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

And that's

the perceptual contents of an emotion in exactly the same way that redness and location and shape are the perceptual contents of a visual experience.

It's true you've got to give up.

I think most neuroscience of consciousness, not just my own take on it, but most work,

would say that we've got to give up this idea that there's an immaterial conscious self that is completely separate from the body, completely separate from the brain in a way, and that has some agency, some causal power over the physical world that can make things happen that otherwise wouldn't happen.

Now, consciousness is not like that.

For me anyway, it's a natural property as much as anything else.

It's a product.

It goes along with brain activity.

And free will, in a sense, is real too.

I mean, we are complicated creatures.

Our brains are the most complex objects in the known universe.

we're capable of exhibiting voluntary action.

If I choose to make a cup of tea or to go for a walk down by the sea, that's a real voluntary action on my part.

How do you know that?

Because it's not being constrained or imposed on me by anything else.

My brain is deciding to do that.

Now I'm going to stop you there because that kind of free will is the free will we have to give up.

If you run the same tape and everything is exactly the same, the same thing will happen.

I'll make a coffee again and not a tea.

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