David Chalmers | |
|---|---|
 Chalmers in 2021 | |
| Born | David John Chalmers (1966-04-20)20 April 1966 (age 59) Sydney,New South Wales, Australia |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | University of Adelaide (BSc, 1986) University of Oxford (1987–1988) Indiana University Bloomington (PhD, 1993) |
| Thesis | Toward a Theory of Consciousness (1993) |
| Doctoral advisor | Douglas Hofstadter |
| Academic work | |
| Era | Contemporary philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| School or tradition | Analytic |
| Institutions | New York University |
| Main interests | Philosophy of mind Consciousness Philosophy of language |
| Notable ideas | Hard problem of consciousness,extended mind,two-dimensional semantics,naturalistic dualism,philosophical zombie,further facts |
David John Chalmers (/ˈtʃɑːmərz/;[1] born 20 April 1966)[2] is an Australianphilosopher andcognitive scientist, specializing inphilosophy of mind andphilosophy of language. He is a professor of philosophy and neural science atNew York University (NYU), as well as co-director of NYU's Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness (along withNed Block).[3][4] In 2006, he was elected a fellow of theAustralian Academy of the Humanities.[5] In 2013, he was elected as a fellow of theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences.[6]
Chalmers is best known for formulating thehard problem of consciousness, and for popularizing thephilosophical zombie thought experiment.
Chalmers and David Bourget co-foundedPhilPapers; a database of journal articles for philosophers.
David Chalmers was born inSydney,New South Wales, and subsequently grew up inAdelaide,South Australia, where he attendedUnley High School.[7]
As a child, he experiencedsynesthesia.[7] He begancoding and playingcomputer games at the age of 10 on aPDP-10 at a medical center.[8] He also performed exceptionally inmathematics, and secured a bronze medal in theInternational Mathematical Olympiad.[7] When Chalmers was 13, he readDouglas Hofstadter's 1979 bookGödel, Escher, Bach, which awakened an interest in philosophy.[9]
Chalmers received his undergraduate degree inpure mathematics from theUniversity of Adelaide.[10] After graduating, Chalmers spent six months reading philosophy books while hitchhiking across Europe,[11] before continuing his studies at theUniversity of Oxford,[10] where he was aRhodes Scholar but eventually withdrew from the course.[12]
In 1993, Chalmers received hisPhD in philosophy and cognitive science fromIndiana University Bloomington underDouglas Hofstadter,[13] writing a doctoral thesis entitledToward a Theory of Consciousness.[12] He was a postdoctoral fellow in the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology program directed byAndy Clark atWashington University in St. Louis from 1993 to 1995.[10][14]
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In 1994, Chalmers presented a lecture at the inauguralToward a Science of Consciousness conference.[13] According to theChronicle of Higher Education, this "lecture established Chalmers as a thinker to be reckoned with and goosed a nascent field into greater prominence."[13] He went on to co-organize the conference (renamed "The Science of Consciousness") for some years withStuart Hameroff, but stepped away when he felt it became too divergent from mainstream science.[13] Chalmers is a founding member of theAssociation for the Scientific Study of Consciousness and one of its past presidents.[15]
Having established his reputation, Chalmers received his first professorship atUC Santa Cruz, from August 1995 to December 1998. In 1996 he published the widely cited bookThe Conscious Mind. Chalmers was subsequently appointed Professor of Philosophy (1999–2004) and then Director of the Center for Consciousness Studies (2002–2004) at theUniversity of Arizona.[16][17] In 2004, Chalmers returned to Australia, encouraged by an ARCFederation Fellowship, becoming professor of philosophy and director of the Center for Consciousness at theAustralian National University.[18] Chalmers accepted a part-time professorship at thephilosophy department ofNew York University in 2009, becoming a full-time professor in 2014.[19]
In 2013, Chalmers was elected a Fellow of theAmerican Academy of Arts & Sciences.[6] He is an editor on topics in thephilosophy of mind for theStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.[20] In May 2018, it was announced that he would serve on the jury for theBerggruen Prize.[21]
In 2023, Chalmers won a bet—made in 1998, for a case of wine—with neuroscientistChristof Koch that the neural underpinnings for consciousness would not be resolved by the year 2023, while Koch had bet that they would.[22]
