarding or punishing of the horse’s behaviour; there is no need to consider the feelings they evoke, if such things even exist. This is, of course, faulty reasoning
It's absolutely incredible how clearly and precise Solms illustrates his arguments. I've wanted to read a book like this for so long - thank you!
Feelings are real, and we know about them because they permeate our consciousness. They are, in fact, for the reasons I will now explain, the wellspring of sentient being � in a sense that seems to me barely metaphorical. From their origin in some of the most ancient strata of the brain, they irrigate the dead soil of unconscious representations and bring them to mental life.
In Feelings, Solms explains 'feelings' in a neurological sense, that is the difference between emotional and bodily experiences and how they correlate or are distinguished within the brain.
As Panksepp said when he was accused by colleagues of anthropomorphism towards animals: he would rather plead guilty to zoomorphism towards humans.
He then illustrates Panksepp's Taxonomy on instinctual emotions: LUST, SEEKING, RAGE, FEAR, PANIC/GRIEF, CARE, PLAY.
But we have only been living like this (in permanent settlements with artificial laws regulating social behaviour) for about 12,000 years. Civilisation is a very recent feature of mammalian existence; it played no part in the design of our brains.
VI. The Source
(continued in comments)
March 13, 2021
I won this book in a goodreads drawing.
A neurologist trained in psychoanalysis tells us about the brain, and where consciousness comes from. Dense, but readable. I recommend it for those interested in the mind and the brain.
A neurologist trained in psychoanalysis tells us about the brain, and where consciousness comes from. Dense, but readable. I recommend it for those interested in the mind and the brain.
September 2, 2024
El «problema difícil» lo llamaron reverencialmente algunos.
¿Cómo puede nuestro cuerpo físico generar experiencia subjetiva? ¿De dónde nace el yo? ¿Qué es la conciencia y de dónde surge?
La neurociencia se acerca a estas preguntas y busca en el cerebro aproximándose con distintas teorías, con ayuda de la física, con nueva tecnología y examinando pacientes con lesiones cerebrales.
Percepción, cognición, emoción. Homeostasis, entropía, conservación. Cuerpo, cerebro, mente.
Muy muy muy interesante. Aunque cada vez sabemos más, acotamos más y estamos más cerca, sigue siendo en sí mismo un milagro de la naturaleza y además ahora sabemos que no es único de nuestra especie.
(4/5)⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ ojito que es denso
¿Cómo puede nuestro cuerpo físico generar experiencia subjetiva? ¿De dónde nace el yo? ¿Qué es la conciencia y de dónde surge?
La neurociencia se acerca a estas preguntas y busca en el cerebro aproximándose con distintas teorías, con ayuda de la física, con nueva tecnología y examinando pacientes con lesiones cerebrales.
Percepción, cognición, emoción. Homeostasis, entropía, conservación. Cuerpo, cerebro, mente.
Muy muy muy interesante. Aunque cada vez sabemos más, acotamos más y estamos más cerca, sigue siendo en sí mismo un milagro de la naturaleza y además ahora sabemos que no es único de nuestra especie.
(4/5)⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ ojito que es denso
May 30, 2024
(English review behind)
3.5 Pese a que posee un inherente sesgo cientifista, puesto que hay ciertos reduccionismos, escaso conocimiento de la filosofia de la subjetividad (lo que le hace ser ingenuo en varias afirmaciones), y mucho deseo personal, es uno de los mejores libros sobre neurociencia que he leido.
Al introducir una parte valiosa de la tradicion humanista (en este caso, a Freud), le ofrece al rancio cognitivismo neurocentrico una serie de estimulos que elevan la tesis por encima de la media.
En general, Solms se ubica en la buena tradicion cientifica de Damasio o Kandel, aunque soy esceptico con sus anhelos futuristas y creo que subestima la subjetividad, el lenguaje y otras dimensiones de las que, mismamente, Lacan y los postlacanianos han hablado mucho.
Quizas despues del retorno a Freud haga falta tomarse tambien en serio a varios de sus herederos. Sin saberlo, varias de las conclusiones de este ensayo estan en Lacan y otros pensadores del siglo XX.
--------------------
3.5 Although it has an inherent scientistic bias, since there are certain reductionisms, little knowledge of the philosophy of subjectivity (which makes it naive in several statements), and a lot of personal desire, it is one of the best books on neuroscience that I have read.
