#mark solms

This is the most jawdropping introductory video to anything I have ever seen

“[...] Great. Don’t have to go to Sunday school anymore. Until the full weight of the implications of what he said dawned on me, which was, well, then what happens about this business of being good and going to heaven when you die? Maybe you don’t go to heaven when you die. Maybe you’re just gone when you die, and that caused me literal panic attacks.

The panics then led to a sort of a despair because the further thought was, well, if that is the case, that I’m just going to be snuffed out for eternity, then what’s the point of doing anything while I’m here? It’s all going to come to nothing. And I’m not going to be here to experience any reward or pleasure from what I’ve achieved, so why achieve anything?

So some years later, I guess it must have been during my adolescence, I came up with some sort of– the beginnings of a plan, which ended up being the course that I followed in my life, which was the one thing that does seem worth doing in the circumstances I describe is to try to understand what is it then to be, to exist, to experience, to be a mind? What are minds? That seemed like possibly some sort of escape out of this solipsistic nightmare. Some external point of view on what existence and experience really is might be one thing worth doing with your life, and that’s what I then went on to do.

I wouldn’t want to cross Professor Solms

“Because the mind something is subjective, and therefore because you can only ever know your own, you can never, as a matter of principle, never, know if anything else has a mind. So I can’t know if you have a mind, ever, and you can’t know if I have a mind. I might be a figment of your imagination. This might be a dream. You might wake up from it soon. And find that although you thought there was a thing out there in the world called Mark Solms speaking to you, in fact it wasn’t really the case.”

"The simplest forms of feeling – hunger, thirst, sleepiness, muscle fatigue, nausea, coldness, urinary urgency, the need to defecate and the like – might not seem like affects, but that is what they are.

What distinguishes affective states from other mental states is that they are hedonically valenced: they feel ‘good’ or ‘bad’.

This is how affective sensations such as hunger and thirst differ from sensory ones like vision and hearing.

Sight and sound do not possess intrinsic value – but feeling does. (…)

Affects are how we become aware of our drives; they tell us how well or badly things are going in relation to the specific needs they measure.

This is what affects are for: they convey which biological things are going well or badly for us, and they arouse us to do something about them.

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What I read The Hidden Spring: a journey to the source of consciousness An overview of brain structure at a large scale, highlighting the midbrain. From Wikimedia. The Hidden Spring, an ambitious book by Mark Solms, wants to sell you on two things. First, that it has the outlines of a theory of consciousness. Second, that other theories – on multiple counts – are looking for it in the wrong…