David Chalmers Quotations

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.

My interests started about in science and in mathematics; I always thought I was going to be a mathematician.

Within psychology and neuroscience, some new and rigorous experimental paradigms for studying consciousness have helped it begin to overcome the stigma that has been attached to the topic for most of this century.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There's certainly nothing original about the observation that conscious experience poses a hard problem.

Things are still in early stages, but one can imagine that as we build up and systematize our theories of these associations, and try to boil them down to their core, the result might point us toward the sort of fundamental principles I advocate.

What does it mean, exactly, for a given system to be a "neural correlate of consciousness"?

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 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.

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.

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!

It probably helps that my background is in the sciences and I can speak the scientists' language.

People have managed to avert their eyes and hope for the best.

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.

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.

I had the idea that it would be wonderful to be a physicist or a mathematician maybe 500 years ago around the time of Newton when there were really fundamental things just lying around to be discovered.

I never expected this to catch on in the way it did! Of course similar observations have been made by any number of people, and the distinction is obvious to anyone who thinks about the subject a little.

I think it's a stupendous piece. I'm frankly a little surprised that it's not done more often because the music is so wonderful. The writing, especially for wind instruments, is extraordinary. He was just very expressive of the text and very inventive. So there's a wonderful sort of genius use of different styles and an ingenious use of the orchestra. I'm excited that we're doing it because I think people need to hear this piece.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Sacred texts are universal and their truths are eternal. There is not a thing that we sing that doesn't have our personal conviction.

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.

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.

They are dedicating a large part of their lives to this choir. Any gift from God is meant to be shared.

I argue that neuroscience alone isn't enough to explain consciousness, but I think it will be a major part of an eventual theory.