It is a pleasure to welcome the author of The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness, Mark Solms. In this episode, we unpack "The Hard Problem" and culminate on Mark's latest challenge: Making a Mind, where he and his team have built a conscious intelligence.

00:00:00.508 The Final Chapter: Exploring the Source of Consciousness 00:06:03.237 Understanding the Underlying Mechanism and the Free Energy Principle 00:12:35.699 Mechanism: Substrate-Independent and Irrelevant to Appearance 00:24:05.372 The cortex and brainstem: the wrong place to look 00:26:57.108 The mechanism of feeling predicts conscious experience 00:34:18.887 Making a Mind: Exploring Consciousness and Mechanisms of Feeling 00:42:00.900 Richard Feynman's Last Words: "If I can't create it, I don't understand it." 00:46:47.955 The Imperative for Artificial Intelligence: Maintaining Homeostatic States 00:47:39.085 The Functioning of the Robot and its Activities 00:52:53.276 The Final Chapter: Artificial Feelings and Ethical Considerations