42 Quotes by David Chalmers

People have managed to avert their eyes and hope for the best.

Anyway, there is a lot of really interesting work going on in the neuroscience and psychology of consciousness, and I would love to see philosophers become more closely involved with this.

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.

I had the idea that it would be wonderful to be a physicist or a mathematician maybe 500 years ago around the time of Newton when there were really fundamental things just lying around to be discovered.

I never expected this to catch on in the way it did! Of course similar observations have been made by any number of people, and the distinction is obvious to anyone who thinks about the subject a little.

I think it's a stupendous piece. I'm frankly a little surprised that it's not done more often because the music is so wonderful. The writing, especially for wind instruments, is extraordinary. He was just very expressive of the text and very inventive. So there's a wonderful sort of genius use of different styles and an ingenious use of the orchestra. I'm excited that we're doing it because I think people need to hear this piece.

Those are what I call the easy problems, not because they're trivial, but because they fall within the standard methods of the cognitive sciences.

A philosopher might find the general work unsophisticated, and scientists are often bemused by esoteric talk of zombies, supervenience, and possible worlds.

Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does.