David Chalmers (original) (raw)

I am a philosopher at New York University. Officially I am University Professor of Philosophy and Neural Science and co-director of the Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness. I’m also Honorary Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University and co-director of the PhilPapers Foundation. I am interested in the philosophy of mind (especially consciousness) and the foundations of cognitive science, physics, and technology, as well as the philosophy of language, metaphysics and epistemology, and many other areas.

This site includes quite a bit of my own work, including all of my articles and information on my books. It also includes various resources I’ve put together over the years, along with a photo gallery and some videos. You can navigate via the menus in the header or the site map. Some newer items are listed in the box below.

Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy was published by W.W. Norton (US) and Allen Lane (UK) in 2022. Here’s an excerpt. More information is here.

Recent-ish papers on AI

• • • Taking AI Welfare Seriously (multi-authored)
      • Does Thought Require Sensory Grounding?
      • Could a Large Language Model be Conscious?
      • The Computational and the Representational Language of Thought Hypotheses
      • GPT-3 as General Intelligence

Papers on the simulation hypothesis and virtual reality:

• • • The Simulation Hypothesis: Metaphysics, Epistemology, Value
      • Taking the Simulation Hypotheses Seriously
      • Precis of Reality+
      • Three symposia on Reality+

Papers on consciousness

• • • Consciousness and the Collapse of the Wave Function (with Kelvin McQueen)
      • Is the Hard Problem of Consciousness Universal?
      • The Meta-Problem of Consciousness

Papers on mental content:

• • • Inferentialism, Australian style
      • Interpretivism and inferentialism

Events, videos, etc.:

• • • Consciousness and the Collapse of the Wave Function (Talks@Fermilab, March 2020; also two 2021 versions)
      • The Nature and Ethics of Consciousness (5-hour audio interview with 80,000 hours, October 2019)
      • Zeno Goes to Copenhagen (talk at TSC 2019, with bonus conversation with René Descartes starting around 1:03)
      • Conversation with Dan Dennett: Possible Minds and Superintelligence (Pioneerworks, March 2019)
      • The Meta-Problem of Consciousness (Talks@Google, February 2019; also 2020 Indiana version)
      • What is Conceptual Engineering and What Should it Be? (NYU, September 2018)
      • Sensual (rationalist/empiricist music video by Dorian Electra and the Electrodes)
      • The Virtual and the Real (lecture version; see also midnight version)
      • Reverse Debate on Consciousness (debate with Carlo Rovelli)
      • Conversation with Tom Stoppard (on The Hard Problem)
      • Tucson 1994 talk on the Hard Problem (recently uncovered)

Updated resources:

• • • Australasian Philosophy Family Tree
      • Photo Gallery