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

So hallucination is a bit of a tricky word.

What I'm trying to emphasize here is that the world we experience, how we perceive what's really out there, that's an internal construction.

So it's not that our eyes and our ears and our senses provide some transparent window out onto the external objective real world.

There's a real world there, but our brain is constantly estimating it.

It's constantly building a perception of it

by using sensory signals.

So the control is just as important as the hallucination here.

Our experiences of the world come from within, like hallucinations, but they're controlled by sensory data that comes from the world so that our perceptions have a grip on reality.

Of course, they have to, otherwise we wouldn't survive very long.

It poses a massive challenge.

One of the biggest problems in studying consciousness scientifically is that consciousness itself is intrinsically private and subjective.

I can't put your conscious experience on the table and look at it.

In the same way that in science we tend to be able to study objectively pretty much whatever we're interested in, whether it's atoms or quarks or bacteria or the universe.

But consciousness only ever exists for a particular organism.

So I have to rely on what you say about it.

And when you say, for instance, that, oh, yeah, I see maybe a red car outside the window.

It's difficult to know whether you're having exactly the same experience of redness that I would or that somebody else would.

In fact, you probably aren't, I think.

And it's a bit of a speculation here.

We know that some people's experiences differ quite wildly from others.

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