Mark Solms – The Hidden Spring Part 9: Making a Mind and The Hard Problem

In The Hidden Spring, our guest Mark Solms does not dive too deeply into Karl Fristonā€™s mathematics. As you will discover, he summarises its implications, describing Fristonā€™s free energy as a quantifiable measure of how a system models the world and how it behaves.

Mark Solms – The Hidden Spring Part 8: A Predictive Hierarchy

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 talk about the brain’s prediction system.

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00:00:00.000 Introduction and Overview of the Chapter
00:03:30.388 Establishment of the Meteorology Department
00:11:59.546 The Fundamental Task: Minimizing Free Energy
00:15:43.370 Feelings: Connecting Us to Our Ancestors
00:19:36.790 Neglecting the inter-receptive and extra-receptive in cognitive science
00:22:30.002 The brain’s attempt to contain environmental effects on the organism
00:31:32.675 Innate Predictions: Fear and Instinctual Behaviors
00:34:19.723 The Evolution of Responses and Predictive Model Complexification
00:42:59.118 The Brain: Ones and Zeroes, Predictions and Errors
00:54:18.834 The Brain as an Organization
00:59:57.338 Emotional Needs and Scripts

The Homeostatic Organisation _ Organism

The Homeostatic Organisation / Organism

Resisting entropy is a fundamental function of living things. Similarly, organisations that resist change become victims of entropy, disrupting the balance of their systems and tipping the scales towards entropy. Maintaining homeostasis is not an event. It is a continual process. Maintaining success requires effort, constant renewal and permanent reinvention.

A scales of justice

The Homeostatic Organisation/ Organism

Homeostasis refers to the maintenance of relatively constant internal conditions in an organism. For example, we maintain an average body temperature of about 98.6Ā°F (37Ā°C). In a cold environment, we shiver to return to our ideal body temperature. We fan ourselves or find other means to restore homeostasis in a warm climate. This delicate balance within biological systems is the hotbed of existence.

Mark Solms

Mark Solms – The Hidden Spring Part 6: The P.A.G.

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.

Mark Solms The Hidden Spring The Cortical Fallacy

Mark Solms – The Hidden Spring Part 3: The Cortical Fallacy

In The Hidden Spring, our guest Mark Solms does not dive too deeply into Karl Fristonā€™s mathematics. As you will discover, he summarises its implications, describing Fristonā€™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 Descartesā€™s reason-centric version that set up the puzzling dualism of ā€œmindā€ and ā€œmatterā€, a la Damasio’s Descartes Error. Mark explores the ā€œcortical fallacy,ā€ which refers to his view that neuroscientists who have argued that the ā€œseat of consciousnessā€ 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 ā€œobliterate all consciousness.ā€

So where does it “Spring” from?

Mark Solms

Mark Solms – The Hidden Spring Part 2: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness

Join Mark Solms and I for Part 2 of The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness

Mark Solms

Mark Solms – The Hidden Spring Part 1: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness

Part 1 of a 9-part series with the brilliant Mark Solms.How does the mind connect to the body?
Why does it feel like something to be us?
Our guest is one of the boldest thinkers in neuroscience and solving this puzzle has been a lifetime’s quest.
Now at last, the pioneer who discovered the brain mechanism for dreaming
appears to have made a breakthrough.

It is a pleasure to welcome the author of The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness, Mark Solms welcome to the show

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