Overview
This document is an enhanced transcript of the live presentations and group discussions with Mark Solms in 2022 at the Active Inference Institute. The focus is the 2018 paper "How and Why Consciousness Arises: Some Considerations from Physics and Physiology" by Mark Solms and Karl Friston.
Active InferenceConsciousnessNeuroanatomyPsychologyFree Energy PrincipleLivestream
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Methods and contributions
Read the source for the full argument, qualifications, and evidence.
Findings and contributions
- Solms asserts that affect is the foundational form of consciousness and that affect is intrinsically conscious.
- Solms argues, citing hydranencephalic children, that the cortex as seat of consciousness and feeling has to be dismissed.
- Solms argues affect is not the same as interoceptive inference (distinguishing his view from Anil Seth's), because many interoceptive perceptual states are not affective.
- Solms claims the mechanism of perceptual and cognitive consciousness is precision modulation of allostatic prediction errors.
- Solms reports his group is trying to instantiate these affect mechanisms in an artificial system, with only preliminary findings presented so far.
Methods
- Transcript of two GuestStream sessions with Mark Solms — Edited transcript of participatory livestream sessions (#016.1, Jan. 22, 2022 and #016.2, June 11, 2022) presenting and discussing the 2018 Solms & Friston paper.
- Solms's ten-claim slide-led presentation with interleaved Q&A — Solms presented a summary slide of points, taking each in turn and pausing for participants' questions and comments.
- Clinical neurological cases discussed as evidence — Solms draws on cases including hydranencephalic children without cortex, patients lacking prefrontal or insular cortex, and deep brain stimulation of the substantia nigra.
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- ActInfLab_GuestStream.pdf PDF · 5.36 MiB · extracted-text source
Citation
Citation metadata follows the unified bibliography.
Solms, Mark; Douglass, David S; Sillett, Stephen; Friedman, Daniel Ari. 2022. Transcript of: Mark Solms, "Consciousness as Precision Optimization: Some Physiological and Philosophical Considerations", ActInf GuestStream #016. Zenodo. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.7259006. URL: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7259006.
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