Mark Solms’ Project

Mark Solms’ revision of Freud’s (1895) Project re-represents a dynamic, biologically plausible, mathematically tractable model of mind. “The intention is to furnish a psychology that shall be a natural science: that is to represent psychical processes as quantitatively determinate states of specifiable material particles, thus making those processes perspicuous and free from contradiction” (Freud, 1895, p. 295). In Solms’ version, psychical has become mental and material particles have become physical elements. In the next sentence, Freud’s Q (quantity) of energy “subject to the laws of motion” becomes Solms’ F (Friston free energy) “subject to the laws of information.” The two documents may be read as a palimpsest. Solms’ superimposed text is intended to fortify the underlying text as prescient precursor to newer science. Both Projects are written in dense prose. Language is not superfluous to my discussion. Scientific terms often carry multiple and labile meanings (information, representation,mechanism, entropy). Metaphors have and continue to shape understanding in science in both productive and blinding ways (Keller, 1995; Pigliucci & Boudry, 2011). Freud’s frequently quoted words that the cases in Studies on Hysteria read “like short stories” and “lack the serious stamp of science” (Breuer & Freud, 1895, p. 160) have an apologetic tone I suspect he hoped to rectify in the Project. A hope for that “stamp” has animated the discipline of neuropsychoanalysis. My own apologies: I suffer from formula blindness and could not perform a Bayesian calculation if someone tied me to a tree and threatened me with a gun. Despite these glaring deficits, what I have to offer in few words is historical context for and philosophical observations on the intellectual foundations of the Projects. I have questions, not answers. Solms’ changes to Freud’s opening paragraph afford ample room for thoughts on the complexities involved. Thedreamofquantifying intangible qualities in theWest is as old as the Pythagoreans, and methods for measuring the mind have a long and sometimes ugly history. Galton’s eugenics was fueled by precisely the same desire (Kevles, 1985). For modern science, quantity begins with Galileo – “science is measure.” Questions of “soul” or “psyche” fell outside the picture (see Goff, 2019). Freud hoped to bring subjective consciousness and felt meaning to “quantitative psychology” (1895, p. 311), but uniting quantity and quality remains an unsolved chasm of the mind/body problem. This is Solms’ “Rubicon,” the fateful crossing from the objective and numerical to lived experience – the phenomenological. The old and the new Project are linked by analogous formulas for entropy. Freud’s concept of neuronal energy is derived from the first two laws of thermodynamics clarified in the nineteenth century, first by Clausius, then Boltzmann: the first, the conservation of force (energy); and the second, in isolated systems entropy (disorder, randomness) tends to increase. Freud’s idol Hermann von Helmholtz (followed by Gibbs) quantified the free energy available for “work” in a closed system. In his 1948 paper, “The Mathematical Theory of Communication,” Claude Shannon (1948) created a quantitative measure for what had seemed unquantifiable: information sent through a communication channel. This quantity in bits (binary digits) could be applied to multiple media. It was not a theory of meaning: “Semantic issues are irrelevant to the engineering problem” (p. 379). Through probability calculations of highly used and rare symbols, Shannon linked information to “surprise.” Redundant messages carry no surprise and hence no information. What Shannon first called “uncertainty” in the system became “entropy.” Information was resolved uncertainty. Notably, the formula for entropy in information theory closely resembles the formula for entropy in statistical thermodynamics. Unlike thermodynamic entropy, however, information entropy does not spontaneously increase. “You should call it entropy,” von Neumann is reported to have told Shannon,