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

There are other AI systems, like systems that fold, predict how proteins fold, alpha fold.

Brilliant.

No one really worries about whether alpha fold is conscious, but it's basically the same thing.

It just doesn't speak to us.

So our biases are definitely playing some role.

But then there's a more fundamental thing, which is, is consciousness the kind of thing that a computer could even have?

Is it a matter of computation?

And that comes down to what kind of a thing do we think a brain is?

Is a brain just a computer that happens to be made of meat rather than metal?

If it is, then we could say, okay, we'll figure out whatever the algorithms that are running in our meat-based supercomputers are, and we'll just implement versions of those algorithms in silicon.

If the brain is nothing but a computer, then that should be fine because that's the whole point about computers.

The algorithm is enough.

You don't need to worry about what's implementing it.

The algorithm is sufficient.

That's the fundamental assumption that computation, that consciousness is a matter of computation, that computation is sufficient for consciousness.

And I just think this is a very, very shaky assumption.

You look at a real brain and

And it's so different from the physical computers that we have in ways that really matter.

In a brain, there's no sharp separation between mindware and wetware as there is between software and hardware and a computer.

In a real brain, continuous time matters.

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