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“How does the water of the brain turn into the wine of consciousness?”
― David Chalmers

“Materialism is a beautiful and compelling view of the world, but to account for consciousness, we have to go beyond the resources it provides.”
― David J. Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory

“Now I have to say I'm a complete atheist, I have no religious views myself and no spiritual views, except very watered down humanistic spiritual views, and consciousness is just a fact of life, it's a natural fact of life.”
― David J. Chalmers

“Conscious experience is at once the most familiar thing in the world and the most mysterious. There is nothing we know about more directly than consciousness, but it is far from clear how to reconcile it with everything else we know. Why does it exist? What does it do? How could it possibly arise from lumpy gray matter? We know consciousness far more intimately than we know the rest of the world, but we understand the rest of the world far better than we understand consciousness. Consciousness can be startlingly intense. It is the most vivid of phenomena; nothing is more real to us. But it can be frustratingly diaphanous: in talking about conscious experience, it is notoriously difficult to pin down the subject matter. The International Dictionary of Psychology does not even try to give a straightforward characterization: Consciousness: The having of perceptions, thoughts, and feelings; awareness. The term is impossible to define except in terms that are unintelligible without a grasp of what consciousness means. Many fall into the trap of confusing consciousness with self-consciousness—to be conscious it is only necessary to be aware of the external world. Consciousness is a fascinating but elusive phenomenon: it is impossible to specify what it is, what it does, or why it evolved. Nothing worth reading has been written about it. (Sutherland 1989)”
― David J. Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory

“We won't have a theory of everything without a theory of consciousness”
― David J. Chalmers

“Some say that consciousness is an "illusion," but I have little idea what this could even mean. It seems to me that we are surer of the existence of conscious experience than we are of anything else in the world.”
― David J. Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory

“Why should there be conscious experience at all? It is central to a subjective viewpoint, but from an objective viewpoint it is utterly unexpected. Taking the objective view, we can tell a story about how fields, waves, and particles in the spatiotemporal manifold interact in subtle ways, leading to the development of complex systems such as brains. In principle, there is no deep philosophical mystery in the fact that these systems can process information in complex ways, react to stimuli with sophisticated behavior, and even exhibit such complex capacities as learning, memory, and language. All this is impressive, but it is not metaphysically baffling. In contrast, the existence of conscious experience seems to be a new feature from this viewpoint. It is not something that one would have predicted from the other features alone. That is, consciousness is surprising. If all we knew about were the facts of physics, and even the facts about dynamics and information processing in complex systems, there would be no compelling reason to postulate the existence of conscious experience. If it were not for our direct evidence in the first-person case, the hypothesis would seem unwarranted; almost mystical, perhaps. Yet we know, directly, that there is conscious experience. The question is, how do we reconcile it with everything else we know?”
― David J. Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory

“Simulations are not illusions. Virtual worlds are real. Virtual objects really exist.”
― David J. Chalmers, Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy

“The subject matter is perhaps best characterized as “the subjective quality of experience.” When we perceive, think, and act, there is a whir of causation and information processing, but this processing does not usually go on in the dark. There is also an internal aspect; there is something it feels like to be a cognitive agent. This internal aspect is conscious experience. Conscious experiences range from vivid color sensations to experiences of the faintest background aromas; from hard-edged pains to the elusive experience of thoughts on the tip of one’s tongue; from mundane sounds and smells to the encompassing grandeur of musical experience; from the triviality of a nagging itch to the weight of a deep existential angst; from the specificity of the taste of peppermint to the generality of one’s experience of selfhood. All these have a distinct experienced quality. All are prominent parts of the inner life of the mind. We can say that a being is conscious if there is something it is like to be that being, to use a phrase made famous by Thomas Nagel.1”
― David J. Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory

“The most obvious thing a consciousness theory could do is to explain why consciousness exists: that is, to solve what David Chalmers calls the “Hard Problem,” by telling us how a clump of neurons is able to give rise to the taste of strawberries, the redness of red … you know, all that ineffable first-persony stuff.”
― Anonymous

“Here’s my view of these things. Our minds are part of reality, but there’s a great deal of reality outside our minds. Reality contains our world and it may contain many others. We can build new worlds and new parts of reality. We know a little about reality, and we can try to know more. There may be parts of it that we can never know. Most importantly: Reality exists, independently of us. The truth matters. There are truths about reality, and we can try to find them. Even in an age of multiple realities, I still believe in objective reality”
― David J. Chalmers, Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy

“The footman entered first. “Lord Murdo Balfour, sir,” he said, addressing Mr. Chalmers. David thought stupidly, I know that name. For the briefest instant, he didn’t connect it with the man at whose feet he’d knelt. And then he saw him. Murdo”
― Joanna Chambers, Provoked

“Positive arguments for the natural possibility of absent qualia have not been as prevalent as arguments for inverted qualia, but they have been made. The most detailed presentation of these arguments is given by Block (1978).

These arguments almost always have the same form. They consist in the exhibition of a realization of our functional organization in some unusual medium, combined with an appeal to intuition. It is pointed out, for example, that the organization of our brain might be simulated by the people of China or even mirrored in the economy of Bolivia. If we got every person in China to simulate a neuron (we would need to multiply the population by ten or one hundred, but no matter), and equipped them with radio links to simulate synaptic connections, then the functional organization would be there. But surely, says the argument, this baroque system would not be conscious!

There is a certain intuitive force to this argument. Many people have a strong feeling that a system like this is simply the wrong sort of thing to have a conscious experience. Such a “group mind” would seem to be the stuff of a science-fiction tale, rather than the kind of thing that could really exist. But there is only an intuitive force. This certainly falls far short of a knockdown argument. Many have pointed out that while it may be intuitively implausible that such a system should give rise to experience, it is equally intuitively implausible that a brain should give rise to experience! Whoever would have thought that this hunk of gray matter would be the sort of thing that could produce vivid subjective experiences? And yet it does. Of course this does not show that a nation's population could produce a mind, but it is a strong counter to the intuitive argument that it would not.
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Once we realize how tightly a specification of functional organization constrains the structure of a system, it becomes less implausible that even the population of China could support conscious experience if organized appropriately. If we take our image of the population, speed it up by a factor of a million or so, and shrink it into an area the size of a head, we are left with something that looks a lot like a brain, except that it has homunculi—tiny people—where a brain would have neurons. On the face of it, there is not much reason to suppose that neurons should do any better a job than homunculi in supporting experience.”
― David J. Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory

“We need to make decisions right now about how we use video games, smartphones, and the internet. An increasing number of such practical questions will confront us in decades to come. As we spend more and more time in virtual worlds, we’ll have to grapple with the issue of whether life there is fully meaningful. Eventually, we may have to decide whether or not to upload ourselves to the cloud entirely. Thinking philosophically can help us get clear on these decisions about how to live our lives.”
― David J. Chalmers, Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy

“Figure 35 Princess Elisabeth and René Descartes in Minecraft.”
― David J. Chalmers, Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy

“A common view of knowledge, going back to Plato, is that knowledge is justified, true belief. To know something, you have to think it’s true (that’s belief), you have to be right about it (that’s truth), and you have to have good reasons for believing it (that’s justification).”
― David J. Chalmers, Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy

“Technophilosophy is a combination of (1) asking philosophical questions about technology and (2) using technology to help answer traditional philosophical questions.”
― David J. Chalmers, Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy

“I’m not Frodo and you’re not Gandalf.”
― David J. Chalmers, Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy

“I probably have six or seven leather jackets, but I tend to wear one at a time for at least a couple of years.”
― David J. Chalmers