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

We have to address the meta problem, which is why do people think there's a hard problem of consciousness?

Part of that might be because of the actual nature of reality, that it's mysterious because we haven't figured out how consciousness fits into our picture of the universe.

But part of the answer might be in our own psychologies, that we expect something different from a theory of consciousness that is just simply unfair to ask of scientific explanations in general.

I mean, this is indeed very much a topic for today.

It's very much in my mind.

I was just in San Francisco the last couple of days, which is the center of the universe for these things at the moment.

And it's fascinating.

Like the idea of whether AI can be conscious has been, people have talked about this for a long time in philosophy groups and in neuroscience seminars and in tech as well.

But basically nobody cared.

It was sort of a very abstract idea.

abstract discussion that in the last few years has just catapulted itself into everyday reality and it really matters what people think about this you know it shapes regulation it shapes how we interact with AI systems it will shape the sorts of systems people build my perspective is

And I should say first that humility is necessary here because we don't know.

I don't think anybody knows the necessary or sufficient conditions for consciousness.

So we cannot be sure about whether AI is conscious or not.

But I'm very skeptical that AI as we know it now

either is or will be.

And by know it now, I mean like programs running on silicon systems, server farms, wherever they might be.

All the things being developed in biotech labs, that's another thing altogether.

We'll put that aside for now.

And I think there's like two kinds of reasons.

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