Day of the Gamelan, 17th of Spring, 526 M.E. (Helios): According to his Wikipedia page, Mark Solms is a South African psychoanalyst and neuropsychologist known for his discovery of the brain mechanisms of dreaming and his use of psychoanalytic methods in contemporary neuroscience. According to Solms, as Michael Pollan explains it, consciousness is generated from feelings, and feelings, in turn are a result of uncertainty. 

One of the hard problems of consciousness is defining just what it is we're talking about. Buddhism has the advantage of two different terms when we talk about consciousness. What the Buddha called "consciousness" (vijnana) wasn't all that big of a deal. In Buddhism, vijnana takes six different forms, each associated with a sense, so that there's a touch consciousness, a visual consciousness, and so on up to consciousness of thought, our awareness of thinking. Each form of vijnana arises from contact of an object with the organ corresponding to a sense, and the brain is considered the organ that perceives thoughts. The Buddha, therefore, would probably have agreed with Solms that consciousness arises from "feeling" our thoughts.   

But consciousness, as considered today, with it's model of self or personhood, it's memory, it's emotional states, and so on, is probably closer to what is called "mind" in Zen. Mind, hsin in Chinese, shin in Sino-Japanese, and kokoro in Japanese, can be translated as mind, heart, spirit, soul, outlook, interiority, thought, and so on. I usually encounter it in the literature as "heart-mind," not meaning the mind of the beating heart, but the deepest, most basic, essential manifestation of the mind - the metaphorical heart of the mind, the mind before thoughts arise. In that latter sense, kokoro, the pure, true mind, the mind before we layer all the bullshit of thoughts and rationalization on it, can also mean absolute reality - the mind beyond distinction between thought and matter, between the abstract and the concrete.

When the Buddha taught in the 12-Fold Chain of Dependent Origination that the appearance of consciousness was dependent on the prior existence of samskara, or mental models, he wasn't talking about mind (kokoro), but merely our awareness of thought (vijnana). Kokoro ultimately refers to the entire Chain of Dependent Origination in which we are born, live, and die, according to contemporary Zen teacher Shohaku Okumura. Ultimately, the chain is a circle - the top link, old age and death, is a precursor to the bottom link, ignorance, so there's no real start or end to the chain. As such, there is no ultimate cause or origin to mind, conscious experience as we think of it today, in Buddhism, making speculation on what it arises from a meaningless question.