Reddit mentions of The Remembered Present: A Biological Theory of Consciousness

No, I haven't read that, but just checked a summary on wikipedia.

The impression I got that is that it is quite populistic. He doesn't say anything new apart from something I seems to have published about the same time on my blog, this part about accelerated returns. I did my PhD in computational neuroscience and have so far, not heard anyone but my self speculate about this about accelerated returns being of importance to the computational efficiency of the brain[1], so this is interesting. Otherwise (only gave it a quick look through, will likely get the book and read) it seems as he is just repeating things which e.g. Douglas Hofstadter, Gerald Edelman, Daniel Dennet and me (thesis from 2003, chapter 7 speculative part) have written about.

> apparently to give him the resources to put into practice his hypothesis from that book.

Yes, this is my theory as well, to make it appear as he will put into practice the hypotheses from that book.

The employment of him can have many reasons:

1. to ride on the singularity "AI-hype"
   
2. to stop him from actually implement conscious AI.
   
3. naïve assumption that he could make it.
   
   No 1 would simply be a reasonable business image approach. No 2 would be a sensible beings action, as we do not really need any "conscious AI" (unless I am an AI, have A.I. in my middle names though...) to implement the singularity (which is my project). No 3 is also reasonable, as if the google engineers actually had as goal to implement conscious AI and knew how to do it, they wouldn't need Kurzweil.
   
   However, I suspect that google already know how to implement ethical conscious AI, as when I showed this algorithm from my thesis , he almost instantly refused talking to me more, and said that they can not help me.
   
   I showed that algorithm for 25 strong AI researchers at a symposium in Palo Alto 2004, and they said, yes, this is it.
   
   However, I have later refined it and concluded that the "rules" are not needed, these are built in due to the function of the neural system, all the time striving towards consistent solutions. I wrote a semi jokular (best way to hide something, learned from Douglas Adams) approach to almost rule free algorithm in 2011. The disadvantage with this algorithm is that it can trivially be turned evil. By switching the first condition you could implement e.g. Hitler, by switching the second condition you could implement the ordinary governmental politician...
   
   
4. OK, my PhD opponent prof Hava Siegelmann has proved that the neural networks are Super Turing, but not explicitly explained the reason for them being, that is, not in language of "accelerated returns". She is considerably smarter than me, I do not understand the details of the proof.