Mark Solms
@Mark_Solms
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Neuropsychologist and Psychoanalyst. Author of 'The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness' (London: Profile Books, New York: WW Norton, 2021).
Joined September 2020
I am at the 53rd IPA congress in Cartagena, and am about to present my 24 volume Revised Standard Edition of Freud's complete works to colleagues for the first time. I am holding my breath . this task is so controversial, it is almost impossible to get away with it unscathed!.
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I am very sad to report the passing of Dan Dennett. He was a great polymath and a very good person. I am grateful to him for the generous support that he gave me over the last few years. RIP.
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It was my birthday yesterday . so, I will consider it a birthday gift that David Chalmers posted that lecture, in which Tom Nagel says I am on the right track!.
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I am about to have a debate with Ariane Bazan (a Lacanian psychoanalyst) on the topic "Neuroscience & Psychoanalysis: Two Sciences or One?". I will let you know the answer shortly . .
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My dear son, Leonard Julian de Gier Solms is getting married tomorrow, to the lovely Kimara Govender! Wishing them luck for the years to come, and hoping it doesn't rain tomorrow, at the reception, which is being held at my farm (we are having an unseasonably wet 'Spring' here).
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Here is a discussion with (the very interesting) Michael Levin concerning consciousness and cognition in complex vs simple organisms, right down to the level of the single cell .
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I am the proud step-grandfather of a little boy, 6lbs 8oz, born an hour ago! Congratulations to his mother and father, Angelica and Fenner . .
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An extraordinarily comprehensive survey of current theories of consciousness:.
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Here, as promised, is the cover of the US paperback edition of The Hidden Spring! The charcoal drawing was done by the brother of my partner Eliza, the South African artist William Kentridge.
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My student Rowan Hodson presented the first results of our artificial consciousness project to Karl Friston's Theoretical Neurobiology seminar today. A tour de force! Anyone who'd like to see the recording, please email me at mark.solms@uct.ac.za. A warning: it is 3 hours long . .
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I had my second (and final) quasi-debate with Lisa Feldman Barrett yesterday. It should be available on YouTube shortly. I will post the link here.
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I had my first quasi-debate with Lisa Feldman Barrett yesterday. She will post it on YouTube shortly. I will distribute the link here as soon as it is available. We ran out of time, though, so we will have another meeting, possibly even two more.
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Had a great conversation yesterday on the topic of illusionism vs realism with Karl Friston, Wanja Wiese & Krzystof Dolega (hosted by Majid Beni). I'll post the recording here, as soon as it becomes available. What follows is a summary of my take on this fundamental issue . .
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Here is that discussion between me, Karl Friston, Wanja Wiese and Krzystof Dolega (hosted by Majid Beni) on the topic of 'illusionism' vs 'realism':.
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I am going to Kathmandu next week, for a conference on non-human consciousness. What a topic and what a place!.
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I was glad to learn yesterday that 'The Hidden Spring' won the Gradiva Award (Best Book) for 2021. Smiles.
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I had an interesting mediated conversation with Yuval Noah Harari today, concerning just about everything! I will post the link as soon as I get it . .
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First part of a two-part podcast. This one covers general issues to do with consciousness. The second one (forthcoming) deals with 'love' . so, more interesting!.
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A 'little' podcast (in the sense of having few subscribers) which wobbles a bit in the first minutes but which is well worth watching if you are interested in the dreaming brain, or in psychoanalysis, or in the hard problem of consciousness: .
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A very nice review of my book, The Hidden Spring, by someone who really understood it:
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Here's a succinct definition of consciousness that I'm prepared to defend: "the subjective bestowal of qualities upon objects". Here, 'qualities' are naturally-selected categories of uncertainty, i.e., about things that matter to the subject, and 'objects' include the own body.
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This is of interest to those who are interested in psychoanalysis; i.e., not for everyone. You can safely skip the first 12 - 14 minutes:
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This talk summarizes in ONE HOUR just about the whole of neuropsychoanalysis (cognitive, affective and computational neuroscience that advances the practice of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy): The talk itself begins about 5 mins into the video. Enjoy . .
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Very nice to hear Karl Friston describe me as "the main player"! (1:30-1:39 in this podcast):.
