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

Let's get on with it.

The question just becomes very practical when we ask

What about non-human animals?

What about a newborn human infant?

What about someone after traumatic brain injury who might be in a condition we call coma or vegetative state?

And then what about all the things happening in our technologies these days?

What about AI systems?

What about these things called organoids, which are synthetic biology creations made of neurons grown in petri dishes in various labs in California and elsewhere?

What's the distribution of consciousness itself?

This is an incredibly important question because

With consciousness travels moral status.

Things matter for their own sakes when they can have experiences, at least that's a reasonably consensus view.

And for each of us, consciousness really is everything that matters.

Everything that makes life worth living is because we experience things.

In my approach, and many of my colleagues' too,

we have to go at things incrementally, iteratively, slowly, step by step.

And what this means is, let's take dogs and cats and seals and other mammals.

Now those creatures have brains that are actually pretty similar to human brains in many ways.

They lack some things, they have other things, but to the extent that we now know in a human brain

that we don't need, let's say, we don't need language to be conscious.

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