Gide, humans. Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas and what more dangerous

idea is there than the idea that you may not actually be you the way that you think of yourself

as being. I mean, what even are you anyway in a big grand philosophical sense?

You're a homo sapien. You have a conscious experience

of your own life, but do you think of yourself as a spiritual being? There's that hoary old

cliche that I rather like that we're not human beings having a spiritual experience. We're

spiritual beings having a human experience, We're spiritual beings having a human

experience, which is all very crystal dangling and sort of Oprah, but nonetheless, touches on

something about what it feels like to be alive, which is that we don't just feel like meat.

But if we're not just meat, what are we? I'm not talking about a religious explanation. We're not little fairy angels

with wings inhabiting human bodies. So how is it that matter comes together and becomes you?

And are you actually the thing that you think you are, or is your sense of your own self,

kind of an illusion that consciousness

conjures up as increasingly neuroscientists seem to think it is what the hell does all that mean

well i wanted to know so we got anil seth to explain one of the world's leading neuroscientists

a neil's book is called Being You,

a new science of consciousness. I loved it. It was a Sunday Times top 10 bestseller in the

UK. It was a book of the year from The Economist and the New Statesman and Bloomberg Business.

It was a book of the week from The Guardian. He's given a TED talk on the main stage at the big, big TED, not TEDx,

and that has had more than 13 million views.

It's one of Ted's most popular science talks.

I don't really need to go through all of Anil's qualifications.

...