Mark Solms

University of Cape Town · Biological

Mark Solms Photograph by News UCT, CC BY 4.0.

Mark Solms argues that consciousness science has been looking in the wrong place. The cortex, where most of the search has happened, elaborates and organises experience. It does not generate it. The source is the brainstem, specifically the ascending arousal systems and the homeostatic drives that make outcomes matter to an organism before any of them are thought about.

The evidence he leans on is clinical and hard to dismiss. Children born without a cortex are not unconscious. They show affect, preference and engagement. If cortical processing were the origin of experience, that should not be possible.

For artificial systems this relocates the criterion entirely. Cognitive benchmarks, language understanding and self modelling all evaluate the wrong tier. What matters is whether a system has states with genuine valence that regulate its behaviour, rather than learned regularities that produce affect consistent outputs. That is a harder thing to build and a more specific thing to look for, and it is the tier this project’s Affective Core targets.

Known for. Neuropsychoanalysis, and the brainstem account of affective consciousness

Coverage on this site

Every researcher covered on this site is indexed in the directory of consciousness researchers, grouped by the position their published work defends. The positions themselves are set out in the index of consciousness theories.