Brains working towards machine consciousness

Ben Goertzel reports on the Workshop on Machine Consciousness at Nokia Research in Helsinki over the last couple of days. Will Browne was also there, so I am hoping to get some more in depth insights into the discussions that went on. I would have loved to have been there myself.
Ben mentions his theory about abstraction – this, and the description of Harri Pirkola's ideas on the topic remind me of the plans I had in 2001/2002 to link a ANN's (A) inputs to the weights of another (B) and train it to produce a compressed version of them (by having a symmetrical network which tapers to a pinch point and back out, and which learns by comparing output directly to input).