By introducing a valuable part of the humanist tradition (in this case, Freud), it offers stale neurocentric cognitivism a series of stimuli that elevate the thesis above the average.
In general, Solms is located in the good scientific tradition of Damasio or Kandel, although I am skeptical about his futuristic desires and I think he underestimates subjectivity, language and other dimensions that, likewise, post-Lacanians have talked a lot about.
Perhaps after returning to Freud, it will also be necessary to take several of his heirs seriously.
Without knowing it, several of the conclusions of this essay are in Lacan and other thinkers of the 20th century..
3.5 Pese a que posee un inherente sesgo cientifista, puesto que hay ciertos reduccionismos, escaso conocimiento de la filosofia de la subjetividad (lo que le hace ser ingenuo en varias afirmaciones), y mucho deseo personal, es uno de los mejores libros sobre neurociencia que he leido.
Al introducir una parte valiosa de la tradicion humanista (en este caso, a Freud), le ofrece al rancio cognitivismo neurocentrico una serie de estimulos que elevan la tesis por encima de la media.
En general, Solms se ubica en la buena tradicion cientifica de Damasio o Kandel, aunque soy esceptico con sus anhelos futuristas y creo que subestima la subjetividad, el lenguaje y otras dimensiones de las que, mismamente, Lacan y los postlacanianos han hablado mucho.
Quizas despues del retorno a Freud haga falta tomarse tambien en serio a varios de sus herederos. Sin saberlo, varias de las conclusiones de este ensayo estan en Lacan y otros pensadores del siglo XX.
--------------------
3.5 Although it has an inherent scientistic bias, since there are certain reductionisms, little knowledge of the philosophy of subjectivity (which makes it naive in several statements), and a lot of personal desire, it is one of the best books on neuroscience that I have read.
By introducing a valuable part of the humanist tradition (in this case, Freud), it offers stale neurocentric cognitivism a series of stimuli that elevate the thesis above the average.
In general, Solms is located in the good scientific tradition of Damasio or Kandel, although I am skeptical about his futuristic desires and I think he underestimates subjectivity, language and other dimensions that, likewise, post-Lacanians have talked a lot about.
Perhaps after returning to Freud, it will also be necessary to take several of his heirs seriously.
Without knowing it, several of the conclusions of this essay are in Lacan and other thinkers of the 20th century..
October 14, 2022
The hard problem of consciousness is thought by many to be unsolvable. Forever beyond our reach. But not Mark Solms and a band of cohorts forging a new frontier. It is amazing how far we have come in the last 10 years.
Consciousness is a topic that everyone seems unable to even define. We all agree we have it, but it is really hard to put a finger on exactly what it is because we have no real references to compare to. You simply have subjective experience, and the objective world, but how they are tied together is not at all obvious.
If like me you have spent hours and hours researching consciousness without many concrete answers, I have to highly recommend this book. It is intriguing. By looking at homeostasis and the free energy principles we seem to be able to describe a system that work in a way very much like consciousness feels. You know, it just might be the answer.
I wish I could say that this book dispels all doubt. It doesn't. There are still many questions, and so many gaps to fill in, yet Solms has taken what appears to be a distinct concrete step forward. Only time will tell, but if interested in consciousness and how it might manifest in a material world, this will certainly be worth the time to read. It will be interested to see what is built in the coming years on this able platform.
Consciousness is a topic that everyone seems unable to even define. We all agree we have it, but it is really hard to put a finger on exactly what it is because we have no real references to compare to. You simply have subjective experience, and the objective world, but how they are tied together is not at all obvious.
If like me you have spent hours and hours researching consciousness without many concrete answers, I have to highly recommend this book. It is intriguing. By looking at homeostasis and the free energy principles we seem to be able to describe a system that work in a way very much like consciousness feels. You know, it just might be the answer.
I wish I could say that this book dispels all doubt. It doesn't. There are still many questions, and so many gaps to fill in, yet Solms has taken what appears to be a distinct concrete step forward. Only time will tell, but if interested in consciousness and how it might manifest in a material world, this will certainly be worth the time to read. It will be interested to see what is built in the coming years on this able platform.
January 27, 2024
One of the most fascinating, if not the most fascinating books I’ve read in years. I learned a tremendous amount about the source/origin of consciousness, and it was never what I would have expected. I’ve ranted and raved about this book in the process of reading it to pretty much everyone who will listen. I highly recommend it. Absolutely everything about it was mind-blowing. Changed my perceptions of many things, and obviously emotions, a great deal. Magnificent.
