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.
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.
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
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.
Homeostasis refers to the maintenance of relatively constant internal conditions in an organism. For example, we maintain an average body temperature of about 98.6°F (37°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.
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.
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.
Join Mark Solms and I for Part 2 of The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness