David Chalmers
David Chalmers
David John Chalmersis an Australian philosopher and cognitive scientist specializing in the areas of philosophy of mind and philosophy of language. He is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Consciousness at the Australian National University. He is also Professor of Philosophy at New York University in the NYU Department of Philosophy. In 2013, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth20 April 1966
CountryUnited States of America
David Chalmers quotes about
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.
It probably helps that my background is in the sciences and I can speak the scientists' language.
A philosopher might find the general work unsophisticated, and scientists are often bemused by esoteric talk of zombies, supervenience, and possible worlds.
How does the water of the brain turn into the wine of consciousness?
Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does.
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.
Now I have to say I'm a complete atheist, I have no religious views myself and no spiritual views, except very watered down humanistic spiritual views, and consciousness is just a fact of life, it's a natural fact of life.
Those things in a way didn't need to evolve. They were part of the fundamental furniture of the world all along.
You have a different kind of experience -- a different quality of experience -- when you see red, when you see green, when you hear middle C, when you taste chocolate. Whenever you're conscious, whenever you have a subjective experience, it feels like something.
To do two CDs worth of a very well known composer is a little different, but what isn't different is that one of the things we established when we started recording was that we were going to record things that were not as well known and that I think we've been fairly consistent about, even with famous composers.
Sacred texts are universal and their truths are eternal. There is not a thing that we sing that doesn't have our personal conviction.
Almost everyone agrees that there will be very strong correlations between what's in the brain and consciousness, ... The question is what kind of explanation that will give you. We want more than correlation, we want explanation -- how and why do brain process give rise to consciousness? That's the big mystery.
Any sacred text comes alive in a unique way when it is sung, and composers from Gregorian chant to the present day have known that.