Reading David Chalmers on the Coming "Singularity"

New York University philosopher David Chalmers is well known for critiquing the scientific materialist's vision of explaining, someday and somehow, the phenomenon of conscious experience in purely material terms. Chalmers has argued (now famously) that a philosophical thought experiment is fatal to materialist science: "zombies" are conceivable, and hence logically possible. Here he means by "zombie" a human whose outward behavior perfectly mimics people having consciousness, yet in fact the...