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Another truly wonderful conversation yesterday with Mike Levin & Chris Fields! Before the recording started, I had expressed the view that consciousness (feeling) underwrites an organism's capacity to generate novel solutions in unexpected situations .
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I am very proud of these wines. My (branch of my) family's main activity for the past 500 hundred years has been wine making. However, please remember that since I took over our South African estate in 2001, ALL the profits have gone to the farm workers.
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I am pleased to say that my dialogue with Anil Seth is now freely available online:
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I am heading home (via Miami) from the 21st International Neuropsychoanlaysis Congress. It was really good to see that so many young colleagues think that *what it is like* to be a brain matters for our understanding of how this part of nature works.
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1/ How much longer we can be polite about tha question of whether cortex is necessary for consciousness? I have a medical colleague in Australia with a hydranencephalic child; the surgeon who operated on her skull said anaesthetic wasn't necessary because she wasn't conscious . .
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I had another interesting conversation with the remarkable Mike Levin:.
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A very nice podcast focusing mainly on psychoanalysis: .Investigating Consciousness From the Brainstem to the Psyche with Mark Solms.
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A really important study, which provides a valuable corrective to all the cortico-centric functional imaging literature .
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A few people have asked about the problems with Lisa Feldman Barrett's meta-analyses, mentioned in our recent discussion. The ethologist Karolina Westlund provides some preliminary comments here: You can scroll down to the section entitled 'Meta-Schemata'.
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It's a dreamlike moment when a childhood hero acknowledges you. I've been a fan of Brian Eno since he came to prominence in the 1970s. Here's what he just wrote about my forthcoming book The Hidden Spring: "This is truly a remarkable book. It changes everything." Isn't that cool!.
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It seems that few people are still interested in the origin of cerebral asymmetry, but it has continued to puzzle me since the 1980s. Herewith, possibly, the final piece of the puzzle:.
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A nice podcast discussion about consciousness (as I see it!):
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I have just submitted my responses to a series of commentaries on my book which will appear in the next issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies, by Thomas Nagel, Daniel Dennett, Karl Friston, Lionel Naccache and Adam Safron. Look out for it!.
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A discussion with Iain McGilchrist and Hyman Schipper on Mind, Matter & Metaphysics for the 'Great Minds' series:.
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The livestreamed discussion I had with the Active Inference Lab on Saturday was so rich that we could not finish it within the allocated two hours! So, there will be a Part Two. For now, here is Part One:
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I presented my 'Revision of the theory of the Oedipus complex' at the Winter Meetings of the American Psychoanalytic Association yesterday. I think I got away with it.
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1/2 How much longer can we be polite about the question of whether cortex is necessary for consciousness? I have a medical colleague in Australia with a hydranencephalic child; the surgeon who operated on her skull said anaesthetic wasn't necessary because she wasn't conscious . .
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A nice discussion about the mechanisms of change in psychotherapy, CBT in particular:
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2/2 . This is not just a matter of scientific (or philosophical) skepticism! It leads to appalling clinical errors. Not to mention the way we treat animals without cortex, like fishes. History will judge us very harshly on this score. We need to wake up and smell the feelings.
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I am busy indexing the Revised Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, in 24 volumes. For that reason, this makes delightful reading:
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This is the article I mentioned in my recent conversation with Lisa Feldman Barrett:
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A nice podcast, which takes a largely 'biographical' approach to my work:.
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An unnecessarily adversarial discussion between a materialist (someone called TJump) and a dual-aspect monist (me):
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It is approaching midnight on my body-clock and I have just woken up in Sydney, where I am about to deliver a three-hour workshop to the local psychiatrists! Oy . .
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2/2 . This is not just a matter of scientific (or philosophical) scepticism! It leads to appalling clinical errors. Not to mention the way we treat animals without cortex, like fishes. History will judge us very harshly on this score. We need to wake up and smell the feelings.
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This podcast discussion of my book on consciousness goes far deeper than most: .I suggest that one starts about 15 minutes in, as the preliminaries are quite protracted.
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An overview of themes in my book that may be of interest to psychoanalysts:
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Here is a nice blog about Lisa Feldman Barrett's conception of emotion:
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I had an interesting (and challenging!) podcast discussion with Richard Brown today. Will post the link shortly.
