David Chalmers Quotes

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.

I became really interested in the study of consciousness.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

People into hard sciences, neurophysiology, often ignore a core philosophical question: 'What is the relationship between our unique, inner experience of conscious awareness and material substance?' The answer is: We don't know, and some people are so terrified to say, 'I don't know.'

Might we... be doing something with our brains that cannot be described in computational terms at all? How do our feelings of conscious awareness - of happiness, pain, love, aesthetic sensibility, will, understanding, etc. - fit into such a computational picture?

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.

Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery.

Self awareness is NOT just a bunch of amino acids bumping together.

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

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

There is an urgent need for a radical revision of our current concepts of the nature of consciousness and its relationship to matter and the brain.

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.

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.