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

That's a problem that doesn't arise from the materialist view because we don't start with small conscious things.

And my feeling is that if we'd all focused on the combination problem, then we would have made less progress than we have.

Now, this is counterfactual.

It's a hypothetical.

I don't know.

But that's my bet.

Now, my bet is that materialism has done really well at

at kind of demystifying things that has seen mysterious previously.

Like life at one point seemed very mysterious.

We don't understand everything about life yet either, but a materialist view has deepened our understanding of life.

And it's now broadly accepted that there's nothing supernatural or we don't need to change the laws of physics to accommodate life.

That's another problem with panpsychism.

It's like, okay, uh,

how does this actually work?

Will we need new laws of nature?

And if consciousness is just what something is and has no relation to what it does, then it can have no function.

It sort of rules itself out of being useful, which seems exactly against everyday evidence that conscious experiences are useful.

I actually find idealism perhaps a little bit more compelling than panpsychism.

idealism is the idea that it's not just that panpsychism is that consciousness is a fundamental property along with other fundamental properties idealism is the idea that really there's only consciousness and the things that we think of as being material physical properties are also just consciousness

I don't, it's not my preferred metaphysics, but I think it has a consistency and a coherence that I can see the appeal of that.

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