33 Facts About David Chalmers

David John Chalmers is an Australian philosopher and cognitive scientist specializing in the areas of the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language.

David Chalmers is a professor of philosophy and neural science at New York University, as well as co-director of NYU's Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness.

Chalmers and David Bourget co-founded PhilPapers; a database of journal articles for philosophers.

David Chalmers was born in Sydney, New South Wales, and subsequently grew up in Adelaide, South Australia, where he attended Unley High School.

David Chalmers began coding and playing computer games at the age of 10 on a PDP-10 at a medical center.

David Chalmers performed exceptionally in mathematics, and secured a bronze medal in the International Mathematical Olympiad.

When David Chalmers was 13, he read Douglas Hofstadter's 1979 book Godel, Escher, Bach, which awakened an interest in philosophy.

David Chalmers received his undergraduate degree in pure mathematics from the University of Adelaide.

In 1993, David Chalmers received his PhD in philosophy and cognitive science from Indiana University Bloomington under Douglas Hofstadter, writing a doctoral thesis entitled Toward a Theory of Consciousness.

David Chalmers was a postdoctoral fellow in the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology program directed by Andy Clark at Washington University in St Louis from 1993 to 1995.

In 1994, David Chalmers presented a lecture at the inaugural Toward a Science of Consciousness conference.

David Chalmers is a founding member of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness and one of its past presidents.

David Chalmers was appointed Professor of Philosophy and then Director of the Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona.

In 2004, David Chalmers returned to Australia, encouraged by an ARC Federation Fellowship, becoming professor of philosophy and director of the Center for Consciousness at the Australian National University.

David Chalmers accepted a part-time professorship at the philosophy department of New York University in 2009, becoming a full-time professor in 2014.

David Chalmers is an editor on topics in the philosophy of mind for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

David Chalmers is best known for formulating what he calls the "hard problem of consciousness," in both his 1995 paper "Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness" and his 1996 book The Conscious Mind.

David Chalmers argues for an "explanatory gap" from the objective to the subjective, and criticizes physicalist explanations of mental experience, making him a dualist.

David Chalmers characterizes his view as "naturalistic dualism": naturalistic because he believes mental states supervene "naturally" on physical systems ; dualist because he believes mental states are ontologically distinct from and not reducible to physical systems.

David Chalmers has characterized his view by more traditional formulations such as property dualism.

In support of this, David Chalmers is famous for his commitment to the logical possibility of philosophical zombies.

David Chalmers argues that since such zombies are conceivable to us, they must therefore be logically possible.

David Chalmers maintains a formal agnosticism on the issue, even conceding that the viability of panpsychism places him at odds with the majority of his contemporaries.

But, David Chalmers argues, if qualia were to fade or disappear, the brain's holder could notice the difference, which would alter the information processing in the brain, leading to a contradiction.

David Chalmers concludes that such fading qualia are impossible in practice, and that after each neuron is replaced, the resulting functionally isomorphic robotic brain would be as conscious as the original biological one.

David Chalmers has published works on the "theory of reference" concerning how words secure their referents.

David Chalmers disagrees with Kripke, and direct reference theorists in general.

David Chalmers thinks that there are two kinds of intension of a natural kind term, a stance called two-dimensionalism.

In some more recent work, David Chalmers has concentrated on verbal disputes.

David Chalmers argues that a dispute is best characterized as "verbal" when it concerns some sentence S which contains a term T such that the parties to the dispute disagree over the meaning of T, and the dispute arises solely because of this disagreement.

David Chalmers addressed the issue of virtual and non-virtual worlds in his 2022 book Reality+.

David Chalmers sees virtual reality as potentially offering as meaningful a life as non-virtual reality, and argues that we could already be inhabitants of a simulation without knowing it.

David Chalmers proposes that computers are forming a form of "exo-cortex", where a part of human cognition is 'outsourced' to corporations such as Apple and Google.