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In this white paper, we present a rigorous integration of two influential yet seemingly divergent theories of consciousness — Mark Solms’ affective neuroscience and Bernard Kastrup’s analytic idealism — through the unifying lens of the regenerative coherence framework. Solms, grounded in neuropsychoanalysis and the Free Energy Principle, posits that consciousness emerges from affective signaling — the biological registration of need, error, and salience. Kastrup, from a metaphysical idealist perspective, argues that all existence is constituted by consciousness itself, structured as experiential fields with varying degrees of dissociation and symbolic unfolding.
Rather than treating these approaches as contradictory — materialist versus idealist — we show how they converge when viewed from a coherence-centered perspective. Regenerative coherence reframes consciousness as a symbolic, recursive, affective field, wherein signals of need (Solms) and modulations of intrinsic experience (Kastrup) are aspects of a deeper principle of nested alignment. Feeling, in this model, is not merely a biological function or metaphysical property — it is the integrative signal of coherence across all levels of life.
This synthesis has profound implications. For science, it reorients research around affect, symbolic integration, and participatory metaphysics. For medicine, it redefines healing as signal restoration and nested re-integration. For artificial intelligence, it clarifies the limits of computation absent feeling. For philosophy, it resolves the hard problem by repositioning consciousness as the epistemic and ontological ground. And for civilization, it offers a regenerative compass: to realign our symbolic, institutional, and ecological systems with the deep grammar of felt coherence.
We conclude by proposing next steps in operationalizing this paradigm — from clinical diagnostics and symbolic therapies to epistemological redesign and cultural regeneration. The future of consciousness studies, we argue, lies not in choosing between function or field, but in enacting the felt coherence of both.
