"congrats on ascending to godhood Ryan, how's life after becoming a god?"

"I dunno, still can't manifest the power to give a shit"

"Ah, true enlightenment"

Philosophy can help in analysing the concepts behind the characters/episodes, but the core is that everyone is flawed with varying levels of awareness rather than philosophy being front and center.

Because every character has a similar relationship to their flaws (that’s the relationship the author had with himself at that time), even aware characters cannot work through their flaws but somehow begrudgingly make it a non-fixable part of themselves.

The movie about death is the most fascinating one as that’s the moment he must face his demons and comes the closest to pure philosophical analysis, but you have to see the whole series before that to understand the context, and even then, reading about the background story that happens behind the scene (because the story focuses mostly on what shinji is aware of) is almost necessary.

You can already read and implement the research papers yourself, you just need the time. The various machine learning packages already are quite simple to work with.