Love Quote by David Chalmers

Chalmers is doing something slyly political under the guise of collegial enthusiasm: he’s staking a claim for philosophy inside a scientific gold rush that often treats philosophers as decorative at best, parasitic at worst. The “Anyway” is a tell. It sounds like an offhand pivot, but it functions as a reset button after the usual skirmishes over whether consciousness is “real” enough to merit anything beyond lab measurements and brain scans. He’s not conceding the debate; he’s stepping around it to make a strategic invitation.

The praise for “really interesting work” in neuroscience and psychology is calibrated. It grants the empirical side its momentum and legitimacy, while implying that the story is incomplete without conceptual labor. Consciousness research is famous for producing data-rich correlates and theory-poor interpretations: we can map attention, report, and neural signatures, then quietly smuggle in contested assumptions about what counts as experience, what “explanation” means, and whether first-person reports can be treated like any other measurement. That’s where Chalmers wants philosophers: not as metaphysical referees declaring winners, but as method-and-meaning specialists embedded early enough to shape the questions.

Context matters because Chalmers is the “hard problem” guy, often caricatured as the person who insists science can’t touch subjective experience. This line corrects that caricature. It’s less retreat than repositioning: the hard problem doesn’t have to be a barricade; it can be an organizing principle for collaboration. The subtext is also a warning to philosophy: if philosophers don’t show up where the action is, consciousness will be defined by whichever operationalization happens to be easiest to publish.