David Chalmers is a leading philosopher in the area of
philosophy of mind. He is a professor of philosophy and the
director of the Center for Consciousness at the Australian
National University. Prior to his position there, he was the
director of the Center for Consciousness Studies at the
University of Arizona. Chalmers earned his PhD in philosophy and
cognitive science at Indiana University Bloomington under
Douglas Hofstadter. He is the author of the book The
Conscious Mind (1996), which was described by The
Sunday Times as "one of the best science books of the
year."
He is best known for his articulation 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
things like finding neural correlates of sensation, and the hard
problem, which could be phrased as the question "why does
awareness of sensory information exist at all?" A key to his
argument is the distinction between neurological impulses of
sensory information and the experience of them (known in
philosophy of mind as qualia). He argues for the irreducibility
of the experience of awareness to purely physical processes
(also known as physicalism). In his argument (as it appears in
his book The Conscious Mind) he makes use of the
philosophical zombie, which is a hypothetical person in all
respects identical to a real one, but missing qualia. After the
publication of this paper, about 25 papers were published in the
Journal of Consciousness Studies in response to the
hard problem. 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.
Chalmers has also compiled what could be the largest
bibliography on the philosophy of mind and related fields with
close to 5000 annotated entries topically organized. He serves
on the editorial board of the journals Consciousness and
Cognition, Psyche, and the Journal of
Consciousness Studies. He is an editor for the philosophy
of mind series at Oxford University Press, a philosophy of mind
editor for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and
philosophy editor for the Macmillan Encyclopedia of
Cognitive Science. He is on the board of directors of the
Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness.
selected books
Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings (Editor)
(Oxford University Press, 2002)
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Toward a Science of Consciousness III: The Third Tucson Discussions and Debates (Complex Adaptive Systems)with S. R. Hameroff and A. W. Kaszniak (Editors) (The MIT Press, 1999)
Buy at AmazonExplaining Consciousness: The Hard Problemby Jonathan Shear (Editor) (The MIT Press; Reprint edition, 1999)
Buy at AmazonThe Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (Philosophy of Mind Series)(Oxford University Press, 1997)
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selected articles
"The Puzzle of Conscious Experience" (Mysteries of the Mind - Special Issue): A Scientific American article
(Digital, 2002)
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selected video, audio, dvd
Consciousness
DVD (Alsbury Films, 2005)
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other related websites
http://consc.net/chalmers/
