Philosophical Speculations

Link to review in wired:
https://www.wired.com/story/sexy-new-t ... you-feels/
I only browsed it quickly so ... Who knows...

* Suggests emotions as ontic prime?
* Markov blankets are mentioned as the mechanism for separating 'inside' and 'outside'

too much sex for me there

Are you sure this is a version of idealism? Flipping through the article, he seems to attribute to a certain part of the brain our core of consciousness, "emotions." The Blind Will strikes again, this time through Freud. Perhaps the proponents of the blind will, will confirm there claims according to this physiological diagnosis. As a fan of Victor Frenkel I was filled with a feeling of nausea. Ahh, that's a feeling too, a mere want, devoid of meaning...

Jung's theory was that experiences make it to ego consciousness when they reach a certain threshold of emotional valence, so that is somewhat aligned with the article. Of course he did not think ego consciousness was the sum total of consciousness, but rather the experiences lacking sufficient emotional valence remained 'unconscious'. And he was an idealist so he did not think anything existed apart from experience. I'm sure it's more complicated than that but I think that's the gist of it.

There was already a post sometime back on Solms' view that the brainstem is a source of consciousness. All of this is interrelated within his book The Hidden Spring. I've been meaning to give more elaborate review of this book on my own blog.

Short story is that Solms thinks consciousness originates in the brainstem and is based on feelings more than cognition. At the time, he thinks of the brain as a prediction machine that is constantly fighting against entropy. The role of consciousness is to handle the unexpected in the internal and external worlds in order to maintain internal balance and homeostasis. It guides action and reaction. Much of this is based on Friston's free energy theory of how the brain works. The early part of the book talks about his career and how he was drawn to Freud and sought to integrate subjective experience understood from a Freudian viewpoint with neuroscience and the brain. Some reviews seems to focus a lot on the Freudian angle but after the first part of the book references to Freud are few and usually unnecessary to the main arguments.