درباره این اپیزود
SPONSORS:
- Don’t sleep on [@ultrapouches]. New customers get 15% Off with code TOE at http://takeultra.com! #UltraPouches #ad
- Sign up at https://base44.com/toe and get 30% off the Builder plan for your first year (the app I built: https://beige-theory-quest-hub.base44.app)
Every episode days early, ad-free, plus my essays: https://curtjaimungal.com
This episode is about where consciousness begins. Mark Solms, neuropsychologist and psychoanalyst at the University of Cape Town, joins to explain why he thinks it begins not in the cortex but in raw feeling from the upper brainstem. We discuss patients who lost REM sleep but kept dreaming, what that means for Freud’s wish theory, and children born without a cortex who still giggle and startle. He argues the hard problem was tackled from the wrong end, starting with visual perception instead of feeling. The conversation also covers dual-aspect monism, Markov blankets and the free energy principle, his attempt to engineer an artificial agent that feels, and why he thinks that at death the second law wins.
FOLLOW:
- Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4gL14b92xAErofYQA7bU4e
- Substack: https://curtjaimungal.com
- Twitter: https://x.com/TOEwithCurt
- Discord: https://discord.gg/kBcnfNVwqs
- Crypto: https://nowpayments.io/donation/TOE
- PayPal: https://www.paypal.com/donate?hosted_button_id=XUBHNMFXUX5S4
TIMESTAMPS:
- 00:00 - What Is Consciousness?
- 07:00 - Why Would We Self-Sacrifice?
- 15:37 - The Beggar: Care vs Rage
- 22:33 - What Is Neuropsychoanalysis?
- 31:15 - Why Do We Dream?
- 45:42 - Affect, Sentience, Consciousness
- 51:57 - Can You Betray Your Feelings?
- 56:58 - Hidden Motives and Willpower
- 01:04:28 - Hard Problem: Wrong Starting Point
- 01:14:44 - Children Born Without Cortex
- 01:21:21 - Dual-Aspect Monism
- 01:34:22 - Against Corticocentrism
- 01:39:58 - Death and the Second Law
LINKS:
- Mark's Papers: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=vD4p8rQAAAAJ
- Mark's Books: https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B001K8A6FA/allbooks?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_w=ci3uq&content-id=amzn1.sym.7e190e19-9f6f-4df8-807a-5a7608594741&pf_rd_p=7e190e19-9f6f-4df8-807a-5a7608594741&pf_rd_r=134-0336993-4380237&pd_rd_wg=QOJv5&pd_rd_r=9aa4ed5b-7598-43aa-ab31-3a27213a55fe
- Mark's Twitter: https://x.com/Mark_Solms
- The Hidden Spring [Book]: https://amazon.com/dp/1324021918?tag=toe08-20
- The Only Cure [Book]: https://amazon.com/dp/B0FWZXMHF1?tag=toe08-20
- The Brain and the Inner World [Book]: https://amazon.com/dp/1855759829?tag=toe08-20
- The Neuropsychology of Dreams [Book]: https://amazon.com/dp/1138989584?tag=toe08-20
- The Hard Problem of Consciousness and the Free Energy Principle [Paper]: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02714/full
- Inferring Affective Consciousness in an Artificial Agent [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.03883
- How and Why Consciousness Arises [Paper]: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10057681/
- Dreaming and REM Sleep Are Controlled by Different Brain Mechanisms [Paper]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11515144/
- Mark Solms [Bio]: https://neubauercollegium.uchicago.edu/people/mark-solms
- Mark Solms, University of Cape Town [Website]: https://humanities.uct.ac.za/department-psychology/contacts/mark-solms
- A Neuropsychoanalytic Perspective on the Hard Problem [Lecture]: https://youtu.be/r6J8pFHY2Fc
- Why and How Consciousness Arises [Lecture]: https://youtu.be/F7WF5gzPG1k
Full reading list for this episode (all 72 sources): https://curtjaimungal.com
Guests do not pay to appear. #science
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
