The importance of being precise: Commentary on “New Project for a Scientific Psychology: General Scheme” by Mark Solms

It is a great pleasure to comment on Solms’ Rosetta Stone. This commentary focuses on the New Project as a natural science. As such, the New Project has to conform to natural laws. In the physical sciences, there is only one principle we have to worry about, namely, Hamilton’s principle of stationary action. From this principle, one has to elaborate a physics of sentience. I think that Solms meets this challenge, casting Freud’s Project in a light – and language – that physicists and neurobiologists would be comfortable with. This is a remarkable achievement but not entirely unanticipated. I refer here to a line of thinking that inherits from the students of Plato, through Kant and Helmholtz, to modern day treatments of the Bayesian brain (Helmholtz 1878/1971). Given that Freud built upon the foundations laid by Helmholtz, the [re]union of Freudian and Helmholtzian thinking – on offer in the New Project – should be of no surprise. Although the mathematical details may take a few years to tie down with precision (sic) and grace, I think all the heavy lifting has been accomplished with this [re]visionary monograph. This commentary focuses on what the Solms’ [re]vision brings to the table, in terms of the functional architectures that underwrite a physics of sentience. There are some beautifully phrased sentences in it that speak to the fundaments of the free energy principle – and some that take us into new territory. I will frame my critique around these key observations and unpack them from the perspective of active inference.