Quote
"Conscious experience is at once the most familiar thing in the world and the most mysterious."
D
David ChalmersDavid Chalmers
David Chalmers
David John Chalmers is an Australian philosopher and cognitive scientist, specializing in philosophy of mind and philosophy of language. He is a professor of philosophy and neural science at New York University (NYU), as well as co-director of NYU's Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness. In 2006, he was elected a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. In 2013, he was elected as a f
"Conscious experience is at once the most familiar thing in the world and the most mysterious."
"I am an optimist about consciousness: I think that we will eventually have a theory of it, and in this book I look for one. But consciousness is not just business as usual; if we are to make progress, the first thing we must do is face up to the things that make the problem so difficult. Then we can move forward toward a theory, without blinkers and with a good idea of the task at hand."
"Consciousness can be startlingly intense. It is the most vivid of phenomena; nothing is more real to us. But it can be frustratingly diaphanous: in talking about conscious experience, it is notoriously difficult to pin down the subject matter."
"Consciousness is the biggest mystery. It may be the largest outstanding obstacle in our quest for a scientific understanding of the universe."
"In developing my account of consciousness, I have tried to obey a number of constraints. The first and most important is to take consciousness seriously. The easiest way to develop a "theory" of consciousness is to deny its existence, or to redefine the phenomenon in need of explanation as something it is not. This usually leads to an elegant theory, but the problem does not go away."