In this episode, host Manuel Brenner talks to Mark Solms.
Mark Solms is the Chair of Neuropsychology at the University of Cape Town, President of the South African Psychoanalytical Association, and the author of 8 books and hundreds of scientific articles. His most well-known scientific contributions include discovering the brain mechanisms of dreaming, and combining psychoanalysis and neuropsychology in an approach he coined "neuropsychoanalysis".
In this episode, we primarly discuss ideas from his newest book "The Hidden Spring", which delves into the relationships between affect, its source in the brainstem, Karl Friston's free energy principle, and how it all relates to a new theory for a "hidden spring" of consciousness.
We discuss Mark Solm's motivation for combining psychoanalysis and neuropsychology and historic reasons for why the subject has been long neglected in psychology. We move on the talking about affect and valence, what role they play in our experiental life, and how they might give us a new handle for approaching a scientific theory of consciuousness. We discuss how current cortical theories of consciousness interact with problems surrounding Chalmer's hard problem of consciousness, epistemology, and metacognition, and why the current neuroscientific evidence points away from the cortical towards an affective view of consciousness.
We close by discussing the relationship of affective consciousness to Karl Friston's free energy principle and the theory that Mark Solms developed with Friston, and questions of responsibility around using this theory to build an artificial consciousness.
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