How real is vitual reality?
David J.Chalmers
Do our minds draw a line between digitally and naturally generated experience? Is your smartphone part of your mind? NYU scholar David Chalmers delves into such questions on March 28.
As virtual reality technology makes advances, so does analysis of its social and ethical implications. A scholar of consciousness and philosophy will share his findings in a free, public lecture at Skidmore on Monday, March 28, at 8 p.m. in Gannett Auditorium, Palamountain Hall.
The speaker, David J. Chalmers, is a professor of philosophy and co-director of the Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness at New York University. His talk, titled “The Virtual and the Real,” will argue for “virtual realism,” which holds that virtual objects are real, experience in virtual reality is not illusory, and virtual experiences are as valuable as what we might call real reality.
His 1996 book The Conscious Mind is known for emphasizing the "hard problem" of consciousness: "Why is all this [brain] processing accompanied by an experienced inner life?" He concludes that materialist theories of mind are not sufficient to answer the question, so exploration into other theories is needed.
The Philosophy Department invited Chalmers to Skidmore, in part, says Professor Larry Jorgensen, because its Senior Seminar is studying the history of consciousness, and that work includes “looking at some of the traditionally marginalized theories to see whether any of them provide fruitful avenues of research.” Jorgensen says the seminar students are reading two of Chalmers's articles, and the author will meet with the class during his campus stay.
A frequent public speaker, Chalmers has given a TEDx talk called “Is Your Phone Part of Your Mind?” and another TED talk titled “How Do You Explain Consciousness?” He also wrote The Character of Consciousness and Constructing the World and edited essay collections on the philosophy of mind and on “metametaphysics.” His articles range from “A Computational Foundation for the Study of Cognition” in the Journal of Cognitive Science to “The Puzzle of Conscious Experience” in Scientific American. His other activities include serving as philosophy-of-mind editor for Oxford University Press and Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and co-directing the PhilPapers online bibliography.
Chalmers studied mathematics at the University of Adelaide, in Australia, and Oxford, in England. He earned a Ph.D. in philosophy and cognitive science at Indiana University and then spent 1993-95 as a McDonnell Fellow at Washington University in St. Louis. Before joining NYU, he was on the faculty at UC-Santa Cruz, the University of Arizona, and also Australian National University, where he maintains a part-time appointment.
