内容摘要：The landscape gardener appeared with his mother Jo as they travelled across South America in the second series of the BBC show, which aired in 2020.

The landscape gardener appeared with his mother Jo as they travelled across South America in the second series of the BBC show, which aired in 2020.

There is a growing view among some thinkers that as AI becomes even more intelligent, the lights will suddenly turn on inside the machines and they will become conscious.Others, such as Prof Anil Seth who leads the Sussex University team, disagree, describing the view as "blindly optimistic and driven by human exceptionalism".

"We associate consciousness with intelligence and language because they go together in humans. But just because they go together in us, it doesn't mean they go together in general, for example in animals."So what actually is consciousness?The short answer is that no-one knows. That's clear from the good-natured but robust arguments among Prof Seth's own team of young AI specialists, computing experts, neuroscientists and philosophers, who are trying to answer one of the biggest questions in science and philosophy.

While there are many differing views at the consciousness research centre, the scientists are unified in their method: to break this big problem down into lots of smaller ones in a series of research projects, which includes the Dreamachine.Just as the search to find the "spark of life" that made inanimate objects come alive was abandoned in the 19th Century in favour of identifying how individual parts of living systems worked, the Sussex team is now adopting the same approach to consciousness.

They hope to identify patterns of brain activity that explain various properties of conscious experiences, such as changes in electrical signals or blood flow to different regions. The goal is to go beyond looking for mere correlations between brain activity and consciousness, and try to come up with explanations for its individual components.

Prof Seth, the author of a book on consciousness, Being You, worries that we may be rushing headlong into a society that is being rapidly reshaped by the sheer pace of technological change without sufficient knowledge about the science, or thought about the consequences."And yeah, the Milky Way looks fantastic.

"A lot of people say that you have quite a lot of cloudy skies and a bit of rain in Cornwall, so it's quite a rarity to get clear skies especially."I had three nights in a row while I was down there, so it was a bit of a bonus really."

Mr Nuttall posted the images onto social media and said he was surprised how popular they have become.He said: "I put them on a local Facebook page.