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

All the time ask what's left.

You might still think, well, there's the self.

We'll take away the feeling of where the body is, take away the feeling of emotion and so on.

How far can you strip down

the specific contents of consciousness and still have consciousness.

I don't think there's a good answer to this.

I'm pretty confident there's no obvious answer to this because this is a question that people have been asking in so many different ways for thousands of years and people in the meditative traditions now try to, well, they don't try, that's kind of against the grain for meditation, but they talk about these states of minimal or pure consciousness.

bare consciousness where there's no other content.

In psychedelics as well, people report experiences of complete ego dissolution in some psychedelic states where there's no content to consciousness, there's just consciousness.

My own feeling about this, having... I'm not a meditator.

I have tried the psychedelic route to minimal phenomenal experience.

And just thinking about it as well is that I'm not sure you can strip away absolutely everything.

I think...

my view on consciousness in the broader frame is very, very closely tied up with our nature as living creatures.

And this is speculation.

It's very hard to do an experiment on this, but I tend to think that the most basic form of conscious experience that certainly a human being can have is something like the feeling of being alive.

without any particular shape, without any particular form, without any specific emotion, without even really the background texture of a mood, but just this simple formless, structureless feeling of being alive.

If there is anything left in a state of bare consciousness, maybe it's that.

I think so, especially the last thing you said.

I struggle a bit with the...

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