Mark Solms > Quotes

“Affects tell long evolutionary stories of which we are completely unaware.”
― Mark Solms, The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness

“What you experience all the time is fluctuating pulses of feeling in response to your movement through the world, as you check whether everything is as you expected to find it - and as you try to close the gap, somehow, when it isn't.”
― Mark Solms, The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness

“I suspect that many readers find it hard to believe that what they are seeing right now is not simply what is ‘there’. I can imagine you asking: ‘Where else does my perception of these words on the page come from?’ It might help if I point out that what you are seeing right now bears little resemblance to the sensory inputs you are receiving. Those inputs start out as light waves impacting on your retinae. The photosensitive cells there (called rods and cones) respond to the light waves by generating nerve impulses. These impulses – not the light waves themselves – are then propagated along your optic nerves to the cortex, in the form of spike trains (see Figure 11). Why do you experience these trains – 001111101101 – as moving images out there in the world?”
― Mark Solms, The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness

“we can retain the hypothesis that the cortex is the seat of ‘consciousness as experience’ by positing that being conscious in the behavioural sense of being awake and responsive is significantly different from having consciousness in the phenomenological sense – that is, being a subject of experience.”
― Mark Solms, The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness