David Chalmers

David John Chalmers is an Australian philosopher and cognitive scientist, born in 1966, who specializes in philosophy of mind and philosophy of language. He is a professor of philosophy and neural science at New York University and co-director of its Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness, and he was elected a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 2006 and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2013. Chalmers is best known for formulating the hard problem of consciousness, the question of why physical processes in the brain are accompanied by subjective experience at all, and for popularizing the philosophical zombie thought experiment, in which a being physically identical to a conscious person is imagined to lack any inner experience. He and David Bourget co-founded PhilPapers, a widely used database of academic philosophy articles.