Anil Seth

speaker

1,118 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 28 Jul

Anil Seth’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Know Thyself · E205 - Anil Seth: Your Perception of Reality & Self Is a Hallucination · 28 Jul 2026 podcast

In some cases, I mean, there's sometimes when I'm traveling and I've been in such a deep sleep because I'm jet lagged or something like that.

And I wake up and I don't really know where I am.

And nothing really makes sense, even visually.

It's like, where are things in this room?

And I don't remember which hotel I'm in or I arrived late, didn't really look around.

And then it takes a little while for things to kind of click into place because I don't have the predictions in my mind about the layout of the room or where, indeed, what kind of room I'm in.

This is a very good question.

I mean, there's this lovely phrase, I think it's from William James, he talks about consciousness as the remembered present.

which kind of conveys the idea that to experience anything, we have to have some amount of memory.

And this is very much in line with the idea of perception as this process of controlled hallucination.

It's always reaching back a little bit into time.

But it does beg the question about, so what would be the most basic form of conscious experience?

There's an old thought experiment from Greek philosophy called Avicenna's man.

You know about this one?

I think sometimes it's called the floating man.

And the idea is a picture, a man, or any person just floating in the air.

And gradually you take away their senses and you ask what's left.

So you take away vision.

What's left?

Well, you know, they're going to still be conscious to hear the wind whistling, birds take away hearing, take away smell, take away taste, take away touch.

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