David Chalmers
Philosopher and Cognitive Scientist
David Chalmers is a philosopher and cognitive scientist who specializes in the areas of philosophy of mind and philosophy of language. He is a professor at New York University, and a co-director of NYU's Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness. Chalmers is best know for formulating "The Hard Problem of Consciousness". The Hard Problem dials in the focus on our current debates about consciousness and identifies the unique qualities of consciousness -- the "Qualia" -- that is often sidestepped in more dogmatic definitions. How can we feel conscious and experience the subjective, introspective aspects of consciousness.
From a ConscioCentric standpoint, we feel Chalmer's focus is on point. ConscioCentrism also puts a focus on the amazing capabilities of consciousness to move through time and space -- to envision chains of events far into the future, to shift focus to a flow state focus of the moment of now and milliseconds ahead, to jog back in time to actual or possible memories, or to consider alternate paths taken and alternate possibilities. All of this conscious motion through time and space is key to the conscious experience. Consciousness freely can travel the 3-Dimensions of Space and 4th Dimension of Time, and even can navigate through the 5th Dimension, the "Many Worlds" of the Relative State Formulation. These aspects of the Qualia of Consciousness, and the dimensional navigation of consciousness constitute a Very Hard Problem for those who subscribe to more rigid, materialist, dogmatic views of consciousness.
Quotes by David Chalmers
"We won't have a theory of everything without a theory of consciousness." - David Chalmers"The easy problems of consciousness are those that seem directly susceptible to the standard methods of cognitive science, whereby a phenomenon is explained in terms of computational or neural mechanisms. The hard problems are those that seem to resist those methods. ...The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. ...When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought." - David Chalmers"Another useful way to avoid confusion [used by e.g. Allen Newell 1990 Unified Theories of Cognition] is to reserve the term "consciousness" for the phenomena of experience, using the less loaded term "awareness" for the more straightforward phenomena... If such a convention were widely adopted, communication would be much easier; as things stand, those who talk about "consciousness" are frequently talking past each other." - David Chalmers"Materialism is a beautiful and compelling view of the world, but to account for consciousness, we have to go beyond the resources it provides." - David Chalmers"Why should there be conscious experience at all? It is central to a subjective viewpoint, but from an objective viewpoint it is utterly unexpected. Taking the objective view, we can tell a story about how fields, waves, and particles in the spatiotemporal manifold interact in subtle ways, leading to the development of complex systems such as brains. In principle, there is no deep philosophical mystery in the fact that these systems can process information in complex ways, react to stimuli with sophisticated behavior, and even exhibit such complex capacities as learning, memory, and language. All this is impressive, but it is not metaphysically baffling. In contrast, the existence of conscious experience seems to be a new feature from this viewpoint. It is not something that one would have predicted from the other features alone. That is, consciousness is surprising. " - David Chalmers"The subject matter is perhaps best characterized as “the subjective quality of experience.” When we perceive, think, and act, there is a whir of causation and information processing, but this processing does not usually go on in the dark. There is also an internal aspect; there is something it feels like to be a cognitive agent. This internal aspect is conscious experience. Conscious experiences range from vivid color sensations to experiences of the faintest background aromas; from hard-edged pains to the elusive experience of thoughts on the tip of one’s tongue; from mundane sounds and smells to the encompassing grandeur of musical experience; from the triviality of a nagging itch to the weight of a deep existential angst; from the specificity of the taste of peppermint to the generality of one’s experience of selfhood. All these have a distinct experienced quality. All are prominent parts of the inner life of the mind. We can say that a being is conscious if there is something it is like to be that being, to use a phrase made famous by Thomas Nagel." - David Chalmers
Persons shown on this website are not affiliated with or materially involved with the ConscioCentric Paradigm. Their writings, teachings, publications or quotes have been influencial to the ideas of ConscioCentrism.