The Review:
Here, the author exposes his new "free energy theory of consciousness" to the public. It proposes to solve "the hard problem of consciousness" once and for all.
It begins with a series of provocative but interrelated questions that should have been asked many years ago:
How do we picture the world before "picturing a world" became possible that is, before consciousness evolved? How do we represent reality without a tool for representation? What is reality without representation? What does it mean to say that the material word exists beyond or without consciousness? And, without the primary tool of representation, how do we determine what existence is? How is sense made of the world without consciousness? How did the world look when there was no one around to see it?
Professor Mark Solms' thesis is that we have been making so little progress answering these questions because we have been looking in all the wrong places.
According to the author, we have been looking at the cerebral cortex when we should have been looking at the brain stem, which deals with raw feelings rather higher cognitive functioning.
He begins the book by going through six patients with disorders of consciousness.
His aim is to give us a clue as to how physical mechanisms may have led to subjective experiences.
Using his brother as case one, he tells us what it is like to be a conscious organism that has lost his sense of who he is. He watched his brother lose that ability after suffering brain damage resulting from a fall from their roof. His brother never recovered and became someone else. It led the author to ask a further question: How can a physical organ be us?
We have been taught that the complex multilevel cortical functions govern the mind. But where is the "we," the subject, in all of this processing? The same processing can be done with a cell phone. So why is a subject needed in this process?
The easy problem of consciousness is the part describing brain mechanisms. The hard problem is hard because after the mechanisms all have been explained we still do not know how consciousness works generally, or why we need feelings in particular.
A blind person can know everything there is to know about visual processing. But she still cannot see. The act of seeing is not contained within her knowledge set. Seeing is in another causal universe.
Why doesn't seeing just go on in the dark like a cell phone does when it recognizes faces, or as does normal anatomic processing all the time? Both are perceptions without awareness because neither is aware of what it is doing. So, why do we need awareness?
The answer is that looking only at brain functions is looking in the wrong place.
We used to believe that the cerebral cortex was the global work space, and that it included the subjective too. So, according to that now debunked theory, if the cortical part of the brain is lost, then subjectivity must be lost too.
But this is not what happens with patients and animals lacking a pre-frontal lobe. Tests show that neither loses their sense of self or their consciousless.
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