Consciousness evolved to enable organisms to maintain their balance and make choices that promote survival.
Feeling, rooted in the upper brainstem, provides an awareness of an organism's state and guides decision-making based on survival needs.
Dreaming originates from the brainstem's intrinsic capability to generate feelings and has intrinsic meaning, challenging the notion of random chaotic experiences.
Deep dives
The Purpose of Consciousness
Consciousness serves the purpose of enabling living organisms to stay within their viable balance by providing a subjective experience of the organism's state. It allows organisms to feel their way through unexpected circumstances and make choices that help them maintain homeostasis. Consciousness has an evolutionary origin and evolved because it bestows an adaptive advantage by allowing organisms to choose actions that promote survival. Feeling, rooted in the upper brainstem, underlies voluntary behavior and contributes to the prevention of death.
The Relationship Between Feeling and Choice
Feeling is intrinsically subjective and provides an awareness of how well an organism is doing. It gives value to the organism's actions and guides decision-making based on the organism's survival. Feelings are not just valenced, but also have specific qualities that correspond to different needs and homoeostats in the body and brain. Each need is treated as a categorical variable, allowing organisms to address specific deficiencies and take appropriate actions to restore their viable balance.
The Role of Feeling in Cognitive Neuroscience
Unlike cognitive functions, which may not explain why they feel a certain way, affective functions, such as feeling, do explain why they feel the way they do. Feeling is an essential component of consciousness as it provides a subjective experience that guides behavior and promotes survival. Mechanistic explanations of cognitive functions alone do not account for the causal consequences of feeling and its role in guiding decision-making and voluntary behavior.
The Brain Mechanisms of Dreaming and REM Sleep
Dreaming is a fascinating phenomenon that occurs during sleep, highlighting the interplay between consciousness and unconsciousness. The traditional view connected the brain mechanisms of dreaming with REM sleep, stating that random cortical activation creates nonsensical and chaotic dreams. However, research on human subjects revealed that dreaming can occur even without REM sleep, leading to the recognition that the brain mechanisms underlying dreaming and REM sleep are distinct. The mesocortical mesolimbic dopamine circuit, also known as the brain reward system, plays a prominent role in dream generation. This system, sourced in the brainstem's reticular activating system, generates motivating and affective experiences. These findings suggest that dreams have an intrinsic meaning and are not simply random chaotic experiences.
Consciousness, Affect, and the Role of the Brainstem
The study of dreams has shed light on the fundamental role of the brainstem in consciousness and affect. Brainstem arousal is not motivationally neutral, but rather generates affective states. All basic affective experiences, including raw feelings, are produced by upper brainstem mechanisms. Consciousness, therefore, originates from the brainstem's intrinsic capability to generate feelings. Understanding the mechanism of feelings is crucial in understanding consciousness itself. It is important to make a distinction between raw feeling and dreaming consciousness, as dreams encompass complex perceptual experiences in addition to feelings. While all mammals are believed to dream due to their sharing of brainstem structures and cortex, it is unclear if other animal species without cortex, such as fish or amphibians, experience dreams. However, all vertebrates are believed to possess raw feelings, as evidenced by their behaviors and responses to stimuli.
Mark Solms is professor of Neuropsychology at the Neuroscience Institute at the University of Cape Town. He is also a psychoanalyst, and while Mark’s early research focused on the brain mechanisms of sleep and dreaming, he is currently working on the neural correlates of consciousness and affect. In this episode, Robinson and Mark talk about his new book The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness. More particularly, they discuss the hard problem of consciousness and how recent advances in neuroscience have pointed toward a solution.
The Hidden Spring: https://a.co/d/jcvbmLw
Mark’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/Mark_Solms
OUTLINE
00:00 In This Episode…
00:47 Introduction
03:09 What is Neuropsychoanalysis?
11:54 Was Freud a Neuroscientist?
26:17 What is the Hard Problem of Consciousness?
36:24 What is the Relationship between Dreaming and Consciousness?
54:44 Patients without a Cortex
01:03:01 Does Consciousness Have a Purpose?
01:14:53 Daniel Dennett and Karl Friston
01:24:49 Solving the Hard Problem of Consciousness
Robinson Erhardt researches symbolic logic and the foundations of mathematics at Stanford University. Join him in conversations with philosophers, scientists, weightlifters, artists, and everyone in-between.
Get the Snipd podcast app
Unlock the knowledge in podcasts with the podcast player of the future.
AI-powered podcast player
Listen to all your favourite podcasts with AI-powered features
Discover highlights
Listen to the best highlights from the podcasts you love and dive into the full episode
Save any moment
Hear something you like? Tap your headphones to save it with AI-generated key takeaways
Share & Export
Send highlights to Twitter, WhatsApp or export them to Notion, Readwise & more
AI-powered podcast player
Listen to all your favourite podcasts with AI-powered features
Discover highlights
Listen to the best highlights from the podcasts you love and dive into the full episode
