Everything about David Chalmers totally explained
David John Chalmers (born
April 20,
1966) is a
philosopher in the area of
philosophy of mind. He is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Consciousness at the
Australian National University.
Background
Chalmers grew up in Australia. Before he moved to the
Australian National University in 2004, he was Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Consciousness Studies at the
University of Arizona and prior to Arizona he taught at
UC Santa Cruz. He was educated at the
University of Adelaide (earning an undergraduate degree in mathematics and computer science) and then briefly at
Lincoln College in the
University of Oxford as a
Rhodes Scholar before studying for his
PhD at
Indiana University Bloomington under
Douglas Hofstadter. He was a post-doctoral fellow in the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology program (directed by
Andy Clark) at
Washington University in St. Louis (1993-1995).
He is the author of the book
The Conscious Mind (1996), which discusses
consciousness, arguing that
reductive explanations describing consciousness in terms of physical processes don't hold. The book was described by
The Sunday Times as "one of the best science books of the year".
Work
He is best known for his support for the notion of the
hard problem of consciousness in both his book and in the paper "Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness" (originally published in
The Journal of Consciousness Studies, 1995). He makes the distinction between easy problems of consciousness (which are, amongst others, things like finding neural correlates of sensation) and the hard problem, which could be stated "why does awareness of sensory information exist at all?" A main focus of his study is the distinction between brain biology and behavior as distinct from mental experience taken as independent of behavior (known as
qualia). He argues that there's an explanatory gap between these two systems, and criticizes
physical explanations of mental experience, making him a
dualist in an era that some have seen as being dominated by
monist views.
In his argument (as it appears in his book
The Conscious Mind) he creates a hypothetical
philosophical zombie, which is the same as a normal person, except lacking
qualia or
sentience. He argues that since this zombie is logically possible, then qualia and sentience are not fully explained by physical properties alone.
Instead, Chalmers argues that consciousness arises from any information-bearing system (in the sense of
information theory), leading him to adopt a form of
panpsychism, believing that even thermostats are somewhat conscious. Chalmers has elsewhere said ("Consciousness and the Philosophers: an Exchange") that he's agnostic on the issue of panpsychism, but that it isn't nearly as indefensible an idea as some think.
After the publication of this paper, more than twenty papers in response were published in the
Journal of Consciousness Studies. These papers (by
Daniel Dennett,
Colin McGinn,
Francisco Varela,
Francis Crick, and
Roger Penrose among others) were collected and published in the book
Explaining Consciousness: The Hard Problem.
John Searle fiercely critiqued Chalmers's views in
The New York Review of Books.
Chalmers, with
Andy Clark, has written
The Extended Mind, a popular article about the borders of the mind
(External Link
).
Miscellaneous
On his web site, David Chalmers has compiled what could be the largest bibliography on the
philosophy of mind and related fields with close to 18000 annotated entries topically organized.
Chalmers appears in
The Matrix video documentary "The Roots of the Matrix" and presents a novel take on a large part of the traditionally skeptical "
brain in a vat" hypothesis. He maintains that this hypothesis is not, contrary to common philosophical opinion, a
skeptical hypothesis.
He serves on the editorial board of the journals
Philo,
Consciousness and Cognition, the
Journal of Consciousness Studies, and
Psyche.
Further Information
Get more info on 'David Chalmers'.
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