Science & Tech Quote by David Chalmers

Chalmers is doing something slyly strategic here: he’s not just identifying a research topic, he’s staging a coup. By insisting that consciousness is the central problem in philosophy of mind and a top-tier concern for cognitive science, he elevates the “what it’s like” question above the field’s more comfortable preoccupations with computation, behavior, and information-processing. Then comes the dagger twist: “surprisingly neglected.” That adverb doesn’t merely express disappointment; it implies negligence. If consciousness is this important, the neglect can’t be chalked up to mere fashion. It suggests a collective avoidance, a disciplinary blind spot.

The context matters. For much of late 20th-century cognitive science, consciousness was treated as scientifically awkward, too subjective, too tainted by introspection, too likely to invite metaphysics. The reigning mood favored problems you could operationalize: vision, language, memory, decision-making. Chalmers’ line reads like a rebuke to that pragmatism. He frames the omission as an anomaly, nudging readers to conclude that a mature science shouldn’t be built by quietly bracketing its most intimate datum.

Subtextually, this is also a pitch for a new research program. If the field has been neglecting consciousness, then there’s intellectual territory up for grabs - and professional legitimacy to be won by whoever can reintroduce it without sounding mystical. The sentence carries the poise of someone positioning a “hard problem” as not just philosophically respectable, but scientifically urgent. It works because it flatters the reader’s seriousness (“we should care about the deepest thing”) while indicting the status quo for failing that seriousness.