Mark Solms
University of Cape Town
Biological naturalist Consciousness requires living metabolic hardware
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 give outcomes stakes for 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. The test 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
- Dreaming and Consciousness From David Foulkes to World Models September 2026
- Mark Solms Inferring Affective Consciousness in an Artificial Agent JCS 2026 August 2026
- The Spinning Wheel Theory and the Consciousness Risk Rubric. Hulme and Griffiths at AISB 2026 July 2026
Related researchers
- David FoulkesDevelopmental research on children's dream reports and narrative dreaming
- Erik HoelCenter for Humanities and Sciences, Tufts UniversityFormal theory of Causal Emergence (macro over micro causation), The Overfitted Brain Hypothesis of Dreams, The World Behind the World (2023), The Kleiner-Hoel Dilemma
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David ChalmersNew York University. Co-director, Center for Mind, Brain and ConsciousnessNaming the hard problem of consciousness, and the philosophical zombie argument
- John R. SearleUniversity of California, BerkeleyThe Chinese Room Argument (1980), Biological Naturalism, Syntax is not semantics, The Rediscovery of the Mind (1992)
- Karl FristonUniversity College London. Chief Scientist, VERSES AIThe free energy principle and active inference
- František BaluškaUniversity of BonnCellular consciousness, subcellular nanobrains, plant neurobiology, sentient cells as units of physiology
Mark Solms is listed with the other biological naturalists, who hold that consciousness requires living metabolic hardware. The theory family behind that position is set out in the index of consciousness theories. Every researcher covered on this site is indexed in the directory of consciousness researchers.