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.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

Know Thyself · E205 - Anil Seth: Your Perception of Reality & Self Is a Hallucination · 28 Jul 2026 podcast

There's lots of theories you mentioned, but some are more dominant than others.

And we know certain things and certain things make sense about the neural correlates of consciousness and so on.

The views of perception that we've been talking about, I think really do help us understand things about the nature of self and the world.

Will that be enough going along that trajectory?

Or will there always be some residue, some explanatory gap between physics and consciousness?

The honest answer is I don't know.

I think it's plausible that there might be, but I think the only way we'll know is to see how far we get.

And also...

Maybe we set a different criteria for consciousness compared to other phenomena that seem mysterious.

And that's because we are ourselves conscious.

So there are many things that are distinctive about consciousness compared to other problems in science, like the origin of life or the origin of the universe, the nature of time and so on.

We're trying to explain a phenomenon that we instantiate.

And you can make the argument that we therefore expect more from an explanation than we typically might do in science.

Scientific theories in general are asked to explain properties of phenomenon, predict when they might happen and maybe control them, explain, predict and control.

They don't necessarily have to give you an intuitive sense of, aha, now I understand that's how of course it has to be, that would be nice.

Like we don't really have that in quantum mechanics and physics.

No one understands what that means, but it's able to explain properties.

We can make predictions and we can control things and it's a successful science.

I think the same, a similar thing might apply in consciousness.

We have to ask what Dave called the meta problem of consciousness as well.

Showing 781–800 of 1,118 · page 40 of 56