Solms, Mark. The Hidden Spring. W. W. Norton New York 2021. NF;8/26.

I decided to read this after hearing about the author in Michael Pollan’s book on conciousness A World Appears. Dr Solms’s qualifications on the topic must be pretty close to unique. He’s first a senior and cutting-edge neuropsychologist, but he also moved beyond science of the brain into psychoanalysis. Sort of bridging physical science and healthcare you could say. What he isn’t, he tells us, is a philosopher. And in my humble (make no mistake, I’m over my head here) opinion that’s where he runs into trouble.

Dr Solms’s says his project is to build a conscious machine. But I think he’s also trying to do something else. He works with a group of world-class experts engaged in this, and this book contains his justification for why a conscious machine should (he says must) be possible. To put it simply his point of departure is the view that consciousness “is engineerable. It is artificially producible.” The something else he’s trying to do is prove that the furniture of the universe consists only of entities accessible to a completed physics: “science”. I may as well present my impertinent opinion right away: I disagree with him. And because I don’t see a final answer to the old and famous ontology question now and there may never be one, I choose to be agnostic about it and go about my business as best I can.

I think Dr Solms’s view drags behind it several assumptions. First, a traditional professional philosopher would say that Solms is a metaphysical materialist. This means that he agrees with the co-discoverer of DNA Francis Crick that

you, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.

My opinion: No. There’s a whole potential world that that statement ignores.

Next, Dr Solms, although he doesn’t quite say so, is convinced that once he describes how human consciousness can be reduced to physical biological fact using logic and math it remains only to reverse-engineer that to produce a conscious machine. He says such a contraption isn’t human, but that it might as well be as long as it functions like one, i.e. has consciousness. As he defines it.

Further he believes the enterprise he proposes will produce something wonderful. He does discuss some concerns about the ethics of his project. But since publication of his book events have suggested that the kind of machines he is talking about might do other things we don’t like very much, absent certain ineffable human realities like what’s referred to as a moral compass. Solms does concede that “…we will be trying to make a being that has no aim and purpose other than to carry on being.” I imagine that’s a recipe for trouble, should for example it “decide” to do dreadful things and knows its “carrying on being” is threatened by humans with access to a kill switch.

It’s pretty clear to anyone familiar with natural selection that existing creatures including people contain – and often consciously carry around – characteristics which, while at the time they evolved were adaptive, now are useless or a bit worse. Not just your appendix but also a Pandora’s box of aggressiveness, fear, xenophobia, lust and greed. All part of what it feels like at least at times to be human. I don’t think you can engineer consciousness as we know it without such things, and why would anyone want to produce a machine as bedeviled by them as we are?

I had trouble with the middle chapters of the book where he describes theoretical considerations to support his idea that consciousness – and I think he sees that as the essence of being human – can be made artificially. Let me see if I can make sense of this. Solms worked with a famous “computational neuroscientist” Carl Friston. One of his contributions in his field is the idea that because living creatures must resist entropy to survive, it’s true that what Friston calls “free energy” (the gap between what the creature expects and what comes at it in the world, more accessibly referred to as surprises) must be minimized. At this point we are introduced to a concept called the “Markov blanket” which is for animals the interface between their inner self and the outer world. We would recognize this as including our senses and our ability to modify the outer world.

Reduction of free energy can be accomplished by “changing our mind”, i.e. adjusting our thinking to fit better with external events, or by using our resources to change the outer world. There is a complex mathematical description of probabilities and quantities in respect of this free energy problem. Solms tells us that we can also “adjust precision to optimally match the amplitude of the incoming prediction errors”, and then (speaking of surprises) he says, “This, I submit, is consciousness.”

Hm. Here I run into worries that there are incontrovertible realities in the above description of what creatures do to survive that I just don’t understand. But assuming there is some sense to it, is that final statement really consciousness? Even without understanding how we get there I sense a breathtaking leap. Dr Solms puts it another way that frankly doesn’t help me:

The fundamental driving force behind the volitional behaviour of all life forms is that they are obliged to minimise their own free energy. This principle governs everything they do…So, there you have it. Armed with this knowledge, everything that we call mental life becomes mathematically tractable.

A couple of chapters in the book deal with changes in belief among brain and consciousness academics over the past few decades, which is to identify consciousness with a different part of the brain than the cortex where most thinking we recognize as uniquely human is located. Neurologist Antonio Damasio and Dr Solms agree that much of what we feel, which feeds our understanding, originates in the “lower” (both in the physical sense of the brain and in its being older in evolution) midbrain. This is described in Damasio’s 1999 book The Feeling of What Happens. It appears generally accepted that at least most of “what it feels like to be” human and alive: consciousness, critically involves structures there in the midbrain. And the emphasis on the nature of consciousness has shifted from just thinking to feeling.

Damasio and Solms seem to disagree as to “where” in the brain exactly the essence of consciousness is. It seems to depend on activity in the midbrain, but Damasio believes it is under influences elsewhere while Solms holds that it is in specific parts of the midbrain that can be examined and defined. I thought Solms’s chapters arguing against the cortex as the physical seat of consciousness seemed unnecessary. Already conceded.

To repeat Solm’s intellectual starting point he says, “If the phenomena of consciousness are natural things (what else could they be?), they, too, must be reducible to laws.” What else could they be? For a convicted metaphysical materialist like Solms that question makes perfect sense. To a metaphysical idealist (or an ontological agnostic like me) that question is an opening into wonder and to exploring what the human experience really is. My suspicion is it may be quite different among individuals but of course I don’t know. This would be referred to by experts as “the problem of other minds”.

I knew I would be out of my depth in trying to follow the thinking of someone as knowledgeable and creative as Mark Solms. Still I can’t avoid a couple of uneducated generalities that sum up how I feel about what I’ve read. I don’t think human minds can be reduced to strictly physical things via mathematics with what we know now. I suppose it could be that in the future in an environment of a completed physics the complexity of human experience could be encompassed. But that environment doesn’t now, and may never, exist.

I’m with Antonio Damasio who appears to still believe that although it may be possible to explain in detail all the physical events accompanying a human experience, that explanation isn’t the experience. If a school aged child asked someone like Dr Solms to explain what a grand piano was all about I imagine she might get a detailed description of the keyboard, and the little hammers and strings. I could probably describe roughly how they work but would be doing my best to convince the kid that the whole idea of all the workings is to produce a thrilling experience of music.

Honestly I don’t recommend this book not just because I disagree with the author’s worldview but because much of it is hard to understand and as far as I can tell it doesn’t add up to a convincing optimism for what Dr Solms is trying to do.

7.0/6.4