Consciousness and Hierarchical Inference

I greatly enjoyed reading Mark Solms’s piece on the conscious id. Mindful of writing this commentary, I noted (in the margins of the target article) points of contact between his formulation and our more formal—if somewhat dryer—treatment using Helmholtzian notions of free energy. It was clear, after a few pages, that I was not going to be able to cover every aspect of the remarkable consilience between the two approaches. Instead, I focus on substantiating Solms’s key conclusions from the perspective of hierarchical inference in the Bayesian brain.