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

And it's very understandable that things that seem to support our ability to not die are things we will naturally want to do.

When I was writing the book, Being You, this was a chapter I found really hard to write.

Because...

And I've always found that when talking about consciousness to people, you can explain how the world that's out there isn't the world as it seems to be.

You can explain how the experience of self might not reveal an unchanging essence of a person.

And people can be more or less, you know, they can take it on board to some degree or other, but then free will.

is the point of maximum resistance.

I think of all those aspects of self that we want to cling on to as being somehow beyond the reach of science.

Free will is probably that thing.

It also just puts many different types of confusing things together.

We have like, is physics deterministic or stochastic?

Like, are things just unfolding in a predetermined way or is there some inherent randomness?

And then we have the feeling of free will and then we have all the moral and ethical issues when we hold people responsible for their actions.

My perspective that I still feel pretty comfortable with is that there's a kind of free will that we can't have

that we don't even need.

And this is the free will where there's sort of some uncaused cause, something that's maybe it's my soul, maybe it's my consciousness that swoops into the brain, pulls some strings, and I do something that I wouldn't have otherwise done.

Philosophers call this a libertarian kind of free will, that it's...

that it really does shift the course of the universe in one way or another.

I don't think we have that.

I don't think we need it.

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