David Chalmers Quotes
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. The quotes below are attributed to David Chalmers, organized by topic.
David Chalmers on Freedom
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“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.”
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David Chalmers on Justice
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“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.”
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David Chalmers on Mind
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Attributed to David Chalmers:
“There is something it is like to be a conscious organism, and that fact is the hard problem of consciousness.”
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Attributed to David Chalmers:
“We may need to revise our basic picture of reality to make room for consciousness.”
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Attributed to David Chalmers:
“The easy problems of consciousness are explanations of cognitive functions; the hard problem is the explanation of experience itself.”
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Attributed to David Chalmers:
“Property dualism is the thesis that the world contains physical properties and irreducible phenomenal properties.”
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“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.”
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“Consciousness is the biggest mystery. It may be the largest outstanding obstacle in our quest for a scientific understanding of the universe.”
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“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.”
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“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.”
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David Chalmers on Nature
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“Conscious experience is at once the most familiar thing in the world and the most mysterious.”
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David Chalmers on Truth
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Attributed to David Chalmers:
“Virtual realities are genuine realities.”