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

Maybe that's because I don't understand enough about consciousness yet.

But to the extent that we know...

nervous systems are necessary but not sufficient.

And trees lack nervous systems, so my starting assumption is, well, they're not conscious.

This is, by the way, will have a very interesting relationship to AI because AIs also don't have biological nervous systems, but they bear other similarities to real brains, just to anticipate.

I also don't think they're conscious, but for different reasons.

And the other thing about trees is they don't face the similar sorts of problems that moving animals face in this continuous battle to survive and thrive.

One way to understand consciousness is kind of through a Darwinian lens, a biological evolutionary lens, where it always helps to ask questions.

What's it for?

You look at birds' wings and what are they for?

They're for flying.

Look at eyes, what are they for?

And so on.

What is consciousness for?

And no one knows, but there's lots of, I think, plausible and interesting ideas that we can test.

We can at least ask, what is consciousness for in us?

How does it help us?

And one, I think, reasonably plausible idea is conscious experiences bring together an enormous amount of information about the world and the self in this single format.

We have one experience at a time.

And in that experience is so much about the world, so much about the self, so much about our emotional state,

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