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 bookThe Conscious Mind. He makes a distinction between "easy" problems of consciousness, such as explaining object discrimination or verbal reports, and the single hard problem, which could be stated "why does thefeeling which accompanies awareness of sensory information exist at all?" The essential difference between the (cognitive) easy problems and the (phenomenal) hard problem is that the former are at least theoretically answerable via the dominant strategy in the philosophy of mind:physicalism. Chalmers argues for an "explanatory gap" from the objective to the subjective, and criticizes physicalist explanations of mental experience, making him adualist. Chalmers characterizes his view as "naturalistic dualism": naturalistic because he believes mental statessupervene "naturally" on physical systems (such as brains); dualist because he believes mental states areontologically distinct from and not reducible to physical systems. He has also characterized his view by more traditional formulations such asproperty dualism.[23]
In support of this, Chalmers is famous for his commitment to the logical (though, not natural) possibility ofphilosophical zombies.[24] These zombies are complete physical duplicates of human beings, lacking only qualitative experience. Chalmers argues that since such zombies are conceivable to us, they must therefore be logically possible. Since they are logically possible, thenqualia andsentience are not fully explained by physical properties alone; the facts about them arefurther facts. Instead, Chalmers argues that consciousness is a fundamental property ontologically autonomous of any known (or even possible) physical properties,[25] and that there may be lawlike rules which he terms "psychophysical laws" that determine which physical systems are associated with which types of qualia. He further speculates that allinformation-bearing systems may be conscious, leading him to entertain the possibility of conscious thermostats and a qualifiedpanpsychism he callspanprotopsychism. 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. According to Chalmers, his arguments are similar to a line of thought that goes back toLeibniz's 1714"mill" argument; the first substantial use of philosophical "zombie" terminology may beRobert Kirk's 1974 "Zombies vs. Materialists".[26]
After the publication of Chalmers's landmark paper, more than twenty papers in response were published in theJournal of Consciousness Studies. These papers (byDaniel Dennett,Colin McGinn,Francisco Varela,Francis Crick, andRoger Penrose, among others) were collected and published in the bookExplaining Consciousness: The Hard Problem.[27]John Searle critiqued Chalmers's views inThe New York Review of Books.[28][29]
WithAndy Clark, Chalmers has written "The Extended Mind", an article about the borders of the mind.[30]
According to Chalmers, systems that have the samefunctional organization "at a fine enough grain" (that are "functionallyisomorphic") will have "qualitatively identical conscious experiences". In 1995, he proposed thereductio ad absurdum "fading qualia"thought experiment. It involves progressively replacing each neuron of a brain with a functional equivalent, for example implemented on asilicon chip. Since each substitute neuron performs the same function as the original, the subject would not notice any change. But, Chalmers argues, if qualia (for example, the perceived color of objects) 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. He 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. In addition, Chalmers proposed a similar thought experiment, "dancing qualia", which concludes that a robotic brain that isfunctionally isomorphic to a biological one would not only be as conscious, but would also have the same conscious experiences (e.g., the same perception of color when seeing an object).[32][31] In 2023, he analyzed whetherlarge language models could be conscious, and suggested that they were probably not conscious, but could become serious candidates for consciousness within a decade.[33]
Chalmers has published works on the "theory of reference" concerning how words secure their referents. He, together with others such asFrank Jackson, played a major role in developingtwo-dimensional semantics.[34]
BeforeSaul Kripke delivered his famous lecture seriesNaming and Necessity in 1970, thedescriptivism advocated byGottlob Frege andBertrand Russell was the orthodoxy. Descriptivism suggests that a name is an abbreviation of a description, which is a set of properties. This name secures its reference by a process of properties fitting: whichever object fits the description most, is the referent of the name. Therefore, the description provides the sense of the name, and it is through this sense that the reference of the name is determined.[35]
