6 ideas
Children born with hydranencephaly lack almost all cerebral cortex, yet they show joy, distress, preference, and responsiveness to their surroundings. Solms uses these cases to argue that cortex is not necessary for consciousness. Intact brainstem structures are enough for felt experience.
The reticular activating system and periaqueductal grey in the upper brainstem generate conscious arousal. Small lesions there abolish consciousness, while large cortical lesions only remove particular contents of experience. The cortex supplies content but is not itself the source of experience.
The most basic form of consciousness is feeling: raw valenced states like hunger, fear, and pleasure. It is not perception or thought. Affect tells an organism how well or badly it is doing at staying alive, and all other conscious content is built on this felt foundation.
Organisms must keep vital variables within viable bounds, and deviations register as prediction errors. Feelings are those errors made felt, weighted by how much they matter for survival. Pleasure signals that errors are resolving and unpleasure signals that they are growing, so the organism knows which needs to prioritise.
Using Friston's free energy principle, self-organising systems persist by minimising surprise about their own states. When an organism must juggle several competing needs in uncertain conditions, it has to prioritise them, and it does this by adjusting the precision given to each error signal. Felt affect is how that precision-weighting is experienced from the inside, which is why experience feels like something.
Solms inverts Freud's model: the id, the seat of drives, is the source of consciousness rather than an unconscious reservoir. The cortical ego works mostly automatically, and it becomes conscious only when predictions fail and affect demands attention. On this view, well-learned behaviour sinks out of awareness because it no longer produces errors.