> the ideas around AI, consciousness & free will they wanted to explore
I haven't seen S2, but with that description, and as an avid fan of the various incarnations of Ghost in the Shell, I want to see S2 to see how they explore those concepts.
I haven't seen S2, but with that description, and as an avid fan of the various incarnations of Ghost in the Shell, I want to see S2 to see how they explore those concepts.
What I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990's and 2000's. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I've encountered is anywhere near as convincing.
I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there's lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine, primary and higher-order.
My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to Jeff Krichmar's lab at UC Irvine, possibly. Dr. Edelman's roadmap to a conscious machine is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461
I'll be keeping this bookmarked to refer back to.
I should also say, a few years ago I read "the man who mistook his wife for a hat" and it totally changed my thinking on how the brain works, as in it has clearly evolved in an entirely "evolved" manner, ie. unstructured, pieces fitting together as they randomly develop. The one sentence description I've come up with is: the brain, our logic engine, doesn't actually work in a way that we would consider logical.
What this means for me, combined with my abstract understanding of your commentary, is that consciousness won't be achieved when you're trying to build it, consciousness will be achieved by trying to build the pieces that can grow and work together over time to become consciousness (I can't quite find the right words to demonstrate what I mean - we can't build "it" but we can build something that can evolve into "it").