The main concepts of the free energy (FE) neuroscience developed by Karl Friston and colleagues parallel those of Freud's Project for a Scientific Psychology. In Hobson et al. (2014) these include an innate virtual reality generator that produces the fictive prior beliefs that Freud described as the primary process. This enables Friston's account to encompass a unified treatment—a complexity theory—of the role of virtual reality in both dreaming and mental disorder. In both accounts the brain operates to minimize FE aroused by sensory impingements—including interoceptive impingements that report compliance with biological imperatives—and constructs a representation/model of the causes of impingement that enables this minimization. In Friston's account (variational) FE equals complexity minus accuracy, and is minimized by increasing accuracy and decreasing complexity. Roughly the brain (or model) increases accuracy together with complexity in waking. This is mediated by consciousness-creating active inference—by which it explains sensory impingements in terms of perceptual experiences of their causes. In sleep it reduces complexity by processes that include both synaptic pruning and consciousness/virtual reality/dreaming in REM. The consciousness-creating active inference that effects complexity-reduction in REM dreaming must operate on FE-arousing data distinct from sensory impingement. The most relevant source is remembered arousals of emotion, both recent and remote, as processed in SWS and REM on “active systems” accounts of memory consolidation/reconsolidation. Freud describes these remembered arousals as condensed in the dreamwork for use in the conscious contents of dreams, and similar condensation can be seen in symptoms. Complexity partly reflects emotional conflict and trauma. This indicates that dreams and symptoms are both produced to reduce complexity in the form of potentially adverse (traumatic or conflicting) arousals of amygdala-related emotions. Mental disorder is thus caused by computational complexity together with mechanisms like synaptic pruning that have evolved for complexity-reduction; and important features of disorder can be understood in these terms. Details of the consilience among Freudian, systems consolidation, and complexity-reduction accounts appear clearly in the analysis of a single fragment of a dream, indicating also how complexity reduction proceeds by a process resembling Bayesian model selection.

This chapter presents a philosophical synthesis of a range of work relating psychoanalysis and neuroscience. The overall argument is (1) material in these and related fields can usefully be integrated via the notion of representation; (2) the appropriate notion of representation is a biological one common both to psychoanalysis and the Holmholtz/Bayes tradition in neuroscience; and consequently (3) the Freudian unconscious may be understood as realized in what is now described as the Bayesian brain.Psychoanalysis began as an extension of the intuitive commonsense psychology in whose terms we make sense of one another in everyday life. In this we understand one another as persons who have subjective experience of an objective world, and whose actions are informed by mental states and processes such as those of emotion, desire, belief, intention, and will. Such states and processes have intentionality: that is, they are about things and situations in the world, and they are capable of both truth (or accuracy) or falsehood (or inaccuracy).This 'aboutness' has historically been regarded as the defining feature of mental phenomena. Recent work in philosophy, however, has enabled us to see that the intentionality of the mental can be understood in terms of the notion of representation; and Ruth Garrett Millikan has argued that representation itself can be seen as a biological phenomenon which has evolved for the selective advantages it confers. So on this account the intentionality of mental phenomena can be understood as realized by the biological functioning of the brain.Such representational functioning is here explicated via the current Helmholtz/Bayes approach to neuroscience developed from work by Geoffrey Hinton and his colleagues. This approach has recently been advanced by Karl Friston in such a way as to unify a number of basic theories in neuroscience and to integrate them with evolution. This framework is particularly relevant for psychoanalysis, since Freud was trained in the school of Helmholtz and framed his early theories in terms of free energy; and this has enabled Friston and Richard Carhart-Harris to relate Freud's claims to data from neuropsychology, neuroimaging, and psychopharmacology.The same framework can also be used to link Freud's theories with the findings of affective neuroscience, including the homeostatic regulatory emotional and motivational systems described by Jaak Panksepp and Antonio Damasio, and the interoceptive system delineated by A. D. (Bud) Craig, and in conjunction with research in attachment and development. In this way we can start to describe the wishfulfilling Freudian unconscious as part of the predictive and error-minimizing working of the computational Bayesian brain.Keywords: conflict, aggression, infancy, attachment, repression, interoception, wishfulfilment, superego Psychoanalysis began as an extension of the natural and intuitive commonsense psychology, sometimes now described as theory of mind (Wellman, 1990), in whose terms we articulate thought and fee...

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Evolution, Consciousness, and the Internality of the Mind The problem of consciousness seems to arise from experience itself. As we shall consider in more detail below, we are strongly disposed to contrast conscious experience with the physical states or events by which we take it to be realized. This contrast gives rise to dualism and other problems of mind and body. In this chapter I argue that these problems can usefully be considered in the perspective of evolution.1. Evolution, mind, and the representation of mind.Among other things, this perspective brings to the fore a contrast between human and (other) animal minds. Many animals seem to have minds, at least in the minimal sense of a system of internal states which represent the environment, and so enable them to attain goals intelligently, that is, in light of a wide variety of information relevant to this task. A striking thing about human beings, however, is that we also represent our own minds, via the various ways of thinking about internal states encompassed in our concept of mind.This difference seems linked to one in adaptive function. While the advantages of possessing a mind apparently derive from representing the self in relation to the environment --which of course includes other creatures and their behaviour --those of possessing a concept of mind would seem to flow from representing these representations themselves, and so further anticipating and controlling the behaviour they govern. We apparently do this, for example, when we deliberate about our own motives, or seek to anticipate or influence those of others. How far animals besides ourselves enjoy these further advantages remains unclear.2. An apparent difficulty for the evolution of a concept of mind.We take the behaviour-governing representations described by our concept of mind to be realized in the nervous system. This means both that they are normally out of sight, and that their causal and functional roles could not be rendered transparent to perception in any case (as shown by the fact that we with all our science are scarcely beginning to fathom them.) So, as we can say, the human species --or the human nervous system --has had to evolve the capacity to represent behaviourgoverning states and events in nervous systems blindly, that is, without drawing on perceptual information about neurons as disposed in space and having features perceptibly related to the operations of computation and control which they perform. This seems part of the reason why in employing our concept of mind we do not represent the neural causes of behaviour as such, but rather as it were from the outside, that is, by relation to observable behaviour and the environment. In thinking of persons as having minds we construe their behaviour as action stemming from desires, beliefs, and other motives, which are directed to the environment and which serve to render both speech and non-verbal action rational (logical) and so intelligible. The capacity for thinking this way evidently develops together with that for...