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 · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Know Thyself · E205 - Anil Seth: Your Perception of Reality & Self Is a Hallucination · 28 Jul 2026
podcast
I don't think we can have that because you'd have to explain how this could happen.
What could change the laws of physics?
What could be that uncaused cause?
What we do have is the experience of free will.
We have the experience of making actions according to our beliefs and desires of...
We have the feeling that the action comes from within rather than being externally imposed.
And we have the feeling that I could have done something different.
I think these are all kinds of perceptions.
I think they're very useful because they allow the thing that is me to distinguish between actions that come relatively from within and that are aligned with goals from those actions that are externally imposed.
And that's a useful thing.
We're creatures with many degrees of freedom.
We can do many different things, but you can't replay the tape and have a different outcome.
So the kind of free will that I think we have is what philosophers call a compatibilist free will, which is we have the capacity to behave according to our beliefs and desires.
And I think that's all the free will we need.
So it sort of exists in the same way that color exists.
It's useful, but it's not what you think it is.
The feeling that our actions come from nowhere doesn't mean they came from nowhere.
The feeling that consciousness caused our actions doesn't mean that consciousness caused the action.
It's a useful perception of the fact that certain actions come more from within than from without.
And that's a very useful thing for creatures like us to have.
Showing 1061–1080 of 1,118 · page 54 of 56
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