However, asKripke argued inNaming and Necessity, a name does not secure its reference via any process of description fitting. Rather, a name determines its reference via a historical-causal link tracing back to the process of naming. And thus, Kripke thinks that a name does not have a sense, or, at least, does not have a sense which is rich enough to play the reference-determining role. Moreover, a name, in Kripke's view, is arigid designator, which refers to the same object in allpossible worlds. Following this line of thought, Kripke suggests that any scientific identity statement such as "Water is H2O" is also a necessary statement, i.e. true in all possible worlds. Kripke thinks that this is a phenomenon that descriptivism cannot explain.[36]
And, as also proposed byHilary Putnam and Kripke himself, Kripke's view on names can also be applied to the reference ofnatural kind terms. The kind of theory of reference that is advocated by Kripke and Putnam is called thedirect reference theory.[37]
Chalmers disagrees with Kripke, and direct reference theorists in general. He thinks that there are two kinds of intension of a natural kind term, a stance calledtwo-dimensionalism. For example, the statement "Water is H2O" expresses two distinct propositions, often referred to as aprimary intension and asecondary intension, which together form its meaning.[37][38]
Theprimary intension of a word or sentence is itssense, i.e., is the idea or method by which we find its referent. The primary intension of "water" might be a description, such as "the substance with water-like properties". The entity identified by this intension could vary in different hypothetical worlds. In thetwin Earth thought experiment, for example, inhabitants might use "water" to mean their equivalent of water, even if its chemical composition is not H2O. Thus, for that world, "water" does not refer to H2O.[37]
Thesecondary intension of "water" is whatever "water" refers to inthis world. When considered according to its secondary intension, water means H2O in every world. Through this concept, Chalmers provides a way to explain how reference is determined by distinguishing betweenepistemic possibilities (primary intension) andmetaphysical necessities (secondary intension), ensuring that the referent (H2O) is uniquely identified across all metaphysically possible worlds.[37]
In some more recent work, Chalmers has concentrated on verbal disputes.[39] He argues that a dispute is best characterized as "verbal" when it concerns some sentence S which contains a term T such that (i) the parties to the dispute disagree over the meaning of T, and (ii) the dispute arises solely because of this disagreement. In the same work, Chalmers proposes certain procedures for the resolution of verbal disputes. One of these he calls the "elimination method", which involves eliminating the contentious term and observing whether any dispute remains.
Chalmers addressed the issue ofvirtual and non-virtual worlds in his 2022 bookReality+. While Chalmers recognises that virtual reality is not the same as non-virtual reality, he does not consider virtual reality to be an illusion, but rather a "genuine reality" in its own right.[40] Chalmers sees virtual reality as potentially offering as meaningful a life as non-virtual reality,[41] and argues that we could already be inhabitants of asimulation without knowing it.[42]
Chalmers proposes that computers are forming a form of "exo-cortex", where a part of human cognition is 'outsourced' to corporations such asApple andGoogle.[11]
Chalmers was featured in the 2012 documentary film entitledThe Singularity by filmmakerDoug Wolens, which focuses on the theory proposed by techno-futuristRay Kurzweil, of that "point in time when computer intelligence exceeds human intelligence."[43][44] He was a featured philosopher in the 2020Daily Nous series onGPT-3, which he described as "one of the most interesting and important AI systems ever produced."[45]
Regarding religion, Chalmers said in 2011: "I have no religious views myself and no spiritual views, except watered-down humanistic spiritual views. And consciousness is just a fact of life. It's a natural fact of life".[46]
As of 2012[update] Chalmers was the lead singer of theZombie Blues band, which performed at the music festivalQualia Fest in 2012 in New York.[47]
In physics, it occasionally happens that an entity has to be taken as fundamental. Fundamental entities are not explained in terms of anything simpler. Instead, one takes them as basic, and gives a theory of how they relate to everything else in the world.
As far as I know, the first paper in the philosophical literature to talk at length about zombies under that name was Robert Kirk's "Zombies vs. Materialists" in Mind in 1974, although Keith Campbell's 1970 book Body and Mind talks about an "imitation-man" which is much the same thing, and the idea arguably goes back to Leibniz's "mill" argument.
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