Reality is a controlled hallucination
Seeing | Neuroscience | 2026-02-27

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’
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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.
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