Rethinking the Mind - Prof. Mark Solms
MLST is sponsored by Brave: The Brave Search API covers over 20 billion webpages, built from scratch without Big Tech biases or the recent extortionate price hikes on search API access. Perfect for AI model training and retrieval augmentated generation. Try it now - get 2,000 free queries monthly at http://brave.com/api. Prof. Mark Solms, a neuroscientist and psychoanalyst at the University of Cape Town, presents a radical challenge to mainstream consciousness research. Drawing on decades of clinical and experimental evidence -- from decorticated animals that retain emotional behavior to hydranencephalic children who display clear affective responses without a functional cortex -- Solms argues that consciousness originates not in the cerebral cortex but in ancient brainstem structures, particularly the reticular activating system and periaqueductal gray. The conversation traces a sweeping intellectual arc from Spinoza's dual-aspect monism through Shannon's information theory to Karl Friston's free energy principle, building the case that feelings are the organism's fundamental means of monitoring its homeostatic state. Solms contends that the hard problem of consciousness only seems intractable because the field began with the wrong modality: vision, which is not intrinsically conscious, rather than affect, which is. Tim Scarfe and Solms explore the implications for AI, the failures of behaviorism, the neuroscience of psychoactive substances and REM sleep, and Jaak Panksepp's SEEKING system as the dopaminergic engine of curiosity and exploration. The result is a compelling argument that understanding consciousness requires putting feelings back at the center of brain science. --- LINKS: Full Transcript: https://app.rescript.info/share/e6521573ac5e4329ee715f768cf82b06 Download PDF transcript: https://app.rescript.info/api/public/sessions/c1459f338bba5d58/pdf
