David Chalmers

Australian philosopher of mind who in 1994–95 named the hard problem of consciousnesshard problem of consciousness, n.: The puzzle of why physical processes in a brain — or a computer — should feel like anything from the inside, rather than simply running without any inner experience.: explaining why physical processing is accompanied by subjective experience at all, as opposed to the 'easy problems' of explaining cognitive functions. A former doctoral student of Douglas HofstadterDouglas Hofstadter, prop. n.: An American cognitive scientist whose prize-winning book 'Gödel, Escher, Bach' inspired a generation to study minds and AI, and who studies analogy as the heart of thinking., he is now at New York University, where he co-directs the Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness. 'The Conscious Mind' (1996) used the conceivability of philosophical zombiesphilosophical zombie, n.: An imagined being that behaves exactly like a person — talking, laughing, even saying it feels pain — but has no inner experience at all. Philosophers use it to ask whether behavior proves a mind. to argue that physical facts do not entail consciousness, while defending a principle of organizational invariance on which a functional duplicate of a brain, even one made of silicon, would have the same experiences. With Andy Clark he proposed the extended mindextended mind, n.: The idea that the mind can reach beyond the head into tools we rely on — a notebook, a phone, perhaps an AI assistant — when they play the same role that memory or reasoning would. thesis (1998). He wrote an influential philosophical analysis of the intelligence explosionintelligence explosion, n.: The idea that once AI gets good enough at improving AI, each smarter version could build a smarter one faster still, so abilities would snowball far beyond human level in a short time. (2010) and has assessed whether large language modelslarge language model, n.: A computer program trained on enormous amounts of text to predict the words that come next. At vast scale, that simple skill lets it chat, answer questions, translate, summarize and write code. could be conscious (2023), co-authoring work on indicator properties of consciousnessindicator properties of consciousness, n.: A checklist of design features that leading scientific theories link to consciousness, used to judge how likely it is that a particular AI system could be conscious. and on AI welfareAI welfare, n.: Concern for the well-being of AI systems themselves, in case some of them can suffer or have interests that matter — and the research into how to tell and what to do about it..