Reality is a controlled hallucination
Seeing | Neuroscience | 2026-02-27
Prof. Anil Seth, PhD
Hans Busstra, MA
Anil Seth is a world-leading neuroscientist who has made important contributions to our understanding of reality as a controlled hallucination. According to the concept of active inference, our perception of reality is not a direct reflection of the world but, instead, the most accurate guess that our brain can muster, which it continually checks and updates with incoming sensory information. But strange things happen when neuroscientists play around with sensory input in unexpected ways. Anil Seth and his team at Sussex University created the Dream Machine, a stroboscopic device that syncs flickering light to music to induce vivid, often complex, hallucinatory visuals in the viewer. In group sessions, exactly the same white light and music gives rise to a tremendous diversity in perception.
Links for more information and reading:
Anil’s personal website: https://www.anilseth.com/
The Dream Machine research project: https://dreamachine.world/
The Perception Census research: https://perceptioncensus.dreamachine.world/
Anil Seth (2021), Being You – A New Science of Consciousness
https://www.amazon.com/Being-You-New-Science-Consciousness/dp/1524742872/
Gomez-Marin, A., & Seth, A. K. (2025). A science of consciousness beyond pseudo-science and pseudo-consciousness. Nature Neuroscience, 28(4), 703–706. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-025-01913-6
Seth, A. K. (2025). Conscious artificial intelligence and biological naturalism. Behavioral and Brain Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X25000032
Chapter marks:
0:00 Introduction
2:33 Transition
3:55 Are we seeing the same room?
5:30 A different starting point
7:12 The dream machine research
12:50 We close our eyes in order to see
15:30 Psychedelics and Van Gogh
16:54 Reality as a controlled hallucination
20:21 Predictive inference
21:07 What is active inference?
25:13 What is the free energy principle?
31:29 The value of the free energy principle
38:14 Hans shares his metaphysical journey
40:34 Are you still a materialist?
46:13 An epistemic commitment to materialism
47:27 The limits of neuroscience
50:07 The hard problem of consciousness
53:56 IIT discussed
56:17 Anil on IIT
59:01 Strong IIT vs weak IIT
1:06:22 IIT, cerebrum and cerebellum
1:08:39 Inactive vs inactivated neurons
1:12:45 Physicalism vs idealism
1:21:17 Metaphysics and the meaning of life
1:24:52 On his mother’s deathbed
1:28:09 Honoring form
1:29:35 Being critical of naive materialism
1:31:50 What questions does a metaphysics permit?
1:37:42 Defending IIT with Alex Gomez
1:40:34 If the brain doesn’t produce consciousness
1:42:43 The philosophical zombie argument
1:44:30 Consciousness is not substrate independent
1:46:40 Can AI be conscious?
1:50:05 Is AlphaFold conscious?
1:50:58 Is consciousness computation?
1:54:19 Consciousness as being ‘entimed’
Ethics statement: Essentia Foundation accepts sponsorships to help us create more and better content but is editorially completely independent. We only accept sponsorships that are compatible with our mission and scientific standards.
Essentia Foundation communicates, in an accessible but rigorous manner, the latest results in science and philosophy that point to the mental nature of reality. We are committed to strict, academic-level curation of the material we publish.
Recently published
|
Steven Wolfram claims that the “ruliad,” the space of all possible computational states in nature, is reality—a structure so complete it contains every possible way of processing information. Our universe emerges from how observers with particular computational bounds sample this infinite structure. In this profound essay, Proulx argues that the ruliad is best understood under an idealist framework wherein each observer’s perspective isn’t merely a partial representation of underlying states, but a rendering of reality itself; just as a frame in a computer game is a rendering generated on-the-fly, not a partial representation of underlying states.
|
In this conversation, cognitive scientist John Vervaeke joins Hans Busstra to examine the historical roots of the modern meaning crisis through the lens of psychotechnologies: culturally developed mental tools and practices that transform how human beings think, perceive and make sense of reality. Vervaeke describes how psychotechnologies such as shamanism, Socratic dialogue and the Christian notion of agape profoundly shaped Western thought.
