Consciousness as Precision Optimization: Some Physiological and Philosophical Considerations

All right. Hello, everyone. Welcome to Acton Flab guest stream number 16.1 with Mark Solms. It's January 22, 2022. It's going to be an awesome discussion. We really appreciate everyone taking the time out to participate in the live stream and in the discussion. We're going to have some intermittent presentation intervals by Professor Solms and also a period for discussion alternating with that. So we'll each just introduce ourselves and then pass it directly to the presentation section. So I'm Daniel. I'm a researcher in California and I'll pass to Dave. I'm Dave. I'm a software developer and student of psychology. I live 200 kilometers north of Manila. Stephen. Hello. I'm Stephen. I'm based in Toronto, Canada, and I'm doing a practice-based PhD around social topographies and how people engage in community development. And I'll pass it over to Mark now. Welcome. Thanks very much. So what I propose to do is to, in a moment, I'll share my screen and you'll see my slides. I'm going to start with the summary slide of all the points that I propose to cover. And then I'll take them one by one, each of those points. And at the end of each of them, I'll stop and see if anyone wants to comment or ask a question. And then we slowly plow through it like that. We've got two hours, so it should be okay. But if worst comes to worst and we don't get to the end of the list of topics, we will arrange a follow-up meeting to conclude them. So I'm very glad to be here. Thanks for inviting me. And I'm really looking forward to this discussion. Here come my slides. On the screen is the title of my book. And here is the promised summary of what I'm going to cover. As I said, I'll cover each of these points in turn. And then we'll have questions and comments in between. And if we don't get to the end, that's fine. Let's rather give each one of the topics the time that it needs. So I start with the assertion that affect is the foundational form of consciousness and that affect is intrinsically conscious. I then move to make the point that that claim, that affect is intrinsically conscious, in other words, that you can't have a feeling that you don't feel, that this is not based on semantic arguments, but rather on empirical evidence. And I will summarize the evidence. I'll then make the point that affect is not synonymous with interceptive inference, which is widely believed these days. And I'll tell you why that matters when I get there. And then I'll move on to making the point that all of this casts new light on the hard problem, particularly if affect is not just an interceptive form of perception, because there are lots of problems about perception that have got us into this hard problem in the first place. I'll argue that affect, rather than being interceptive inference, that it's an extended form of homeostasis. And I'll tell you what that, what I mean by that when we get there. And I'll make the point that complex organisms like ourselves require multiple homeostats, and that these are to be treated as categorical variables, which matters. And that these variables must be prioritized. One can't meet all one's needs simultaneously. I'll then, this is a large point. This one is a large point, the empirical evidence about affect. And this one is another large point. The mechanism of perceptual and cognitive consciousness is precision modulation of allostatic prediction errors. That's a big claim. And so we must spend some time on it. I'll then talk about the nature of the predictive hierarchy. I seem to see it a little differently from most people. So I want to set out my stall on that score and explain why I think the predictive hierarchy is arranged concentrically. And that this, with the, as one moves toward the periphery of the hierarchy, there's progressively increasing tolerance of uncertainty. And then lastly, I'll say a word or two about why I think that consciousness can be artificially engineered. So even if we don't get to the end of…