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

Like, yeah, in some sense, it might have been nice to sort of visit, I don't know, London in the 1960s or some other period of history, a bit more imaginative probably.

Wouldn't that be great?

Maybe ancient Greece and the birth of democracy, something like that.

But really, you know, these are flights of fantasy.

I don't feel any sense of fundamental existential angst about not having existed in the past.

So why should I feel a sense of existential angst about not existing at some time in the future?

You know, I won't be there.

There's no suffering possible.

So there's this kind of weird temporal asymmetry.

Of course, having been alive, then of course there are things that my being alive might affect.

And so that's one thing I might miss out on.

But I still think that's not really commensurate with the way we think about death versus birth.

And then there's the idea that it gets us back to where we started.

What is this?

What dies?

And the self is always changing.

I was thinking about this for some reason this morning, just thinking there was some music playing in the car actually on the way here.

It was Man in the Mirror by Michael Jackson.

I mention that because I think I remember just listening to that when it first came out in the 1980s, like on a cassette tape in my house where I was growing up in Oxfordshire.

And I was trying to remember what it felt like to be, I don't know, I might have been 11 years old or something, I don't really remember.

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