Mark Solms and Sanneke de Haan on the Mind-Body Problem

‘the organic even in its lowest forms prefigures mind, and ... mind even on its highest reaches remains part of the organic’

Mark Solms is a neuropsychologist and psychoanalyst, and the author of The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness (2021). Sanneke de Haan is a philosopher of psychiatry, and the author of Enactive Psychiatry (2020).

Solms’s The Hidden Spring is definitely one of the more memorable books I’ve read this year, and there is a lot to unpack — and perhaps much to contest — in Solm’s account of consciousness. In this post I want to focus on Solms’s discussion of the relationship between physiology and psychology (which he offers in the context of Chalmers’s “hard problem” of consciousness). And I want to place Solms’s description next to Sanneke de Haan’s treatment of this issue from an enactive perspective. Both emphasize the physiological and psychological as dual aspects rather two separate phenomena standing in opposition and both appeal to self-organization as a principle, but in their own different ways. Solms adopts Karl Friston’s free-energy principle as his guide and thinks of the brain in terms of information processing, while de Haan thinks in terms of embedded, embodied, and enactive cognition. The deeper similarities and convergences are worth noting and examining (hopefully in the future); for now, this juxtaposition will do.

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Solms points out that discussions of the hard problem of consciousness often conflate two different kinds of explanatory gap.

“The first one is an explanatory gap between signals propagated from the retina and sensations of vivid red – that is, between physiological events and psychological events… Neither of these events can be explained – and still less explained away – by the other. They are two ways of observing the same thing. When I (introspectively) experience myself as existing, is the mental thing that exists a different thing from the bodily Mark Solms I see in the mirror?” (emphasis in original)

The first explanatory gap is the gap between two different observational perspectives: “This is analogous to hearing thunder with your ears and seeing lightning with your eyes. People do not remark: ‘It is widely agreed that thunder arises from lightning, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises.’ This is because they do not believe that lightning produces thunder in the way that livers produce bile. They accept that they are two manifestations of the same underlying thing. This applies equally to the different ways of experiencing visual information processing: from the outside or the inside. From the outside (if you are a scientist with the right equipment) you see signals propagated from the retina; from the inside you see vivid red.”

The second explanatory gap is the gap between what we (can) experience and the underlying causes describable in terms of physical laws. “It is the gap between things you can experience, such as vivid reds and optogenetic scans of activated neurons, and things you cannot experience, such as quantum fields in themselves. It is, in short, a gap between the first-person and third-person perspectives. To take a third-person perspective on my own experience is to abstract myself from the experience, and to experience it no longer. This perspective concerns neither the brain as it looks nor the mind as it feels, but rather the forces explaining why and how it looks and feels as it does.”

“Moreover, psychological experiences, when abstracted, reveal the functional mechanism of such experiences, giving rise to psychological laws. The same applies to physiological laws: they too are abstracted from experience – from the observable physiological data. These two types of laws, being made of the same abstracted (explanatory) stuff, namely functions, are not as difficult to reduce to each other as the two categorically different types of experiencing are.” (my emphasis)

“To me ‘non-reductive’ explanation is a good thing if it means we can forgo the impossible task of reducing psychological phenomena to physiological ones, or vice-versa. Psychological phenomena cannot be reduced to physiological ones any more than lightning can be reduced to thunder. Lightning does not cause thunder; the two phenomena correlate with each other… Therefore, we must reduce both phenomena to their respective mechanisms, so that we can reduce these mechanisms to a common denominator, without violating the laws of physics.”

(Solms goes to say: “Yet Chalmers seems to mean something different by the term ‘non-reductive’ explanation. For him, it means we cannot reduce experienced psychological phenomena to functional laws, period… Because he believes that ‘experience’ cannot be reduced to ‘the physical’ (as he uses the word, which means both ‘physiological’ and ‘functional’), he is compelled to conclude that experience is not part of the known physical universe.” I’m not in a position to say that Chalmers does or doesn’t mean such a thing, but I think the conflation identified seems important to me, whether or not Chalmers is guilty of it.)

According to Solms, scientists have sought the function of consciousness in the wrong parts of the brain. Consciousness fundamentally resides not in cognition (in processes such as vision, which can very well take place without conscious awareness) but rather affect: “the primary function of consciousness is not perceiving or remembering or comprehending but feeling.” For Solms, feelings are conscious emotions; while emotions can be unconscious, feelings cannot be unconscious by definition. According to Solms, felt and unfelt needs/emotions are physiologically and mechanistically different, and have concrete consequences.

It is logically possible that a particular wavelength of light that you experience as yellow is expressed as green by me, and for it to make no difference in how we behave, but: “Is it logically possible for someone to experience as excruciatingly painful everything that I experience as exquisitely delicious, and for this to make no difference? Certainly not. This is because feelings really do something – and they greatly increase our chances of survival in the process.” (Solms is challenging the idea that consciousness is causally irrelevant.)

“The biological function of feelings like hunger is nothing mysterious; and their something-it-is-like-ness is not especially difficult to explain. Just follow the logic of free-energy minimisation where it leads for self-organising systems like us. Given our multiple needs, complex and perilous environments, wide choice of possible actions and ability to perform only one or two of them at any given time, we should expect to have an inner world, built for the purposes of deliberation and choice. And what should we expect to fill it? What else but a dynamic range of valuative qualities, centrally including confidence weightings, which tag and measure our various incommensurable needs as they arise, along with the salient features of the environment in which they must be met.”

