David Chalmers Quotes

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

Here, the broader issues are already familiar, and discussion has focused at a more sophisticated and detailed level. Within the philosophy of mind, the problem of consciousness is no big news.

I became really interested in the study of consciousness.

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.

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.

The great mystery of our consciousness is beyond our grasp.

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

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

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.

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

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

I love the human mind.

Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery.

The more accurately we search into the human mind, the stronger traces we everywhere find of his wisdom who made it.

I believe that consciousness is the way information feels when being processed.

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

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

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 is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable.

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.

What does it mean, exactly, for a given system to be a 'neural correlate of consciousness'?

A single human brain has about a hundred million nerve cells... and a computer program that throws light on the mind/brain problem will have to incorporate the deepest insights of biologists, nerve scientists, psychologists, physiologists, linguists, social scientists, and even philosophers.

There is something fundamentally fascinating about the mechanics, I guess, of the human body and where consciousness and mind exist, and what you can do with the mechanics of the body while keeping those intact, and where those two cross over.

A thought is an idea in transit.