David Chalmers

David John Chalmers is an Australian philosopher and cognitive scientist specializing in the areas of philosophy of mind and philosophy of language.

He is a professor of philosophy and neural science at New York University, as well as co-director of NYU's Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness (along with Ned Block).

When Chalmers was 13 he read Douglas Hofstadter's 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach, which awakened an interest in philosophy.

Chalmers received his undergraduate degree in pure mathematics from the University of Adelaide.

After graduating Chalmers spent six months reading philosophy books while hitchhiking across Europe, before continuing his studies at the University of Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar but eventually withdrew from the course.

In 1993, Chalmers received his PhD in philosophy and cognitive science from Indiana University Bloomington under Douglas Hofstadter, writing a doctoral thesis entitled Toward a Theory of Consciousness.

He was a postdoctoral fellow in the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology program directed by Andy Clark at Washington University in St. Louis from 1993 to 1995.

In 1994, Chalmers presented a lecture at the inaugural Toward a Science of Consciousness conference.

According to an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, this "lecture established Chalmers as a thinker to be reckoned with and goosed a nascent field into greater prominence."

He went on to coorganize the conference (now renamed "The Science of Consciousness") for some years with Stuart Hameroff, but stepped away when it became too divergent from mainstream science.

Chalmers is also a founding member of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness, as well as one of its past presidents.

Having established his reputation, Chalmers received his first professorship the following year, at UC Santa Cruz, from August 1995 to December 1998.

Chalmers is best known for formulating what he calls the "hard problem of consciousness," in both his 1995 paper "Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness" and his 1996 book The Conscious Mind.

He makes a distinction between "easy" problems of consciousness, such as explaining object discrimination or verbal reports, and the single hard problem, which could be stated "why does the feeling which accompanies awareness of sensory information exist at all?"

The essential difference between the (cognitive) easy problems and the (phenomenal) hard problem is that the former are at least theoretically answerable via the dominant strategy in the philosophy of mind: physicalism.

Chalmers argues for an "explanatory gap" from the objective to the subjective, and criticizes physicalist explanations of mental experience, making him a dualist.

Chalmers characterizes his view as "naturalistic dualism": naturalistic because he believes mental states supervene "naturally" on physical systems (such as brains); dualist because he believes mental states are ontologically distinct from and not reducible to physical systems.

He has also characterized his view by more traditional formulations such as property dualism.

In support of this, Chalmers is famous for his commitment to the logical (though, not natural) possibility of philosophical zombies.

These zombies are complete physical duplicates of human beings, lacking only qualitative experience.

Chalmers argues that since such zombies are conceivable to us, they must therefore be logically possible.

Since they are logically possible, then qualia and sentience are not fully explained by physical properties alone; the facts about them are further facts.

Instead, Chalmers argues that consciousness is a fundamental property ontologically autonomous of any known (or even possible) physical properties, and that there may be lawlike rules which he terms "psychophysical laws" that determine which physical systems are associated with which types of qualia.

He further speculates that all information-bearing systems may be conscious, leading him to entertain the possibility of conscious thermostats and a qualified panpsychism he calls panprotopsychism.

In 1996, while teaching there, he published the widely cited book The Conscious Mind.

Chalmers was subsequently appointed Professor of Philosophy (1999–2004) and, subsequently, Director of the Center for Consciousness Studies (2002–2004) at the University of Arizona, sponsor of the conference that had first brought him to prominence.

In 2004, Chalmers returned to Australia, encouraged by an ARC Federation Fellowship, becoming professor of philosophy and director of the Center for Consciousness at the Australian National University.

In 2006, he was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

Chalmers accepted a part-time professorship at the philosophy department of New York University in 2009, and then a full-time professorship there in 2014.

In 2013, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Chalmers is best known for formulating the hard problem of consciousness, and for popularizing the philosophical zombie thought experiment.

He and David Bourget cofounded PhilPapers, a database of journal articles for philosophers.

David Chalmers was born in Sydney, New South Wales, and subsequently grew up in Adelaide, South Australia, where he attended Unley High School.

As a child, he experienced synesthesia.

He began coding and playing computer games at age 10 on a PDP-10 at a medical center.

He also performed exceptionally in mathematics, and secured a bronze medal in the International Mathematical Olympiad.

In 2013, Chalmers was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

He is an editor on topics in the philosophy of mind for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

In May 2018, it was announced that he would serve on the jury for the Berggruen Prize.

In 2023, Chalmers won a bet—made in 1998, for a case of wine—with neuroscientist Christof Koch that the neural underpinnings for consciousness would not be resolved by the year 2023, while Koch had bet that they would.