Daily Inspiration Quote by David Chalmers

Chalmers is doing a sly bit of scene-setting: he makes the philosophy of mind sound like a room where everyone has already heard the shocking story, so the only interesting question left is how to argue about it without repeating themselves. The phrase "no big news" is deliberately deflationary, almost journalistic, as if consciousness were a policy beat rather than the weirdest fact in the universe. That deadpan tone is the point. It signals professional maturity while quietly exposing a discipline’s coping mechanism: once a problem becomes permanent, you normalize it.

The subtext is gatekeeping with a purpose. "Broader issues" implies the naive, crowd-pleasing questions ("What is consciousness? Why is there experience at all?") that outsiders keep asking. Chalmers suggests that insiders have moved past that into "sophisticated and detailed" debates - about physicalism, qualia, explanatory gaps, functionalism, and the rest. He’s not denying the mystery; he’s marking the level at which he wants the conversation to occur.

Context matters because Chalmers is the philosopher who helped brand consciousness as the "hard problem". So calling it "no big news" isn’t dismissal; it’s a reminder that the field has had decades to metabolize the bomb he helped detonate. The line flatters the initiated, but it also hints at stagnation: when the problem is familiar, the danger is that sophistication becomes its own substitute for progress. The quote works because it compresses academic self-awareness into a casual shrug - a knowing gesture that says, we’ve all been living with this abyss for a while now, and we’ve developed etiquette around it.