David Chalmers (b. 1966) is world-renowned in the field of the philosophy of consciousness. Excelling at mathematics at the University of Adelaide in the mid 1980s, Chalmers was awarded a Rhodes scholarship at Oxford, but in 1989 chose to join the graduate program in philosophy at Indiana University, USA. There he wrote his doctoral thesis, 'Toward a theory of consciousness', which became the influential book The Conscious Mind: In search of a fundamental theory (1996). Currently Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Consciousness at the Australian National University, Chalmers is attentive to the role of subjective experience in consciousness as much as he is interested in neuroscience and the psychology of consciousness. In essence, Chalmers seeks to determine a set of fundamental principles that connect physical processes to consciousness.
