ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the hard problem of consciousness and neuropsychoanalytic approach. The fact of unconscious mental processes applies equally to perception and cognition. It is possible to see without awareness, blindsight, recognize without awareness, read without awareness, learn without awareness, remember without awareness, and make decisions without awareness. Subjective consciousness arises from being the portion of reality that generates consciousness. The relationship between seeing that portion of reality — representing it visually as, say, the innervations of the centrencephalic region — and simultaneously feeling it, is not a causal relationship. Consciousness registers the state of the subject within biological scales of values. The primal form of consciousness is a phenomenon known generally as affect. Prediction errors attract attention to the salient representations. This occurs through the generation of what K. Friston, following H. Helmholtz and Sigmund Freud, calls “free energy”: entropy, lability, and uncertainty.
