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

Firstly, it's back to our biases.

Just as we have perceptual biases to see faces in clouds,

We have perceptual biases to project consciousness into AI systems.

Why?

Because of some deeper principles of how our minds work.

We humans, we tend to be both anthropocentric.

We see the world in our own terms.

And we know we're conscious and we like to think we're intelligent.

And we also take language as a signature of intelligence and as something that makes us distinct from other animals, something special, exceptionalist about humans.

So we tend to bundle these things together.

But of course, the fact that they go together in us doesn't mean they always have to go together in general.

many non-human animals can be conscious without being intelligent by human standards and i think with ai we've got just the other situation that we can have systems that are intelligent in some way but consciousness doesn't have to travel along with that we need independent reasons for thinking that that are more than just our own biases if we see something speak to us

And language models do this, right?

Language models.

I mean, amazing.

I don't want to underplay how amazing these systems are.

They've taken everybody by surprise.

They speak to us, and because they speak to us, we tend to project into them all the other qualities that go along with fluent language in us humans.

Having a mind, being able to understand, and yes, consciousness too.

So I think that's one reason we over-attribute properties.

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