David Chalmers

Key ideas

In 1995 Chalmers distinguished the 'easy problems' of consciousness, explaining functions such as attention, discrimination and report, from the hard problem: why any of this processing is accompanied by experience at all. The name stuck, and set the terms of the field.

In The Conscious Mind he argued from the conceivability of philosophical zombies that consciousness is not entailed by physical facts, and defended a form of property dualism with openness to panpsychism. With Andy Clark he also proposed the 'extended mind': notebooks and phones can be literal parts of a mind.

In Reality+ he argued that we cannot rule out the simulation hypothesis, but that if we are simulated, the objects around us are still real: they are digital objects, not illusions.

Life, briefly

Chalmers grew up in Adelaide, trained in mathematics, and did his doctorate in philosophy and cognitive science at Indiana University. He taught at the Australian National University and New York University. In 1998 he bet the neuroscientist Christof Koch that the neural basis of consciousness would not be clearly identified within twenty-five years; in 2023 Koch conceded.

Major works

• Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness (1995)
• The Conscious Mind (1996)
• The Extended Mind (with Andy Clark, 1998)
• The Character of Consciousness (2010)
• Reality+ (2022)

Further reading

• WikipediaDavid Chalmers