David Chalmers

Notes

David Chalmers (born 1966), Australian philosopher of mind at NYU, who named the hard problem of consciousness in 1995 and defended it in The Conscious Mind (1996). A property dualist, or in his own term a "naturalistic dualist": he accepts that the physical facts are all there is to explain the brain's functioning, and denies that they explain why there is experience. Also the originator of the zombie argument in its modern form, and of the fading qualia argument, which concludes that consciousness is organisationally invariant and so, on the question of substrate, puts him on my side. I disagree with him on the hard problem and regard him as the best person to disagree with on this question.

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Chalmers

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Consciousness

On the "hard problem". David Chalmers' formulation (1995) asks why physical processing should be accompanied by experience at all. I regard this as a question that will dissolve as the "easy" problems are solved, in the way that the questi…

Substrate Independence

Replace the neurons one at a time. The gradual replacement argument: swap one neuron for a silicon device that takes the same inputs and produces the same outputs on the same timing. By construction, behaviour does not change. Repeat until…

Hard problem of consciousness

The hard problem of consciousness is the name David Chalmers gave in 1995 to the question of why physical processing in the brain is accompanied by subjective experience at all. The "easy" problems (how the brain discriminates stimuli, int…

Neuron Replacement

To test whether consciousness depends on the material of the brain or on its functional organisation. The argument was given its modern form by David Chalmers in "Absent Qualia, Fading Qualia, Dancing Qualia" (1995), building on an earlier…

Philosophical zombies

Used in arguments (notably by David Chalmers) to challenge physicalism—the idea that all aspects of the mind can be explained by physical processes. If zombies are conceivable, then it’s possible that consciousness is something extra beyon…