David Chalmers

If you’ve ever wondered why the colour red feels red or why music moves you, you’re in David Chalmers’ domain.

As co-director of the Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness at NYU, and a professor at the Australian National University, Chalmers is one of the most recognisable figures in philosophy and cognitive science. In 1994, his talk at the Toward a Science of Consciousness conference put words to what many have struggled to articulate: science can explain brain activity, but it hasn’t yet cracked the code of subjective experience.

David Chalmers is best known for formulating the ‘hard problem of consciousness’, which asks why and how physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective experiences. Unlike what he calls the ‘easy problems of consciousness’ such as understanding perception, attention, or behaviour; the hard problem remains unresolved because there is no widely accepted explanation for why certain brain states produce the feeling of being alive, of seeing red, or of feeling pain.

Chalmers distinguishes between two kinds of consciousness: phenomenal consciousness, which is the raw subjective experience (what it feels like to see red or taste coffee), and access consciousness, which involves cognitive functions like reasoning, reporting, and memory. While neuroscience is making strides in understanding the latter, it struggles to explain the former. Chalmers has explored several theories, including the possibility that consciousness is a fundamental feature of the universe, much like space and time. He has also proposed that virtual reality can be as real as physical reality and that our minds are increasingly extending into digital spaces through technology.

At a time when AI is challenging our notions of intelligence, when virtual worlds blur with physical ones, and when technology is reshaping human thought, David Chalmers’ insights are crucial. His books, The Conscious Mind and Reality+, are widely considered to be essential works on consciousness and its relation to the mind-body problem in philosophy of mind.