From the archives
|
Swami Sarvapriyananda is one of the world’s leading teachers of Advaita Vedanta, the non-dual philosophical tradition rooted in Hinduism, which places rational inquiry and self-investigation at its core. As head of the Vedanta Society of New York, he is renowned for his clear and rigorous presentations of Advaita Vedanta, and for showing how its insights resonate with modern developments in analytic philosophy, neuroscience, and physics. In this conversation with Hans Busstra, Swami Sarvapriyananda explores the metaphysics of Advaita Vedanta, the meaning of the great saying “That Thou Art” (Tat Tvam Asi), how Advaita differs from other schools of Hinduism and Buddhism, and why it offers a unique perspective on the problem of suffering.
|
A clinical neuropsychologist tells us how her own ego-dissolution experience led her to a new perspective on science, the ‘soul,’ and life itself. Psychology and spirituality are not opposing paths, she realized, but complementary languages describing the same reality: consciousness.
|
River Kanies argues that the paradoxical nature of psychological archetypes isn’t contingent, but reflect the very structure of experience: one where irresolvable tension is the impetus to action and the substance of meaning. The belief that an archetypal paradox can be resolved—that the tension between order and chaos, control and freedom, self and other can be finally settled in favor of one pole—is a failure to understand the nature of consciousness, he argues. It mistakes a structural feature for a solvable problem.
Reading
Essays
|
The question of reality has proceeded uninterrupted with a search “out there,” outside ourselves, but must progress to a search inward towards awareness, argues Adedire. All honest and rigorous inquiries into the nature of reality will ultimately come to the realization that fundamental Nature is conjoined with the phenomenon of consciousness, he concludes in this short and powerful essay. Yet, here, at the inflection point of a new age of contemplation, we find ourselves burdened by the walking-dead ontology of physicalism.
|
Today we are releasing something that has been cooking in the background for a while: our AI-powered Essentia App!
|
Swami Sarvapriyananda is one of the world’s leading teachers of Advaita Vedanta, the non-dual philosophical tradition rooted in Hinduism, which places rational inquiry and self-investigation at its core. As head of the Vedanta Society of New York, he is renowned for his clear and rigorous presentations of Advaita Vedanta, and for showing how its insights resonate with modern developments in analytic philosophy, neuroscience, and physics. In this conversation with Hans Busstra, Swami Sarvapriyananda explores the metaphysics of Advaita Vedanta, the meaning of the great saying “That Thou Art” (Tat Tvam Asi), how Advaita differs from other schools of Hinduism and Buddhism, and why it offers a unique perspective on the problem of suffering.
|
A clinical neuropsychologist tells us how her own ego-dissolution experience led her to a new perspective on science, the ‘soul,’ and life itself. Psychology and spirituality are not opposing paths, she realized, but complementary languages describing the same reality: consciousness.
|
River Kanies argues that the paradoxical nature of psychological archetypes isn’t contingent, but reflect the very structure of experience: one where irresolvable tension is the impetus to action and the substance of meaning. The belief that an archetypal paradox can be resolved—that the tension between order and chaos, control and freedom, self and other can be finally settled in favor of one pole—is a failure to understand the nature of consciousness, he argues. It mistakes a structural feature for a solvable problem.
Seeing
Videos
|
David Glowacki is a cross-disciplinary researcher and artist who founded the ‘Intangible Realities Laboratory’ (IRL) in Spain. A 2020 study showed that the Virtual Reality (VR) phenomenology Glowacki constructed induced peak mystical-type experiences similar to near-death and psychedelic experiences. In this conversation, Glowacki explains how his VR work led him to develop fascinating new visual metaphors for non-duality.
|
This essay proposes association as a fundamental principle uniting physics, biology, and mind. Rather than treating causation as either upward (from parts to wholes) or downward (from wholes to parts), Jarosek suggests that coherence emerges through the relational act of association itself. From Carlo Rovelli’s relational quantum mechanics, where particles acquire properties only in interaction, to Michael Levin’s discoveries of cellular intelligence, to Charles Sanders Peirce’s triadic semiotics, evidence converges on association as irreducible. It can be seen as the connective tissue of reality: the principle by which potential becomes form, and form becomes meaning.
|
David Lloyd discusses the intriguing correspondences and isomorphisms between physical laws—such as electromagnetism and gravity—and the phenomenal flow of mentation. He sees in them more than mere poetic analogy, but a hint pointing to the mental nature and structure of reality.
Let us build the future of our culture together
Essentia Foundation is a registered non-profit committed to making its content as accessible as possible. Therefore, we depend on non-financial contributions from people like you to continue to do our work.
