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.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

Know Thyself · E205 - Anil Seth: Your Perception of Reality & Self Is a Hallucination · 28 Jul 2026 podcast

So the control is just as important as the hallucination.

Control is what keeps our brain's internal perceptual machinery calibrated to the world, grounded in reality.

So in my view, reality exists.

There really is stuff out there.

What exactly that stuff is, is still, I think, not very well understood or known.

You ask a physicist, ask a philosopher, what really is matter?

What's the substance of it?

What's the substrate of the universe?

We never perceive reality directly.

it's always indirect and this again goes right back to Kant and there might be an unknowable in some sense the way things really are with the Kabbalah and what we experience is always a sort of a take on it a perspective on it um

I think the real tricky thing about the way perception works is the sense that what we do see feels real.

It just feels to me in my everyday experience that the colors, the shapes, the movement, time passing, all of these things seem to be independent of my mind and just there.

And that's, I think, the hardest thing to wrap, at least for me, my head around is that that's only partly true.

that the world as it appears to me is always a construction, but there still is a world out there.

When I first started talking about perception using this language of controlled hallucination, people would sometimes say, well, go and walk across a freeway and you'll soon realize that the trucks are not hallucinated, they're real.

And it's, yes, of course they're real.

But that's why the control is just as important, so that we experience the world not as it is, but as it's useful for us to do.

Now, there are other forms of experience which feel more internal, like I can experience emotions, I can experience thoughts, and they seem to arise maybe in my body, maybe in my mind, and they don't seem to be parts of the external world.

but I think they're still constructed in the same way.

You mentioned Helmholtz.

Showing 81–100 of 1,118 · page 5 of 56