The Hidden Spring (2021) by Mark Solms

Book Review

The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness

by Mark Solms

   This is a work of non-fiction written by a neuropsychologist but it tackles a question that intrigues across disciplines, "What, exactly, does it mean to be conscious?"  Solms has an answer, but it is complicated, so complicated that I am going to simply include the relevant paragraph from the review of this book that appeared in the Manchester Guardian:

Solms’s challenge, then, is to show that emotions are essential to humanity’s material existence: that a zombie couldn’t be wired so as to mindlessly handle all the crucial tasks our emotions let us navigate. This he attempts in the book’s densest chapters, an uphill climb from the free energy principle in neuroscience, via advanced information theory, to the role of the cortex in the generation of memory, featuring many phrases such as “we can now formalise a self-evidencing system’s dynamics in relation to precision optimisation”. To the best of my understanding, the gist is that feelings are a uniquely effective and efficient way for humans to monitor their countless changing biological needs, in extremely unpredictable environments, to set priorities for action and make the best choices so as to remain within various bounds – of hunger, cold and heat, physical danger, social isolation, etc – outside of which we can’t survive for long. Doing all that without feelings, and doing it as rapidly as survival requires, would take so many computational resources that it would lead to a “combinatorial explosion”, demanding levels of energy a human could never muster.  Manchester Guardian review written by Oliver Burkeman

  Is Solms right?  Is he wrong?  I'm 100% sure I have no idea, and I could barely follow the explanatory path outlined above.  My summary of the above, paragraph long summary is that emotions are the mechanism chosen by "evolution" to help human survive in a fast paced environment.