David Chalmers Quotes

Without consciousness the mind-body problem would be much less interesting. With consciousness it seems hopeless.

Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery... a topic that often leaves even the most sophisticated thinkers tongue-tied and confused. And, as with all of the earlier mysteries, there are many who insist - and hope - that there will never be a demystification of consciousness.

I worry that we don't have a very good definition of consciousness yet which makes it hard to tackle.

Even when I was studying mathematics, physics, and computer science, it always seemed that the problem of consciousness was about the most interesting problem out there for science to come to grips with.

Materialism ends up denying the existence of any irreducible subjective qualitative states of sentience or awareness.

The great mystery of our consciousness is beyond our grasp.

I became really interested in the study of consciousness.

I'm the guy who reputedly denies that people experience colors or pains, and thinks that thermostats think — just ask my critics.

Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery.

Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else.

Our mind is a machine, it is not a mystery. And the mind always wants to know the how, the why. And because of this persistent inquiry about how and why, it goes on missing all that is beyond the boundaries of machines. Life is beyond the boundaries of machines.

Consciousness, there are about 20,000 papers on consciousness with no consensus. Nowhere in history have so many people devoted so much time to produce so little.

Here, the broader issues are already familiar, and discussion has focused at a more sophisticated and detailed level. Within the philosophy of mind, the problem of consciousness is no big news.

There's certainly nothing original about the observation that conscious experience poses a hard problem.

Consciousness, rather than being something that we have, is something we participate in.

Many philosophers say it's impossible to explain our conscious experience in scientific, biological terms at all. But that's not exactly true. Scientists have explained why we have certain experiences and not others. It's just that they haven't explained the special features of consciousness that philosophers care about.

The distinguishing characteristics of mind are of a subjective sort; we know them only from the contents of our own consciousness.

The full cosmos consists of the physical stuff and consciousness. Take away consciousness and it's only dust; add consciousness and you get things, ideas, and time.

It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter. For if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.

How do we define consciousness, or what has been called the human soul or the spirit, if it can't be quantified as matter or a particle?.. It can be quantified or observed just by a process of elimination.

fundamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism--something it is like for the organism.

They do not think, therefore they are not.

Whatever we know without inference is mental.

If we are to know ourselves, philosophy needs to maintain an ongoing dialogue with the sciences of mind.

I'm your mind", it claims. "You can't parse ME into dendrites and synapses