David Chalmers Quotes

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.

Many philosophers say it's impossible to explain our conscious experience in scientific, biological terms at all. But that's not exactly true. Scientists have explained why we have certain experiences and not others. It's just that they haven't explained the special features of consciousness that philosophers care about.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The great mystery of our consciousness is beyond our grasp.

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

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

I became really interested in the study of consciousness.

I don't doubt that the explanation for consciousness will arise from the mercilessly scientific account of psychology and neuroscience, but, still, isn't it neat that the universe is such that it gave rise to conscious beings like you and me?

No school of philosophy has ever solved this question of whether being determines consciousness or the other way around. It may be a false antithesis.

I came to realise that Darwinian evolution had no explanation of me as an experiencing self.

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.

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.

Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does.

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

You talk of our having an idea; we do not have an idea. The idea has us, and martyrs us, and scourges us, and drives us into the arena to fight and die for it, whether we want to or not.

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

I still find it hard to understand that anyone could argue that you can't have machines that exhibit consciousness.