David Chalmers Quotes

The great mystery of our consciousness is beyond our grasp.

The world is real. Consciousness is the illusion.

I became really interested in the study of consciousness.

What is the meaning of the togetherness of the perceiving mind, in that peculiar modification of perceiving which makes it perceive not a star but a tree, and the tree itself, is a problem for philosophy.

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.

The full cosmos consists of the physical stuff and consciousness. Take away consciousness and it's only dust; add consciousness and you get things, ideas, and time.

The leading edge of reality is mind, and mind is the primary substratum of being.

What we call a mind is nothing but a heap or collection of different perceptions, united together by certain relations and supposed, though falsely, to be endowed with a perfect simplicity and identity.

Time and space are just projections of your consciousness.

Life in the true sense is perceiving or thinking.

I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.

I secretly think reality exists so we can speculate about it.

Even when I was studying mathematics, physics, and computer science, it always seemed that the problem of consciousness was about the most interesting problem out there for science to come to grips with.

Because our entire universe is made up of consciousness, we never really experience the universe directly we just experience our consciousness of the universe, our perception of it, so right, our only universe is perception.

It is convenient to distinguish the two kinds of experience which have thus been described, the experienc-ing and the experienc-ed, by technical words.

Yet, the Universe is real enough to the conscious beings in it, which are as unreal as it is itself.

Life is but thought.

When I see a colour or hear a sound, I am aware of something, and not of nothing.

Consciousness, rather than being something that we have, is something we participate in.

Einstein said, if everything exists as a substance of qualities, and qualities exist only in mind, then all is mind.

The ideal of a pure phenomenology will be perfected only by answering this question; pure phenomenology is to be separated sharply from psychology at large and, specifically, from the descriptive psychology of the phenomena of consciousness.

Where conscious subjectivity is concerned, there is no distinction between the observation and the thing observed.

What's more valuable - intelligence or consciousness?

Consciousness poses the most baffling problems in the science of the mind. There is nothing that we know more intimately than conscious experience, but there is nothing that is harder to explain.

Is perception equivalent to existence?