David Chalmers Quotes

I became really interested in the study of consciousness.

If we are to know ourselves, philosophy needs to maintain an ongoing dialogue with the sciences of mind.

I worry that we don't have a very good definition of consciousness yet which makes it hard to tackle.

Without consciousness the mind-body problem would be much less interesting. With consciousness it seems hopeless.

Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery... a topic that often leaves even the most sophisticated thinkers tongue-tied and confused. And, as with all of the earlier mysteries, there are many who insist - and hope - that there will never be a demystification of consciousness.

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.

The great mystery of our consciousness is beyond our grasp.

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.

There's certainly nothing original about the observation that conscious experience poses a hard problem.

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.

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.

What's most interesting about trying to figure out AI is the questions that it forces you to ask about the nature of consciousness.

Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery.

The Behaviorist cannot find consciousness in the test-tube of his science.

Consciousness, there are about 20,000 papers on consciousness with no consensus. Nowhere in history have so many people devoted so much time to produce so little.

Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable.

Lofty questions about the mind are fascinating to ask, philosophers have been asking them for three millennia both in India where I am from and here in the West - but it is only in the brain that we can eventually hope to find the answers.

For me, consciousness is the most interesting unsolved problem of science, and, in fact, we may never know what it is about a particular arrangement of neurons that gives rise to consciousness. Our consciousness, like the air we breathe or like the passage of time, is central to our existence as intelligent beings.

Some years ago, I wrote a book called the Emperor's New Mind and that book was describing a point of view I had about consciousness and why it was not something that comes about from complicated calculations.

If we had the fundamental laws of nature tomorrow, we still wouldn't understand consciousness. We wouldn't even understand turbulence.

I'm the guy who reputedly denies that people experience colors or pains, and thinks that thermostats think — just ask my critics.

I am strongly convinced that not only too much consciousness but even any consciousness at all is a sickness.

Life in the true sense is perceiving or thinking.

Materialism ends up denying the existence of any irreducible subjective qualitative states of sentience or awareness.

Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else.