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A podcast with Kukhokuhle Tsengwa, a South African now based at Oxford:.
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My son Leon just informed me that he got engaged this morning, to his beloved Kimara Govender!.
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Huge congratulations to Geoffrey Hinton, who shares this year's Nobel prize for physics, for his pioneering work on machine learning. I am delighted that they recognize that *information* is now an important topic in physics.
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I had another fascinating conversation with Mike Levin and Chris Fields today:
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My (unofficial) father-in-law, Sir Sydney Kentridge, turned 100 years old yesterday! We had a wonderful family party, and the King sent a card, and all that . .
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I have just tasted the 2023 vintages of Solms-Delta wines . very exciting; something to be proud of!.
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An open letter on machine consciousness:.Some of you might be willing to sign?.
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To put it another way: complex, dynamical self-organizing systems must chronically ask, "how certain am I about what will happen to (this categorical source of) my free energy if I do that?" This question can be reduced to a quantitative formalism.
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I have just read this paper by Ryan Smith and colleagues. It is a little technical, and therefore a difficult read, but *breathtakingly* good!
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@SmilerTurner They trained a network of rat neurons in culture to recognize 2 different sounds, then predicted precisely how they would respond to further learning *if* the learning process followed mathematical rules dictated by the free energy principle. These predictions were all confirmed.
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Part 2 of a very nice podcast with Andrea Hiott, the title of which is self-explanatory: Mark Solms on Love and Philosophy.
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Hi @LFeldmanBarrett, what is your take on the finding that congenitally blind people display typical facial expression of the emotions? See the article below:
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For those who missed my Royal Institution talk but wanted to watch it, it is here:.
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Here is an interview about another (non-scientific) aspect of my life, which is of some interest in our troubled times:
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Saying goodbye to Berlin, which has been my happy home for the past five months. Auf wieder Sehen!.
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Had a good dialogue with Naccache yesterday about cortical vs brainstem accounts of consciousness, at the International Neuropsychoanalysis Society meeting. His take on neuronal global workspace theory sits easily with mine. I'll circulate the recording, if I can get hold of one.
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With reference to my last tweet: this finding is consistent with the role I assigned - on theoretical grounds - to Panksepp's SEEKING system in default mode activity, and it also supports the link between the default mode network and dreaming proposed by Bill Domhoff and others.
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Let's not focus too exclusively on this one surgeon. That is the common understanding of these children. The underlying error is to confuse 'thinking and reasoning' with 'consciousness'. That is why I focus on *feeling* as the prototype of consciousness.
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To register for my dialogue tomorrow with Anil Seth, in which we will discuss the similarities and differences in our views on consciousness, please contact rbalchin@npsa-association.org.
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Solms-Delta released its two new (2023) wines to the local press today. Very well received!.
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We are looking for a PhD/postdoc candidate for a project on artificial homeostatic systems in simulated environments. To apply, please fill in the Google Form here:
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Please attend this fundraiser for the South African Psychoanalytical Association (in support of our low-fee clinics):
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Dear All, I am sorry to say, I have had to delete the tweet I sent about my Royal Society of Medicine talk. I asked them if I may tweet it and they said "Yes, you may" but it seems they meant to say "Yes, you may not"! Freudian slip . .
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A recent brief talk on the 'hard problem' given to the National Institute for Theoretical and Computational Sciences:.
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A talk I gave recently for the East London NHS Trust. (The audience was made up mainly of psychiatrists.).
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@DrLuisACenteno1 Freud's dream theory is probably the part of his them that has the strongest empirical support today.
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Here is an informal conversation I had this week with two *very interesting* scientists -- Mike Levin and Chris Fieds -- about artificial consciousness .
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Very nice interview (about the free energy theory of consciousness) with Virginia Barry of the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute .
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Here's the cover of the (soon-to-be-released) paperback edition of The Hidden Spring, with some nice new endorsements:.
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@JonathanShedler This simple statement captures everything that is wrong with psychiatry today: it has forgotten that feelings MEAN something, that feelings are SYMPTOMS of something. Then it treats the symptoms and overlooks the causes. Imagine if we did that with bodily symptoms, like angina!.
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