David Chalmers quotes

David Chalmers is an Australian-American philosopher, widely recognized for his work on the philosophy of mind and consciousness. His concept of the "hard problem of consciousness" has had a profound impact on contemporary debates in cognitive science and philosophy. He has written influential books and articles exploring the nature of subjective experience and the mind-body problem. Here are 28 of his quotes:

Sense data are much more controversial than qualia, because they are associated with a controversial theory of perception - that one perceives the world by perceiving one's sense-data, or something like that.

David Chalmers

Within psychology and neuroscience, some new and rigorous experimental paradigms for studying consciousness have helped it begin to overcome the stigma that has been attached to the topic for most of this century.

David Chalmers

My interests started about in science and in mathematics, I always thought I was going to be a mathematician.

David Chalmers

Things are still in early stages, but one can imagine that as we build up and systematize our theories of these associations, and try to boil them down to their core, the result might point us toward the sort of fundamental principles I advocate.

David Chalmers

Why doesn't all this information-processing go on "in the dark", free of any inner feel? ...We know that conscious experience does arise when these functions are performed, but the very fact that it arises is the central mystery. There is an explanatory gap [a term due to J. Levine, "Materialism and qualia: The explanatory gap" Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 64:354-61, 1983] between the functions and experience, and we need an explanatory bridge to cross it.

David Chalmers

Studying consciousness tells us more about how the world is fundamentally strange. I think we have a few revolutions to go yet before we get to the bottom of it.

David Chalmers

People have managed to avert their eyes and hope for the best.

David Chalmers

What does it mean, exactly, for a given system to be a "neural correlate of consciousness"?

David Chalmers

Actually, I think most people accept the existence of qualia.

David Chalmers

Because the idea of zombies seems to make sense, and seems to, in a certain sense, be possible, I think one can use that to argue against the thesis that everything is purely physical. Now many people, I think, agree that the idea of zombies are conceivable, including people who want to be physicalists.

David Chalmers

Anyway, there is a lot of really interesting work going on in the neuroscience and psychology of consciousness, and I would love to see philosophers become more closely involved with this.

David Chalmers

I had the idea that it would be wonderful to be a physicist or a mathematician maybe 500 years ago around the time of Newton when there were really fundamental things just lying around to be discovered.

David Chalmers

I think that consciousness has always been the most important topic in the philosophy of mind, and one of the most important topics in cognitive science as a whole, but it had been surprisingly neglected in recent years.

David Chalmers

Although I'm Australian, I find myself much more in sympathy with the Austrian version!

David Chalmers

It probably helps that my background is in the sciences and I can speak the scientists' language.

David Chalmers

I think the existence of zombies would contradict certain laws of nature in our world. It seems to be a law of nature, in our world, that when you get a brain of a certain character you get consciousness going along with it.

David Chalmers

I am an optimist about consciousness: I think that we will eventually have a theory of it, and in this book I look for one. But consciousness is not just business as usual; if we are to make progress, the first thing we must do is face up to the things that make the problem so difficult. Then we can move forward toward a theory, without blinkers and with a good idea of the task at hand.

David Chalmers

Another useful way to avoid confusion [used by e. g. Allen Newell 1990 Unified Theories of Cognition] is to reserve the term "consciousness" for the phenomena of experience, using the less loaded term "awareness" for the more straightforward phenomena... If such a convention were widely adopted, communication would be much easier; as things stand, those who talk about "consciousness" are frequently talking past each other.

David Chalmers

Consciousness can be startlingly intense. It is the most vivid of phenomena; nothing is more real to us. But it can be frustratingly diaphanous: in talking about conscious experience, it is notoriously difficult to pin down the subject matter.

David Chalmers

Consciousness is the biggest mystery. It may be the largest outstanding obstacle in our quest for a scientific understanding of the universe.

David Chalmers

In developing my account of consciousness, I have tried to obey a number of constraints. The first and most important is to take consciousness seriously. The easiest way to develop a "theory" of consciousness is to deny its exis­tence, or to redefine the phenomenon in need of explanation as something it is not. This usually leads to an elegant theory, but the problem does not go away.

David Chalmers

The easy problems of consciousness are those that seem directly susceptible to the standard methods of cognitive science, whereby a phenomenon is explained in terms of computational or neural mechanisms. The hard problems are those that seem to resist those methods. ...The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience.

David Chalmers