David Chalmers may be philosophy of mind's token bad-boy, but his preference for long hair, faded jeans, and t-shirts, hasn't hurt his credibility. He is one of today's leading figures in the quest for a comprehensive theory of consciousness. Best known for articulating what he calls the hard problem of consciousness, Chalmers is passionate about discovering what conscious awareness is, how it arises, and why it even exists at all? In preperation for his feature article "Is God All in your Head?" EnlightenNext's Craig Hamilton spoke with Chalmers over tacos and beer at the 2004 Consciousness Conference (a biannual event which Chalmers helps organize) in Tuscon, Arizona. The resulting bout of mind-bending conversation provides a fascinating glimpse into a frontier where philosophy, science, and mysticism inexorably converge.
In the first part of this audio, Chalmers explains to a visiting film-crew the classic thought puzzle known as the Cartesian evil genius hypothesis. This bit of mental provocation, also referred to as, “the brain in a vat,” is a hypothetical scenario in which one is asked, “what if you were actually a brain in a vat, being fed a stream of complex sensory information through sophisticated electronic equipment (controlled by the evil genius), and how would or would not this knowledge alter your experience of reality?”
The second part of the audio is a conversation between EnlightenNext editor Craig Hamilton and Dr. Chalmers, in which they discuss the hard problem of consciousness, free will, and the materialist view of reality.
BIO
David Chalmers is a leading philosopher in the area of philosophy of mind. He is a professor of philosophy and the director of the Center for Consciousness at the Australian National University. Prior to his position there, he was the director of the Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona. Chalmers earned his PhD in philosophy and cognitive science at Indiana University Bloomington under Douglas Hofstadter. He is the author of the book The Conscious Mind (1996), which was described by The Sunday Times as "one of the best science books of the year."
He is best known for his articulation of the hard problem of consciousness in both his book and in the paper "Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness" (originally published in The Journal of Consciousness Studies, 1995). He makes the distinction between easy problems of consciousness, which are things like finding neural correlates of sensation, and the hard problem, which could be phrased as the question "why does awareness of sensory information exist at all?" A key to his argument is the distinction between neurological impulses of sensory information and the experience of them (known in philosophy of mind as qualia). He argues for the irreducibility of the experience of awareness to purely physical processes (also known as physicalism). In his argument (as it appears in his book The Conscious Mind) he makes use of the philosophical zombie, which is a hypothetical person in all respects identical to a real one, but missing qualia. After the publication of this paper, about 25 papers were published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies in response to the hard problem. These papers (by Daniel Dennett, Colin McGinn, Francisco Varela, Francis Crick, and Roger Penrose, among others) were collected and published in the book Explaining Consciousness: The Hard Problem.
Chalmers has also compiled what could be the largest bibliography on the philosophy of mind and related fields with close to 5000 annotated entries topically organized. He serves on the editorial board of the journals Consciousness and Cognition, Psyche, and the Journal of Consciousness Studies. He is an editor for the philosophy of mind series at Oxford University Press, a philosophy of mind editor for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and philosophy editor for the Macmillan Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science. He is on the board of directors of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness.
