The Hidden Spring (eBook)

Takes aim at the biggest question there is. Solms will challenge your most basic beliefs

It has come closer than anything else I have ever read to shining a light on a central facet of our humanity

Solms' vital work has never ignored the lived, felt experience of human beings. His ideas look a lot like the future to me

Mark Solms is a serious player in neuropsychology and has contributed serious insights into the mechanisms behind dreaming - returning, interestingly, a degree of lost credibility to Freud ... He posits that consciousness is a measure of our distance at any given point from homeostasis, and an index of the degree to which reality is failing at that instant to match our predictions. You are never more conscious, essentially, than when surveying the reality of life's hotel, with the brochure in one hand and a suitcase in the other

A remarkable book. It changes everything

This treatment of consciousness and artificial sentience should be taken very seriously

Truly pioneering. This unification is clearly the direction for the future

An extraordinarily ambitious undertaking ... Solms is successful, to my mind

Rather extraordinary ... The thing about these rebel types is that, so much of the time, they're the ones most capable of making the wildest leaps. Not the patient, incremental advances of everyday science, but the world-historical, paradigm-shifting transformations in global consciousness. Or, in Solms' case, a new theory of consciousness itself ... One of the worthiest efforts to come out of neuroscience in recent memory

Readers who stick with it will be rewarded with interesting ideas about what it means to feel, think and be

Important

Fascinating and deeply affecting ... Solms argues that feelings, not cognition or perception, are the defining feature of consciousness

At last the emperor has found some clothes! For decades, consciousness has been perceived as little more than an illusion. Solms takes a thrilling new approach, grounded in modern neurobiology but finding meaning in a fascinating reconception of the self

Solms and his colleagues are making a brilliant, determined, scrupulous, and (one wants to say) tactful endeavour to approach, in a new way, the oldest question of them all - the mysterious relation of body and mind

Outstanding ... Solms has provided a valuable service with this bold, thorough, occasionally infuriating and always wildly ambitious book

Intriguing ... If he is correct, the implications are substantial

A scientific blockbuster

Convincing ... As with all returns of the repressed, Solms's exhumation of psychoanalysis is sure to be unnerving, especially for those who want to deny Freud's lessons about the workings of desire