Marketing and Communications

April 11, 2006

Famed philosopher David Chalmers to present lecture on April 18: Are we living in a matrix?

WORCESTER, Mass. - Are we living in a matrix? And if so, is our perception of the external world illusory? David Chalmers, Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Consciousness at Australian National University, will explore answers to these and other questions in the annual George Kneller Chair Lecture, "The Matrix as Metaphysics," at 4 p.m., Tuesday, April 18, in the Lurie Conference Room, Higgins University Center, Clark University.

This lecture is free and open to the public and is presented by the George Kneller Fund and the Department of Philosophy Speaker Series. For more information, please call 508-793-7414.

Chalmers is best known for his articulation of the hard problem of consciousness in both his book and in the paper Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness. He argues that there is an explanatory gap between brain biology and mental experiences, and criticizes physical explanations of mental experience, making him one of the few remaining dualists left in the philosophy world.

Chalmers is the author of the book, "The Conscious Mind," which discusses consciousness, arguing that reductive explanations describing consciousness in terms of physical processes do not hold. The book was described by The Sunday Times as "one of the best science books of the year." He has also compiled what could be the largest bibliography on the philosophy of mind and related fields with close to 8000 annotated entries topically organized. He serves on the editorial boards of several journals including Consciousness and Cognition, the Journal of Consciousness Studies, and Psyche.

Before he moved to the Australian National University in 2004, Chalmers was Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona and taught at the University of California at Santa Cruz. He was educated at the University of Adelaide and then briefly at Lincoln College in the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar before studying for his Ph.D. at Indiana University Bloomington.