It is a pleasure to welcome the author of The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness, Mark Solms. We share terms like Markov Blankets, The Free Energy Principle, Homeostasis, and Entropy.
It is a pleasure to welcome the author of The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness, Mark Solms.
In this episode, we will discuss questions such as where does arousal come from anatomically and how does it arise physiologically? And the central question of today is where the seemingly magical shift from automatic reflex to volitional feeling occurs. Today, we will share some terms like synaptic transmission, reuptake, post-synaptic modulation and the role of neurotransmitters and neuromodulators, and we will also explain the role of the PAG, the periaqueductal grey.
Our struggles today build adversity muscles for tomorrow.
Feelings are difficult to research because they are inherently subjective, but If we exclude feelings from our account of the brain, we will never understand how it works. You tell us, to a fantastic degree, neuroscientists searching for an explanation of consciousness have ignored feelings. Mark Solms takes us on an exploration of Feelings and te work of his friend and collaborator, Jaak Panksepp.
In The Hidden Spring, our guest Mark Solms does not dive too deeply into Karl Friston’s mathematics. As you will discover, he summarises its implications, describing Friston’s free energy as a quantifiable measure of how a system models the world and how it behaves. This notion leads to a very different idea of consciousness from Descartes’s reason-centric version that set up the puzzling dualism of “mind” and “matter”, a la Damasio’s Descartes Error. Mark explores the “cortical fallacy,” which refers to his view that neuroscientists who have argued that the “seat of consciousness” is in the cortex are wrong. Recent neuroscience has shed light on where this is.
As Mark points out, damage to just two cubic millimetres of the upper brainstem will “obliterate all consciousness.”
So where does it “Spring” from?
AI has a Problem of Privilege.This week’s Thursday Thought draws an unlikely parallel between Woodstock ’99 and the burgeoning issue of AI’s privilege problem, warning of an oncoming “Tr-AI-wreck.
I was MC for the tech stage at the Fifteen seconds Festival in Graz, Austria. I had the pleasure of meeting the brilliant Phaedra Boinodiris. She is the author of the book “AI for the Rest of Us”, and is a co-founder of the Future World Alliance, a non-profit dedicated to curating K-12 education in AI ethics.
Hire For Neurosignature Train For Skill. In a changing workplace, rather than hiring solely based on skill, we might consider a candidate’s neurosignature. Each neurosignature brings unique strengths to the table. Hiring for neurosignature and training for skill might lead to higher workplace happiness, higher revenue and lower employee turnover.
Incremental innovation remains a critical component for organisations. However, when an organisation only rewards incremental endeavours (recognition, remuneration and promotion), why would anybody want to risk their career with transformational effort? Give the customer a 12-blade razor, a chai-latte-flavoured soda or a 6G Origami phone. By all means, be a fast-moving caterpillar-cake copycat, but invest some of the profits from the incremental present into the transformational future. Don’t use the future to fuel your present.
What is the purpose of mind-wandering? The aim is to improve the efficiency of your generative model. Author of “The Hidden Spring”, Mark Solms explains.