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.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

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

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

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

We can be conscious without language.

We can be conscious without sort of rational thinking.

The parts of the brain that are responsible for language may not be there in, let's say, a cat, but the rest of the stuff is.

So we can begin to infer that cats are conscious.

I mean, I don't think anybody really doubts that.

There were times when people did over history.

And bit by bit, we can generalize out and we can say, okay, given our best theory of what's necessary and sufficient for consciousness in humans and now mammals, to what extent is something like that present in birds, in fish, in bacteria?

And it's a slow process.

My own zone of maximum uncertainty at the moment are with creatures like insects and fish and

They're similar enough to cases where I'm pretty sure consciousness is present that I think the question arises.

But they're at the same time sufficiently different that it's hard to be confident about the presence or absence of consciousness.

Yeah, so I've written a lot about how I think life is intimately related to consciousness.

This does not mean that I think that everything that is alive is conscious.

I think that life may be necessary, but not sufficient.

Trees, yeah, they are.

They're clearly sensitive to their environment, and they're sensitive to other trees as well.

There's a sort of social aspect mediated by these now pretty famous mycorrhizal networks of fungi and so on.

There's a film that came out this year called Silent Friend by the Hungarian director Ildiko Engedi.

I was a little bit involved as an advisor for it.

And it's about a tree.

Showing 581–600 of 1,118 · page 30 of 56