Consciousness Isn't in the Cortex

Consciousness originates not in the cortex, but in the brainstem as raw feeling, driven by the organism's fundamental need to maintain homeostasis. Neuropsychologist and psychoanalyst Mark Solms argues that by prioritizing visual perception, science has misidentified the mechanism of consciousness, which is intrinsically tied to affective states. Through the framework of neuropsychoanalysis, which integrates objective brain data with subjective human experience, Solms demonstrates that the brain’s dopaminergic "seeking" system generates dreams to fulfill motivational drives. This dual-aspect monist perspective posits that mind and body are two observational viewpoints of the same physical system. By focusing on how self-organizing systems prioritize needs to persist against entropy, this approach offers a path toward solving the hard problem of consciousness through the potential engineering of artificial feeling agents.