Mark Solms

perception.

This is the legendary Mark Solms, the neuropsychologist and psychoanalyst who argues that consciousness does not begin in the cortex.

What

is an intrinsically conscious function is feeling.

I see myself in the mirror.

That's my body.

That's also Mark Solms.

He exists.

A system can recognize the loss of something or a need for something without having to feel these analog things called emotions.

Mark Solms in his book, The Hidden Spring, which introduced me to free energy minimization, basically says this is why we have consciousness, because you can't have a feeling without feeling it.

Ta-da! And yeah, sure.

But why does the need have to be expressed as a feeling? And almost, there's two exceptions to what I'm about to say.

And he has this unparalleled, I would say, since Freud, capacity for just massively influential work.

So what I'm about to say about Mark is not about Mark Solms as a person, but it's about the function of his work on consciousness.

So my sense is that Mark Solms is like a Victor Frankenstein.

I mean that in the most flattering sense that one could say something like that.

I think that there is an ancient human desire to build life with our intellect, not with our bodies.

I think it's humanity's project.

I think it's humanity's desire.

And that Mark Solms is just the first person who's been able to pull this off.

And it turns out being able to feel might not need a big smart brain at all.

A renowned neuroscientist, Mark Solms, argues almost the opposite of what we were taught.

Solms says feeling isn't something that sits on top of intelligence.

He thinks it comes first, underneath everything else, and that it comes straight out of the basic drive to stay alive.

Yup, we've lost the plot.

the skeletal so it would be easy to hear that and just ignore it but being smart was never the scary part here being smart and being awake are two different things you can be great at solving problems and still not feel anything at all so the real question isn't whether those cells are clever it's whether anyone's actually in there and it turns out being able to feel might not need a big smart brain at all A renowned neuroscientist, Mark Solms, argues almost the opposite of what we were taught.

Solms says feeling isn't something that sits on top of intelligence.

He thinks it comes first, underneath everything else, and that it comes straight out of the basic drive to stay alive.

I'm going to get my words going here as best I can soon.

And I'm going to be talking about today something that I've been teaching about in an extension course within that institution called Concerning drives, what drives us? I've been drawing upon a paper in particular that I've assigned as reading by Mark Solms, S-O-L-M-S, if you wanted that to be spelled out and check him out.

This is one of those people who's quite prominent in the fields of neurobiology, neuroscience, and psychoanalysis.

There's a lot of literature presentations that he makes that looks to affirm psychoanalytic technique, but he's also known for his critique of psychoanalysis and particular Sigmund Freud.

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Between, say, the classical Freudian idea and the modern idea, as expressed by the likes of Mark Solms, is this idea of whether or not drives these mental representatives are conscious or unconscious.

Now, Freud thought that the instinctual drives were unconscious and they only become conscious upon discharge.

Good morning

... of looking at Freud's ideas in this light of modern neuroscience comes from Mark Solms.

He's author of The Only Cure: Freud and the Neuroscience of Mental Healing.

He's a neuropsychologist and psychoanalyst.

... what need is there that, uh, you identify with that and what it does for you.

Um, uh, it, uh, we'd have some more sensible voting, um, um, you know.

You know, I think that Mark Solms in, in the final chapter actually talks very, very interestingly about this.

He is from South Africa-

It doesn't have feelings.

And a lot of researchers these days, Mark Solms and others, Devasio neuroscientists, are talking about the consciousness arising actually out of an embodied felt sense.

So there's a ton to say here without getting too heady, too geeky, because it's super easy to do in this world.

I think this is actually one reason why some high-tech people are going into the dark now.

Okay, let's just go back to the human brain for a moment.

Do you think we need a cortex? You know, Mark Solms put forth this...

Now, I'm just gonna lay it out.

I debated Mark Solms on this issue, and, and we won according to the audience vote, because I think the science-

Congratulations

... was on my side.

Well, I mean, I looked at this question.

I was very intrigued by, uh, you know, these claims that AI could be made conscious and there are people actively working on it, some in secret and some openly.