January 25, 2021
“The hard problem of consciousness is said to be the biggest unsolved puzzle of contemporary neuroscience,” writes psychoanalyst and neuropsychologist Solms (The Brain and the Inner World) in this wide-ranging survey. Solms answers such questions as how consciousness came to be, what it is, and whether it could be artificially replicated—his theory proposes that consciousness is an evolutionary response to the human organism’s need to minimize the energy it expends to meet its physical and psychological needs. Solms rejects cognitive psychologists’ theories that consciousness is lodged in the brain’s cerebral cortex—it “is far more primitive than that,” he writes. To support his theory, Solms provides case studies (he discusses a patient experiencing confabulations in terms of Freud’s notions of subjectivity), deep technical dives into the makeup of the human brain, and weaves in entropy and thermodynamics. Solms concludes with a somewhat manically written discussion of the ethics of a conscious machine, complete with a plan for what he’d do if he were able to build one: he’ll remove the battery, patent the process, and organize a symposium. His theory is complex, as is his writing (sentences such as “The cholinergic basal forebrain circuits... constrain the reward mechanism of the mesocortal-mesolimbic dopamine circuit in memory retrieval” are common). Still, readers who stay the course will find much to consider.