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In his impressive “New Project for a Scientific Psychology,” Mark Solms presents us with a revision of Freud’s original “Project for a Scientific Psychology: General Scheme.” While doing so, he conveys a neuropsychoanalytic perspective on Chalmers’ “hard problem” of consciousness. In Solms’ update, he mentions a few key notions and theories that were not available to Freud and his students, viz. (i) Shannon’s concept of information, (ii) surprisal, (iii) predictive coding, (iii) Friston’s free energy, and (iv) Panksepp’s affective neuroscience.
Although the intention is not foremost to solve the hard problem, Solms states that he wants to investigate why and how consciousness arises, i.e. why and how there is something it is like to be for an organism. In other words, how and why do neurophysiological activities produce the “experience of consciousness.” The new project (Solms, 2017) implicates the hard problem, the view of dual-aspect monism, consciousness as a non-cognitive, but affective function with the latter being homeostatic deviations that cognition suppresses surprise, all formulated within the free energy principle (FEP) (Friston, 2010). To achieve this program, Solms bases his theory on Friston’s model of FEP, shown to minimize surprisal as a unifying principle of brain functioning. The theoretical project sets down that prior hypotheses are supplanted by posterior ones implicating that the central organ of the human nervous system operates as a “Bayesian brain.” Yet, Solms’ dualistic view entails that the material brain does not produce the mind and therefore creates a “ghost in the machine” (Koestler, 1967; Koestler & Smythies, 1969). The use of hard-core scientific terms such as free energy, surprisal, negentropy, information, dualism, self-organization, Markov blanket, etc., prompts useful strategies and subtle and interesting interpretations. Nevertheless, their utility might lead to a confusing mix of equivocal terminology. For instance, is not mini