Mark Solms - The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness

T HE H IDDEN S PRING

A Journey to the Source of Consciousness

Mark Solms

In memory of

Jaak Panksepp

(19432017)

He solved the ancient riddle and was a man most wise.

C ONTENTS

While every effort has been made to contact copyright-holders of illustrations, the author and publishers would be grateful for information about any illustrations where they have been unable to trace them, and would be glad to make amendments in further editions.

T HE H IDDEN S PRING

When I was a child, a peculiar question occurred to me: how do we picture the world as it existed before consciousness evolved? There was such a world, of course, but how do you picture it the world as it was before picturing things became possible?

To give you a sense of what I mean, try to imagine a world in which a sunrise cannot occur. The earth has always revolved around the sun, but the sun only rises over the horizon from the viewpoint of an observer. It is an inherently perspectival event. The sunrise will forever be trapped in experience.

This obligatory perspective-taking is what makes it so difficult for us to comprehend consciousness. If we want to do so, we need to elude subjectivity to look at it from the outside, to see things as they really are as opposed to how they appear to us. But how do we do that? How do we escape our very selves?

As a young man, I navely visualised my consciousness as a bubble surrounding me: its contents were the moving pictures and sounds and other phenomena of experience. Beyond the bubble, I assumed there lay an infinite blackness. I imagined this blackness as a symphony of pure quantities, interacting forces and energies and the like: the true reality out there that my consciousness represents in the qualitative forms that it must.

The impossibility of any such imagining the impossibility of representing reality without representations illustrates the scale of the task that is tackled in this book. Once again, all these years later, I am trying to peek behind the veil of consciousness, to catch a glimpse of its actual mechanism.

The book you hold in your hands, then, is unavoidably perspectival. In fact, it is even more perspectival than the paradox I have just described requires it to be. To help you see things from my point of view, I decided to tell a part of my own history. Advances in my scientific ideas about consciousness have often emerged from developments in my personal life and clinical work, and though I believe that my conclusions stand alone, it is much easier to grasp them if you know how I came to them. Some of my discoveries for example, the brain mechanisms of dreaming happened largely by serendipity. Some of my professional choices for example, to take a detour from my neuroscientific career and train as a psychoanalyst paid off more handsomely than I could reasonably have hoped. In both cases, I will explain how.

But to the extent that my quest to understand consciousness has been successful, my greatest stroke of luck has been the brilliance of my collaborators. In particular, I had the profound good fortune to work with the late Jaak Panksepp, a neuroscientist who, more than any other, understood the origin and power of feelings. Pretty much everything that I now believe about the brain was shaped by his insights.

More recently, I have been able to work with Karl Friston, who, among his many excellent qualities, bears the distinction of being the worlds most influential living neuroscientist. It was Friston who dug the deepest foundations for the theory I am about to elaborate. He is best known for reducing brain functions (of all kinds) to a basic physical necessity to minimise something called free energy. That concept is explained in , but for now, let me just say that the theory that Friston and I have worked out joins with that project so much so that you may as well call it the free energy theory of consciousness. Thats what it is.

The ultimate explanation for sentience is a puzzle so difficult it is nowadays referred to reverentially as the hard problem. Sometimes, once a puzzle is solved, both the question and its answer cease to be interesting. I will leave it to you to judge whether the ideas I set out here shed new light on the hard problem. Either way, I am confident they will help you to see yourself in a new light, and to that degree they should remain interesting until such time as they are superseded. After all, in a profound sense, you are your consciousness. It therefore 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. Perhaps it should even clarify what you can do about it.

That last topic, admittedly, transcends the intended scope of this book. But it is not beyond the scope of the theory. My account of consciousness unites in a single story the elementary physics of life, the most recent advances in both computational and affective neuroscience and the subtleties of subjective experience that were traditionally explored by psychoanalysis. In other words, the light this theory sheds ought to be light you can use.

It has been my lifes work. Decades on, I am still asking myself how the world might have looked before there was anyone around to see it. Now, better educated, I imagine the dawn of life in one of those hydro-thermal vents. The unicellular organisms that came into being there would surely not have been conscious, but their survival prospects would have been affected by their ambient surrounds. It is easy to imagine these simple organisms responding to the biological goodness of the energy of the sun. From there, it is a small step to imagine more complex creatures actively striving for such energy supplies and eventually evolving a capacity to weigh the chances of success by alternative actions.

Consciousness, in my view, arose from the experience of such organisms. Picture the heat of the day and cold of the night from the perspective of those first living beings. The physiological values registering their diurnal experiences were the precursors of the first sunrise.

Many philosophers and scientists still believe that sentience serves no physical purpose. My task in this book is to persuade you of the plausibility of an alternative interpretation. This requires me to convince you that feelings are part of nature, that they are not fundamentally different from other natural phenomena, and that they do something within the causal matrix of things. Consciousness, I will demonstrate, is about feeling, and feeling, in turn, is about how well or badly you are doing in life. Consciousness exists to help you do better.

The hard problem of consciousness is said to be the biggest unsolved puzzle of contemporary neuroscience, if not all science. The solution proposed in this book is a radical departure from conventional approaches. 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.