David Chalmers Quotes on Nature
David Chalmers’s The Conscious Mind (1996), Constructing the World (2012), and the more recent Reality+ (2022) give contemporary analytic philosophy of mind one of its most influential accounts of the place of consciousness in nature. The central thesis is that consciousness — the qualitative felt character of experience — poses a hard problem for the standard naturalistic framework: the functional and physical analyses that successfully explain other features of the natural world systematically fail to explain why their physical processes are accompanied by subjective experience at all, and the resulting explanatory gap motivates serious consideration of property dualist and panpsychist alternatives that ascribe phenomenal properties at the fundamental level of physical nature. The framework, developed alongside Chalmers’s parallel work in the philosophy of language and the metaphysics of virtual reality, shaped the contemporary analytic engagement with consciousness and the broader debate over physicalism.
Quotes
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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:
“Property dualism is the thesis that the world contains physical properties and irreducible phenomenal properties.”
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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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“Conscious experience is at once the most familiar thing in the world and the most mysterious.”
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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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