Anil Seth

speaker

170 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 4 Aug

Anil Seth’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

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

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Futureproof with Jonathan McCrea · Gold: How does the brain conjure consciousness? · 4 Aug 2026 podcast

That's a really good place to start.

Consciousness is, well, we're all very familiar with what it is at one level.

Consciousness is what you lose when you fall into a dreamless sleep or have general anesthesia.

And it's what you regain when you come around again.

A scientific, fully consensus definition of consciousness.

Well, that's surprisingly hard to find.

My favorite definition comes from the philosopher Thomas Nagel, who said that for a conscious organism, there is something it is like to be that organism.

There's something it's like to be me.

There's something it's like to be you.

There's probably something it's like to be a bat or an elephant, but there's probably nothing it's like to be a table, a chair or an iPhone.

There's just nothing going on for those things.

So consciousness very broadly is any kind of subjective experience whatsoever.

Consciousness, as well as being positively about subjective experience, you can also say what it isn't.

So it's not just the same thing as sensitivity to an environment.

Plants, they're incredibly interesting and rich.

And I've just been fascinated by recent work showing how trees communicate in forests and exchange nutrients in the wood wide web and all this brilliant stuff.

But just interacting with an environment is not enough for consciousness.

It doesn't mean there's something going on.

It seems to me at least, and I think most people would agree, that a minimum condition for consciousness is having a nervous system, having neurons, having some kind of brain in the right state.

I don't mean that it's all made up, that everything is just in your head.

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