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 · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Know Thyself · E205 - Anil Seth: Your Perception of Reality & Self Is a Hallucination · 28 Jul 2026
podcast
That's the Silent Friend.
It's a tree, a ginkgo tree in Marburg in Germany.
And it's an old tree.
It's been around for hundreds of years.
And the film tracks three successive generations, like early 20th century, 1970s and now.
And the main character in each of these generations interacts with the tree in some way.
And the most recent, the character in the 2000s is a neuroscientist who tries to record from the tree and figure out what's going on.
Maybe trying to answer this question, is it aware of anything?
The film is very, very careful not to really take sides on whether the tree is conscious or not.
But what it does beautifully is it sort of shows the importance of
how sensitive that, how delicate that question is and just how the presence of the tree shapes human consciousness, I think, in really interesting ways.
It came to mind because I think sometimes these questions are important, but just not answerable.
So in the case of the tree, yeah, sure, they're alive.
They behave in some ways over different timescales.
They communicate, but there are two differences that I think, for me, I would bet they're not actually conscious.
One is that they don't have a nervous system.
And maybe we don't need a nervous system.
Maybe a nervous system is just the way animals do consciousness.
Maybe trees do it another way.
But if there is another way, I don't know what that other way is.
Showing 601–620 of 1,118 · page 31 of 56
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