David Chalmers b. 1966

David Chalmers is an Australian philosopher, professor at New York University and the Australian National University, and a leading voice in the contemporary philosophy of mind. His The Conscious Mind argued that physicalist accounts of consciousness face a hard problem that resists any reduction to functional or computational properties, and his later work has explored property dualism, panpsychism, and the so-called extended mind. Reality+ extended these concerns to virtual reality, defending the philosophical thesis that virtual worlds are genuinely real and that simulation hypotheses are genuinely live possibilities for our own world.

David John Chalmers was born at Sydney in April 1966, the son of a marketing professor and a teacher, and grew up in Adelaide. He took his bachelor's in pure mathematics at Adelaide in 1986, went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and completed his doctorate in philosophy and cognitive science at Indiana University in 1993 under Douglas Hofstadter. He was a postdoctoral fellow with Andy Clark at Washington University, taught at Santa Cruz and Arizona (where he founded the Center for Consciousness Studies and the celebrated Tucson 'Toward a Science of Consciousness' conferences), directed the ANU Centre for Consciousness from 2004, and from 2009 has been University Professor of Philosophy and Neural Science at New York University, with a continuing Australian appointment.

His books are The Conscious Mind (1996), Constructing the World (2010), The Character of Consciousness (2010), and Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy (2022); his 1998 paper 'The Extended Mind' with Andy Clark is the founding text of the field of extended cognition.

Chalmers articulated in 1995 the 'hard problem of consciousness' — the question of why there is anything it is like to be a physical system — defended a naturalistic property dualism (and more recently a panpsychist option) against reductive physicalism, and developed two-dimensional semantics as a tool for questions of meaning and necessity. His late work argues that virtual realities are genuine realities and so rebuilds the classical problems of metaphysics within a digital frame.