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 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
- 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
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- Douglas BlackistonAllen Discovery Center at Tufts UniversityMemory stability during brain remodeling, xenobot platform design, amphibian memory transplantation work
- Scott L. BrincatPicower Institute for Learning and Memory, MITElectrophysiology of primate prefrontal cortex, traveling oscillatory waves, and Analog Cognition and Consciousness (2026)
- Paco CalvoUniversity of MurciaPlant cognition and plant neurobiology, minimal cognition without neurons, Planta Sapiens, cognitive ecology of plants
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.