Returning Freud to the heart of mental life, as he delves deeper into the story that damaged brains have to tell science, the author reenters the debate on the "hard problem" of consciousness with fresh tools, a new strategy, and renewed vigor.
As he collaborates with the esteemed Dr. Karl Friston, they embark on a journey to unravel the enigma of consciousness.
When the logic of thermodynamics is intertwined with Freudian psychology, the hard problem begins to reveal its secrets.
One of these revelations is that consciousness may have originated from the brainstem rather than the cortex (as is widely believed).
If the brainstem is indeed the seat of consciousness, this fact, coupled with Dr. Friston's "free energy principle," opens up an entirely new avenue of thought. Consequently, at the very least, an update of our understanding of not only the hard problem of consciousness but also its origins and nature is required.
Another revelation is that if the much older brainstem is responsible for consciousness rather than the newer cortex, it may be primarily governed by the second law of thermodynamics. In this scenario, consciousness could be seen as an entropy-creating and managing machine.
Dr. Friston, drawing from the sophisticated tools of physics, explains that thinking and feelings collaborate to minimize the brain's free energy, its entropy. If his theory holds true, the brain is likely operating under the dominion of the second law of thermodynamics. The extent of this regime is revealed by a simple experiment conducted in Dr. Friston's laboratory.
On a television monitor, we witness several clumps of particles dancing stochastically within a confined universe of other particles. After approximately a thousand seconds, a cluster of clumps forms near the center of this universe. Subsequently, after a similar duration, the inner cluster appears to perceive the motion at its periphery and within its own cluster.
As time passes, it becomes possible to distinguish between inner and outer clusters and detect a causal loop linking various sensing abilities of the inner clusters to those of the outer clusters. Dr. Friston refers to this self-organizing causal loop of self-generated sensing activity as a Markov blanket.
The Markov blanket is a process deeply intertwined with the entropy of the experimental system. Surprisingly, it turns out to be the nervous system's most fundamental homeostat. Dr. Friston asserts that his experiment is replicated millions of times throughout our nervous system, making it so prominent that he views the nervous system as a meta-Markov blanket.
However, there's a broader point to be made about the Markov blanket: its primitive sensing abilities have evolved to enable us to acquire energy from the external environment. Our "feelings" have emerged from these sensing abilities to indicate what demands our internal environment requires.
Therefore, it's not unreasonable to suggest that managing and prioritizing competing internal needs for the purpose of homeostasis has given rise to consciousness.
In further support of this idea, the author explains subjective experience as simply being the feelings we have evolved from the brainstem to prioritize survival needs in moments of uncertainty. It appears that the brainstem's primary function is to protect the organism from surprises by modeling and predicting its environment.
If this is indeed the case, then perhaps for the first time in human history, science has constructed an ontological bridge across the epistemic gap between sensing abilities and feelings; between the brain and mind; and indeed, between the objective and subjective frames of reference of life.
The free energy principle, as manifest by the Markov blanket, stands as an a priori existential principle because anything and everything that can be said to exist exists in service of this principle, including consciousness.
At the core of the author's theory of consciousness lies a fundamental set of human emotions that serve as homeostatic "error correction signals" when one or more of our biological functions or requirements are out of balance or not met. These emotional signals originate from the older parts of the brain, closely aligning with Freud's concept of instinctual drives.
However, despite this comprehensive understanding, several intriguing challenges persist.
Due to the close interplay between thinking and feeling, we often mistakenly perceive them as synonymous. However, they are distinct entities that, when juxtaposed in time, define our existence. We are both "feeling beings" and "thinking beings," but not simultaneously.
This misleading sense of unity gives rise to the subjective impression of "other worldliness" when we experience both thinking and feeling. This inherent "category error" forms the central enigma of the hard problem of consciousness.
To unravel the mystery of why brain mechanics lead us to feel a subjective sense of a unified self when none actually exists, we must delve into the crucial role played by both Freud's instinctual needs and biomechanical actions in our survival at the very beginning of life. This is where the laws of thermodynamics first intersect with Freudian psychology through Dr. Friston's Markov blanket.
Arguably, the sensing abilities demonstrated in Dr. Friston's laboratory represent the early rudiments of feelings, perceptions, and even a nascent sense of selfhood. Amazingly, these are all byproducts of self-organization itself!
If Dr. Friston's Markov blanket theory holds true, it suggests that the rudiments of feelings and perceptions emerged long before the brain developed a neocortex -- implying that they arrived even closer to the time when non-life transcended the second law of thermodynamics and became life itself.
Therefore, the Markov blanket holds the key not only to consciousness through feelings, perception, and selfhood, but also the key to how early organisms harnessed and utilized their own energy.
Upon resolving the confusion of the category error, we discover that "the act of feeling instinctual needs" and "being" are synonymous. Similarly, "thinking" and "being" are also one and the same.
For instance, the essence of the need to drink is the feeling of satisfying thirst. Similarly, Descartes' syllogism, "I think, therefore I am," encapsulates the meaning of being as thinking.
Both "thinking" and "being" are embodied self-referenced entities. However, they are not a unified entity existing simultaneously.
Instead, thoughts are akin to virtual experiences, acts of planning that accompany and prompt instinctual needs. They serve as the building blocks for constructing predictive models.
In essence, as we think, "thought" and "being" are synonymous. Similarly, when we feel, "emotion" and "being" are synonymous.
However, when thinking and feeling occur in the same brain, consciousness creates the illusion that they happen simultaneously (and, ironically, that the brain itself has feelings). In reality, they never occur simultaneously (and the brain is the sole organ devoid of feelings).
The crux of the matter is that the essence of a "thinking person" is fundamentally different from the essence of a "feeling person" -- even if both thinking and feeling occur within the same brain. We are the thoughts we experience during those moments, and the feelings we feel when acting without conscious thought.
Yet, it is important to note that we do not experience thinking and feeling simultaneously.
However, when thoughts or feelings occur at their respective times, each of them represents the essence of the organism at that moment. Thought is our being when we are thinking, just as emotions are our being when we are feeling.
In essence, there is no unified individual experiencing feelings and thoughts simultaneously. Instead, there is a sequence of feelings and thoughts.
From this implicit understanding of self-hood, the author elucidates how the "feeling" of hedonic affect simultaneously enhances interoceptive model construction while simultaneously minimizing free energy. In other words, he finally provides an explanation for how subjectivity emerges from well-established physical laws. Ten Stars