April 16, 2021
While I found a lot of the information in this book interesting, it was not easy to get through. There are some dense spots that I had to take a break from. I am still very glad to have read the book and can think of a few friends this will appeal to.
Read
April 16, 2021Insight into modern Neurophysical knowledge and a theory of consciousness with wide implications.
September 3, 2022
Ok. I've made my way through the book. Several times I felt like a wouldn't make it all the way through. It's a beast but very rewarding.
But I think the idea can be summarized more simply for us ordinary people. Here's a go. Consciousness arises in the brain stem area (rather than the cortex) and is fundamentally about 'feeling' (emotion) rather than thinking. As a living organism with boundaries we are in constant struggle with the natural tendency of the universe to head toward entropy - where all energy is evenly distributed (i.e. disorganised) - and this requires 'work'. Being alive means we have needs to satisfy to maintain ourselves and stay alive. Our 'feelings' signal to us that work needs to be done to satisfy our needs. Consciousness helps us assess our multiple needs, against what we have learned about ourselves and the world, triage them, and take actions, in what we hope will be the most effective way.
I do have a criticism. I'm still not sure that Mark Solms answers the question 'why can't we triage our needs, and take action, 'in the dark' (unconsciously) like most of the other things our bodies do?'
I think the reason this question isn't answered properly is because there is insufficient attention (is that a pun of some sort?) paid to what role being a 'social' creature plays in the evolution of consciousness. I would have thought that being 'aware' of self, and our needs, would enable us to communicate our current state, and our needs, to our colleagues and therefore improve our chances of survival. I would have thought consciousness would improve the efficiency and effectiveness of this communication rather than doing it 'in the dark'. I would have thought that consciousness would enable our ability to project these ideas (self and needs) onto others, to help predict their needs and motives. This would also mean we could better help the people we care about (because we understand their needs and motives) and would also be able to assess the threat posed by our our rivals and enemies (not just humans) as well as be able to 'mislead' them if needed.
Maybe this could be a whole new book ... I'm just about to read "Social" by Matthew Leiberman. Maybe that will address this idea ...
But I think the idea can be summarized more simply for us ordinary people. Here's a go. Consciousness arises in the brain stem area (rather than the cortex) and is fundamentally about 'feeling' (emotion) rather than thinking. As a living organism with boundaries we are in constant struggle with the natural tendency of the universe to head toward entropy - where all energy is evenly distributed (i.e. disorganised) - and this requires 'work'. Being alive means we have needs to satisfy to maintain ourselves and stay alive. Our 'feelings' signal to us that work needs to be done to satisfy our needs. Consciousness helps us assess our multiple needs, against what we have learned about ourselves and the world, triage them, and take actions, in what we hope will be the most effective way.
I do have a criticism. I'm still not sure that Mark Solms answers the question 'why can't we triage our needs, and take action, 'in the dark' (unconsciously) like most of the other things our bodies do?'
I think the reason this question isn't answered properly is because there is insufficient attention (is that a pun of some sort?) paid to what role being a 'social' creature plays in the evolution of consciousness. I would have thought that being 'aware' of self, and our needs, would enable us to communicate our current state, and our needs, to our colleagues and therefore improve our chances of survival. I would have thought consciousness would improve the efficiency and effectiveness of this communication rather than doing it 'in the dark'. I would have thought that consciousness would enable our ability to project these ideas (self and needs) onto others, to help predict their needs and motives. This would also mean we could better help the people we care about (because we understand their needs and motives) and would also be able to assess the threat posed by our our rivals and enemies (not just humans) as well as be able to 'mislead' them if needed.
Maybe this could be a whole new book ... I'm just about to read "Social" by Matthew Leiberman. Maybe that will address this idea ...
March 25, 2021
The best book on neuroscience/consciousness I've read to date. The writing is superb, and the book well structured presenting just the right amount of information at the right pace, with the multiple use of allegories to get the point across to ensure the reader understands the theories and concepts in the simplest terms possible.
June 29, 2021
Really interesting book about consciousness, by a senior neuroscientist who was also (of all things) trained as a Freudian psychoanalyst. On top of those, he also seems to know a lot about physics and information theory. Needless to say, large chunks of the book were too complex for me, but the remainder was very absorbing and educational.
One of his main points is that the origin and basis of consciousness has more to do with emotions (feelings) and less to do with cognition or perception.
