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
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.
Sacred texts are universal and their truths are eternal. There is not a thing that we sing that doesn't have our personal conviction.
Those are what I call the easy problems, not because they're trivial, but because they fall within the standard methods of the cognitive sciences.
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.
Those things in a way didn't need to evolve. They were part of the fundamental furniture of the world all along.
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.
Because the idea of zombies seems to make sense, and seems to, in a certain sense, be possible, I think one can use that to argue against the thesis that everything is purely physical. Now many people, I think, agree that the idea of zombies are conceivable, including people who want to be physicalists.
I think the existence of zombies would contradict certain laws of nature in our world. It seems to be a law of nature, in our world, that when you get a brain of a certain character you get consciousness going along with it.
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.
Actually, I think most people accept the existence of qualia.
Although I'm Australian, I find myself much more in sympathy with the Austrian version!
Actually, I think my view is compatible with much of the work going on now in neuroscience and psychology, where people are studying the relationship of consciousness to neural and cognitive processes without really trying to reduce it to those processes.
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.
Sense data are much more controversial than qualia, because they are associated with a controversial theory of perception - that one perceives the world by perceiving one's sense-data, or something like that.