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

At the same time, we have this phenomenon of consciousness.

which seems very hard to account for by this materialist, physicalist view of the universe in terms of particles or fields or waves interacting.

We don't seem to be getting anywhere, says Philip.

So, hold on a minute.

Why don't we put these two things together, and consciousness is the intrinsic nature of things,

And then now we've got an account of what consciousness is, and we still have our materialist science of how things interact and behave, but we won't use it to try to explain the presence of consciousness in the universe because it's already there, because that's what things essentially are.

And now we can go home.

Job done.

That's my attempt at steel man panpsychism.

Oh, and maybe sometimes people feel that panpsychism is true because they have this experience of consciousness being everywhere.

So that's, you know, another line of evidence for it.

I'm just trying to be generous.

I don't know if I'm succeeding.

I think because it doesn't, to me...

lead in a direction that I think is likely to be insightful.

So I, at least, I like to think that I wear my metaphysical clothes quite lightly.

And so I will often say, you know, Philip will say I'm a materialist.

I kind of agree, but I also think I'm a pragmatic materialist.

I find it useful to take a materialist stance in thinking

trying to explain phenomena and figuring out what experiments to do next and so on.

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