David Chalmers

New York University. Co-director, Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness

Functionalist What matters is the organisation of the processing, not the material

David Chalmers Photograph by Zereshk, CC BY 3.0.

Position on AI consciousness

Chalmers holds that consciousness is not obviously tied to biology and that a system with the right organisation could be conscious. He puts current language models at probably not conscious, while arguing that the reasons for confidence are weaker than people assume.

David Chalmers gave the field its central problem and its vocabulary. The hard problem is the question of why physical processing is accompanied by experience at all, as distinct from the easy problems of explaining discrimination, integration, reportability and control. Those easy problems are hard in the ordinary sense and will yield to normal science. The hard one is different in kind, because a complete functional account leaves the question untouched.

His position on artificial systems follows from that and is more permissive than his reputation suggests. Chalmers holds that consciousness is not obviously tied to biology, that a system with the right organisation could be conscious, and that current language models probably are not but that the reasons for confidence are weaker than people assume. He has put explicit probabilities on it rather than asserting a verdict, which is unusual and useful.

The caution he urges is epistemic. We are poor judges of which systems are conscious, our intuitions were shaped by encountering only biological minds, and a system trained on human text is optimised to produce exactly the signals those intuitions respond to. That is a different worry from the claim that machines cannot be conscious, and the two are frequently conflated.

Known for. Naming the hard problem of consciousness, and the philosophical zombie argument

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David Chalmers is listed with the other functionalists and computationalists, who hold that what matters is the organisation of the processing, not the material. The theory family behind that position is set out in the index of consciousness theories. Every researcher covered on this site is indexed in the directory of consciousness researchers.

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Related researchers