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

But conscious seeming AIs will come for much more.

They won't stop at attention.

They'll come for our relationships and they'll come for our minds.

I think there's a more subtle issue with conscious seeming AI here as well, which is that the extent to which we think of AIs as basically alternative people

the more likely, and this is speculation at this point, but I think we'd be more likely to form relationships of dependence with them rather than complementarity.

One of my mentors, the philosopher Daniel Dennett, who we lost a couple of years ago, sadly, he always said we should remember that AI systems are tools and not colleagues, not alternative people.

And if we can do that, then we can, at least we stand a chance of being able to utilize these systems to amplify our own innate cognitive capacities rather than replace them, to add rather than subtract.

And even more fundamentally, I think, if we think that an AI is conscious or has all these other properties that human minds and brains have, then we become tempted to think of ourselves in those terms too.

We can just think, what is a human being?

Well, it's just a computer.

What else could it be?

It's just a computer.

And I think this is hugely reductive and diminishing, not only for human beings, but for living creatures in general.

It takes us further away from nature.

more apart from nature and less a part of nature.

This is a bit motivated reasoning.

I like to feel that we're part of nature, but I also think that we are.

And we'll understand ourselves better.

We'll know ourselves better by appreciating the continuity with the rest of nature

And by resisting this historical fascination by which we confuse ourselves with our technologies, we see ourselves in our algorithms, but then we also see our algorithms in ourselves.

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