One of his main points is that the origin and basis of consciousness has more to do with emotions (feelings) and less to do with cognition or perception.
April 9, 2021
The most important book I've read about consciousness hands down. Solms makes an incredibly convincing case that the "hidden spring" of consciousness is not cognition but emotion. Emotions, bubbling up from the evolutionarily ancient brain stem, are the core tool through which all of our elaborate and recently evolved perceptions become conscious. The implications are vast. Still processing.
Read
April 21, 2022I think I will read anything recent written on consciousness and be happy. We know so little about what consciousness actually is, and I find that fascinating. I don’t feel like I can rate this book or have an opinion on the author’s views as this topic still feels really new to me. In a nutshell, Solms seems to say that consciousness is not something other than physicality but just an aspect of homeostasis and self-organizing systems. He gives the example of lightning and thunder� they are not different things.
ASIDE: I was first introduced to the idea that consciousness evolved from affect by reading Other Minds and Metazoa, books about animal minds and the evolution of consciousness. So, Peter Godfrey Smith didn’t state that outright though and I had to infer it� what a revelation! If consciousness didn’t always exist, it would have to evolve, and some consciousness may be different than others, ie: is some consciousness more complex or is it on and off like a light switch? I think his view was that pain/pleasure is a symptom/sign of consciousness. My first thought was that that can’t be right� even if a bee didn’t feel pain, that wouldn’t mean that it wasn’t conscious! How could we know that?
So in this book, Solms talks about Oliver Sacks, certain case studies, disputes the idea that the cortex = consciousness and discusses his view that consciousness exists in the brain stem. He has a bit of an argument with Chalmers on the idea that consciousness exists in all things (just a little bit) � one thing I wish he did more was explain WHY when he makes a concession. He will say in the book that an idea doesn’t make sense, but I want to hear more on why.
The musings on AI were really interesting� I’ll be excited to hear more about the project.
If I were to read this again, I would start with the last chapter first and then read from the beginning. For a lot of the book, I had no idea where we were going or what the author’s views were. He summarizes really well in the end what his views are.
As Solms is a neuroscientist, he focuses a lot on parts of the brain. He is also a psychoanalyst and promotes that as well (it has gone into a bit of a downtrend lately). From what I have read and listened to so far, I’ve gleaned that of all the people that study the brain� neuroscientists, psychologists, behavioral scientists, philosophers (of mind) generally, these people don’t talk to each other and may have a lot of misconceptions about each other’s pieces of the puzzle� the misconception about the Cortex� purpose, for example. I thought it was great to have his niche perspective on this.
ASIDE: I was first introduced to the idea that consciousness evolved from affect by reading Other Minds and Metazoa, books about animal minds and the evolution of consciousness. So, Peter Godfrey Smith didn’t state that outright though and I had to infer it� what a revelation! If consciousness didn’t always exist, it would have to evolve, and some consciousness may be different than others, ie: is some consciousness more complex or is it on and off like a light switch? I think his view was that pain/pleasure is a symptom/sign of consciousness. My first thought was that that can’t be right� even if a bee didn’t feel pain, that wouldn’t mean that it wasn’t conscious! How could we know that?
So in this book, Solms talks about Oliver Sacks, certain case studies, disputes the idea that the cortex = consciousness and discusses his view that consciousness exists in the brain stem. He has a bit of an argument with Chalmers on the idea that consciousness exists in all things (just a little bit) � one thing I wish he did more was explain WHY when he makes a concession. He will say in the book that an idea doesn’t make sense, but I want to hear more on why.
The musings on AI were really interesting� I’ll be excited to hear more about the project.
If I were to read this again, I would start with the last chapter first and then read from the beginning. For a lot of the book, I had no idea where we were going or what the author’s views were. He summarizes really well in the end what his views are.
As Solms is a neuroscientist, he focuses a lot on parts of the brain. He is also a psychoanalyst and promotes that as well (it has gone into a bit of a downtrend lately). From what I have read and listened to so far, I’ve gleaned that of all the people that study the brain� neuroscientists, psychologists, behavioral scientists, philosophers (of mind) generally, these people don’t talk to each other and may have a lot of misconceptions about each other’s pieces of the puzzle� the misconception about the Cortex� purpose, for example. I thought it was great to have his niche perspective on this.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 171 reviews
Can't find what you're looking for?
Get help and learn more about the design.