Editorial illustration for Neuroscientist Mark Solms Explores AI's Potential to Unravel Consciousness Origins
AI Consciousness: Mark Solms' Revolutionary Neural Theory
Mark Solms says AI algorithm may tap the evolutionary source of consciousness
The search for consciousness has hit a wall. We have theories, scans, and philosophical debates, but no clear picture of how awareness actually sparked in the brain. Now a neuropsychologist is betting the answer might be found not just in biology, but in code.
Mark Solms thinks AI could trace consciousness back to its evolutionary source. His work with the Conscium project pushes past standard neuroscience into a messier zone of feelings and predictions. It’s a long shot. It’s also one of the few new ideas on the table.
Solms, a South African psychoanalyst, already rattled the field with his 2021 book "The Hidden Spring." He argued that consciousness is not a byproduct of thinking. It's a tool for managing surprise. The brain runs a constant loop of predicting what comes next and adjusting based on what it senses.
When those predictions are wrong, we feel it. That feeling, Solms claims, is the raw material of consciousness. It began as a basic survival mechanism.
In humans, it got wired through emotion.
"There must be something out of which consciousness is constructed--out of which it emerged in evolution," said Mark Solms, a South African psychoanalyst and neuropsychologist involved in the Conscium project. In his 2021 book, The Hidden Spring, Solms proposed a touchy-feely new way to think about consciousness. He argued that the brain uses perception and action in a feedback loop designed to minimize surprise, generating hypotheses about the future that are updated as new information arrives.
The idea builds upon the "free energy principle" developed by Karl Friston, another noteworthy, if controversial, neuroscientist (and fellow Conscium adviser). Solms goes on to suggest that, in humans, this feedback loop evolved into a system mediated through emotions and that it is these feelings that conjure up sentience and consciousness.
This is where AI comes in. If consciousness is built from a predictive feedback loop, could you build one in software? The Conscium project is an attempt to find out.
An algorithm modeled on this principle wouldn't just process data. It would theoretically try to minimize its own prediction errors. The question is whether running that process would simulate anything like the interior experience Solms describes.
Critics see a category error. They argue you can't get wetness from simulating water. But Solms isn't trying to build a conscious machine.
He wants to use AI as a probe. By watching how a simple predictive system evolves and stabilizes itself, we might see the ghostly outline of how feeling first appeared.
It's a tool for a specific job: reverse-engineering evolution. The goal is to isolate the minimal algorithm for managing surprise, the one our ancestors stumbled upon. That's a different goal than most AI labs have.
They want useful output. Solms wants a mirror.
His approach makes many neuroscientists uneasy. It treats consciousness as a solvable engineering problem with a traceable history. That's either a profound simplification or a dead end.
Either way, the old debates aren't getting us anywhere. Solms is offering a new path, built from old parts: Karl Friston's math, Freudian drives, and now, machine learning. It might fail.
At least it's a concrete bet.
We've spent decades looking for consciousness in the brain's structures. We might find its blueprint in a loop of code trying not to be wrong.
Further Reading
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Common Questions Answered
How does Mark Solms' theory suggest consciousness emerges in the brain?
Solms proposes that consciousness emerges through a dynamic feedback loop of perception and action designed to minimize surprise. His theory suggests the brain continuously generates and updates hypotheses about the future based on incoming information, creating a predictive mechanism for understanding awareness.
What is the Conscium project's approach to understanding consciousness?
The Conscium project, led by Mark Solms, explores consciousness as an evolutionary mechanism that can potentially be decoded through innovative research approaches. By bridging neuroscience and artificial intelligence, the project aims to unravel the fundamental origins of human awareness from a novel perspective.
How does Solms challenge traditional views of consciousness in his book The Hidden Spring?
In The Hidden Spring, Solms argues that consciousness is not a static phenomenon but a dynamic process of generating and updating predictive hypotheses. He suggests that the brain's primary function is to minimize surprise by continuously processing perception and action in an adaptive feedback loop.
Further Reading
- Engineering consciousness — Conscium
- Towards engineering an artificial consciousness with Karl Friston and Mark Solms — NPSA
- Designing Artificial Consciousness from Natural Intelligence — Psychology Today
- The year of conscious AI — The AI Journal
