I have spent some time on the Mark Solms’ paper that you linked to, and also researched some of the commentary about it. It’s an interesting and deeply learned paper that demands quite a lot of specialist knowledge. But I think it’s worth taking seriously although it is more concerned with neurobiology than philosophy (even if Solms is quite philosophically aware.)
But I will say a few things about it.
First and foremost, it is nothing like a slam dunk refutation of David Chalmer’s Facing up to the Problem of Consciousness, as you sometimes appear to believe. Solms takes Chalmers’ claim seriously and attempts to address it, which deserves credit. But notice that it’s still addressed in functional terms, i.e. what biological function consciousness serves. This is a biological rather than a philosophical approach, in that it assumes that evolutionary adaptation provides the explanatory horizon. Whereas Chalmers argues that “functionalism”—explaining a system by what it does or how it helps an organism survive—is the source of the hard problem. So Solms is still describing a mechanism, which means he has not crossed the line from a biological process to the inherent nature of subjective experience.
In fact, Solms himself concedes a residual mystery. He advocates dual-aspect monism, acknowledging that we can observe the brain objectively from the outside -or -experience mind as a subject. These are two aspects of — what, exactly? I think it’s to his credit that he doesn’t actually claim to know. But in any case, his essay does not fully explain why nature is split into these two completely different perspectives in the first place. (I have a theory!)
Secondly, Solms’ core premise that an emotional drive cannot exist without being felt could be challenged. It is possible to conceive of an advanced artificial intelligence, a robot, or a simple biological organism equipped with an automated brainstem that monitors its own energy levels, calculates survival errors, and corrects its behavior (which is Chalmer’s P-Zombie argument) . This system could perform every single regulatory function Solms describes while operating completely in the dark, without any subjective awareness of suffering, joy, or sentience. Because in such a case the physical mechanism can be separated from the subjective experience in our concepts, the hard problem persists.
Solms also relies heavily on Friston’s Free Energy Principle — part of the title! — to bridge the gap between physical biology and subjectivity. This can be criticized on the grounds that the principle is a broad mathematical description that applies to all self-organizing systems, including completely non-conscious ones like bacteria, cells, or even tornadoes. If a mathematical equation applies equally to a single-celled organism and a human, that equation cannot be the secret sauce that underwrites conscious awareness. And it’s hard to see how such a principle could be empirically falsified.
In sum, he a powerful explanatory framework by moving the emphasis from the cortex to the brainstem. But he has not 'debunked the hard problem, so much as redefined it.
(But then, if you read the OP and the essay it’s about, Solms’ idea that feeling or affect is fundamental to the sense of self (‘ipseity’) is quite compatible with the overall argument of the essay.)
