Affect, Consciousness, Dreams

hello everybody and welcome back to active inference insights today I am honored to be speaking with Professor Mark SS Professor SS is a neuropsychologist and psychoanalyst best known for his discovery of the full brain mechanisms underlying dreams and his integration of psychoanalytic theories with modern Neuroscience more recently he's been focusing on active inference and what it might bring to bear on the hardest problem of them all Consciousness mark thank you so much for joining me it's a yeah as I said in the introduction it's a real honor and privilege it's it's great to be here Darius thanks very much so yeah I mean you have been in the field of cognitive Neuroscience for many decades but I guess have only recently in the last 10 years or so have really taken an interest in in active inference and seeing you know as many people have I think when I I read your book um The Hidden Spring which is a wonderful read and I think what I really liked about it I've been looking I'm very interested in the hard problem and trying to kind of see different perspectives with which we can take to to approach the hard problem and I've been looking for what I've been calling the synthetic a priori of Consciousness and what I mean by that is can we have a can we determine a function of cognition that needs to be conscious a priori so for example you could say attention well I can imagine offline attention I'm just sort of pinging around without it being online and I thought you got very close and I I will not say determin you know I will not say in a determined fashion because David Charmers will shs at me but I think you got very close with this notion that affect is a good candidate for what I would call the synthetic a prior of Consciousness now affect is can be seen as a kind of loose term so I think where we might want to start is just if you could give a kind of brief definition of what you mean by affect because obviously um maybe what you and yach panp in basic emotion Theory think is a might differ from a constructionist account of aect and so on so maybe if we could just start laying down what affect is before we get to Consciousness thank you um yes that's a good uh point to start with because as you say different people do mean different things by that term um so what I mean by affect is first and not not foremost but first that it is valanced in other words there's a goodness and Badness um to affect and um appropo of your opening remarks about a um aiori synthetic function uh the I think I should mention that the goodness and Badness of affect um is it applies only to the subject of the affect so it's good from my point of view or bad from my point of view it doesn't mean that it is objectively or universally good or bad so an affective state uh is a valanced state it has goodness and Badness the second um and perhaps this is the uh when I said I don't want to say first and foremost veilance because perhaps this is the foremost characteristic is that it is qualified by which I mean uh it has a specific uh differentiated quality there are there are different affects so although all affects share the the um property of veilance of goodness or Badness um each affect has its own unique quality um I don't mean to say that they aren't intermediate forms of affect but what I mean is that the that the feeling of hunger uh is qualitatively different from the feeling of thirst is qualitatively different from the feeling of sleepiness and so on and uh this is important um because you you you you can't you can't say um I have uh currently six out of 10 of sleepiness and six out of 10 of thirst therefore um I have uh 12 out of 20 of total bily need and all I need to be is sleep uh if you if you did that you would reduce the the the the common uh denominator uh the the the continuous variable of need but you would die uh that is because uh sleepiness and thirst are not the same thing they are qualitatively different they are…