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

Like for the out-of-body experience example, I think the materialist stance leads to questions about, oh, so how is the brain generating a first-person perspective rather than... Maybe if you're a panpsychist and you think about an out-of-body experience, you might think, oh, consciousness has gone somewhere.

I don't know.

I don't know what would be said there.

But I find materialism...

a useful heuristic.

I think the fact that we haven't explained everything yet is not a good enough reason to say it's failed.

I think actually a lot of progress has been made.

Pantheism is often motivated by the supposed inadequacy of a materialist perspective.

And I just think that's a little premature.

our ideas about the nature of consciousness are, I think they are becoming more interesting, more sophisticated, and perhaps closer to truth from a broadly materialist perspective.

Now one thing, in many conversations with Philip, one thing he often says is like, all the things that you found out, you neuroscientists, you materialists, all these things you found out about the brain, they're all perfectly compatible with panpsychism.

and panpsychism has the advantage of dissolving this hard problem, or just not really dissolving it, but it no longer is there in the first place.

And when I think about that, he's right.

Panpsychism, his version of it, is compatible with everything that materialist neuroscientists find, because everything that materialist neuroscientists discover is all about how things behave, not what things intrinsically are.

But my...

question is, and I pose this to Philip, and of course we don't know the answer, but would we have found these things out if we were all panpsychists?

Would we have asked the same questions, done the same experiment?

Maybe we would have found out other better things, but maybe we would have made less progress because we would have been focusing on problems which are specific to a panpsychist view.

For instance, panpsychists

Instead of having the hard problem of the relationship between consciousness and matter, they have the problem called the combination problem of how you go from small conscious things, since consciousness is intrinsic to everything, how you go from small conscious things to big conscious things like people.

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