Solms’s account of consciousness consists of the following elements:

• Dual-aspect monism (“[we can] find the causal mechanism of consciousness not in the manifest brain but rather in its functional organization, which ultimately underpins both the physiological and the psychological manifestations of experience” – Solms, 2019)

• Consciousness is not a function of the cerebral cortex, but of the upper brain stem (as far as I can tell, Solms’s view here is not a mainstream position among neuroscientists). It is fundamentally not a cognitive process but an affective one.

• The mechanism of consciousness is to be found in an extended form of homeostasis, which can be formalized in abstract terms as free-energy minimization.

• “[D]eviation away from a homeostatic settling point (increasing uncertainty) is felt as unpleasure, and returning toward it (decreasing uncertainty) is felt as pleasure. There are many types (or “flavors”) of pleasure and unpleasure in the brain. The type identifies the need at issue, which enables the organism to minimize computational complexity…” (Solms, 2019)

The fundamental role of self-organization in this explanation is acknowledged by Solms himself:

“All explanations must take something as given, and therefore inexplicable within the theory. Every story must end somewhere. For me, the trail ends with information, which is undoubtedly puzzling stuff, and with self-organisation, which is positively uncanny. In the account of consciousness that I have given, everything springs from a system’s drive to exist. Our minds are woven from order itself, which emerges spontaneously from chaos as in Friston’s experiment, and then defends itself against the onslaughts of entropy.” (my emphasis)

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Here’s how Sanneke de Haan explains things in Enactive Psychiatry (2020). [The quotes below do not form a continuous passage in the book, but I have presented them in a manner that allows for some continuity.]

“Instead of assuming an opposition between the physiological and the experiential, between matter and mind, enactivism argues that they are rather continuous… when it comes to living beings, their very organisational and physiological structure implies that they engage in sense-making, in other words: that they are minded, or minding beings. This is the so-called life–mind continuity thesis (Thompson 2007; Froese and Di Paolo 2009).3 As Jonas (1966/2001) summarises its core idea: ‘the organic even in its lowest forms prefigures mind, and ... mind even on its highest reaches remains part of the organic’ (p. 1).”

“Organisms are self-preserving through a dialectical process of transforming matter into the organisation that makes this transformation possible… The self-organisation of living beings can be operationalised as involving autopoiesis and adaptivity.”

[cf. Solms (2019) writes: “the dynamics of a Markov blanket generate two fundamental properties of minds—namely (elemental forms of) selfhood and intentionality. It is true that these dynamics also generate elemental properties of bodies—namely an insulating membrane (the ectoderm of complex organisms, from which the neural plate derives) and adaptive behavior. This is a remarkable fact. It underpins dual-aspect monism.”]

“From an enactive perspective both experiential and physiological processes are what they are because of their being part of the wider person–world system… There is no such linear, sequential-type causal relation between the physiological process and the experiential process because we are rather looking at one and the same process, but different excerpts of it, at different levels of zooming in, typically focusing on different time scales too.” (my emphasis)

“The important, dualism-defeating move is to resist thinking about the causality of physiological and experiential processes in linear terms and as a two-place event. The causality involved is rather of a mereological, constitutional, or organizational type.”

“Following the life–mind continuity thesis, experiences are an emergent feature of living beings interacting with their environments: they are the result of the specific self organisation of living matter, depending on constant exchanges with the environment to sustain itself. Matter in specific configurations gives rise to new processes, with different properties, a different character. Are these new properties matter? Are experiences matter? Well, they do depend on matter, they emerge from this configuration of matter, without matter they would not exist. They are not something ‘over and above’ matter, they are not something ‘extra’, something ‘on top of’ the specific matter of living beings.” (my emphasis)

“From an enactive view, the global whole can do things that isolated parts cannot: global processes such as experiencing and sense-making are different from local processes, they have different properties, yet they are not distinct in the sense of being separable from these local processes. Without the local processes, the global ones would not exist. And vice versa.”

“Physiological processes can affect experiential processes, as local-to global influences and experiential processes can affect physiological ones in a global-to-local way. So yes, what I experience, what I do, how I feel, how I think, shapes my physiology… But these are not instances of ‘mental causation’: my experience is not working on my physiology like a mental hammer hitting a physical nail. There are not two separate processes going on, one physiological (‘physical’) and one experiential (‘mental’). There is the one living, interacting being and we can focus on more local or more global processes that are going on in this complex system.” (my emphasis)

“In some sense, the statement that the physical domain is causally closed is true, namely that there are no mysterious ‘other worldly’ substances or processes. But it is not true in a physicalist, reductionist, or atomistic sense. The specific configuration of the matter of living beings gives rise to all sorts of capacities, the sort of capacities that seem mysteriously different from the matter of rocks, like thinking or imagining… If, however, we adopt a more diversified conception of ‘the physical domain’, one that allows for the emergence of properties of organisational wholes that are irreducible to the properties of their parts, we can see that we indeed cannot reduce ‘mental’ capacities to (isolated) physiological processes only, but nor do we need any extra ingredients to explain them.”