Daily Inspiration Quote by David Chalmers

Chalmers is doing a quiet act of boundary-pushing here: not by proclaiming a grand theory of consciousness, but by laundered respectability. The key phrase is “stigma,” a sociological word smuggled into what’s framed as a methodological update. It implies that consciousness wasn’t rejected because it was unimportant, but because it was embarrassing - too close to mysticism, too hard to operationalize, too likely to produce bad science. In other words, the problem wasn’t the phenomenon; it was the field’s anxiety about looking unserious.

The sentence also performs a careful diplomatic maneuver. He doesn’t accuse psychology and neuroscience of cowardice; he credits them with “new and rigorous experimental paradigms,” granting the disciplines their favorite currency: rigor. That’s strategic. Chalmers is a philosopher arguing for the legitimacy of a “hard” problem inside territories that often treat philosophy as decorative. By anchoring the comeback story in experiments, he reassures empiricists while positioning himself as an ally rather than an invading metaphysician.

Context matters: late-20th-century cognitive science increasingly embraced computation, behavior, and neural correlates while treating subjective experience as a messy remainder. Chalmers’ own project insists that remainder is the point. So the subtext is less “science is finally catching up” than “science is finally willing to admit what it edited out.”

Even the modesty of “begin to overcome” is rhetorical self-defense. He’s not declaring victory; he’s claiming a foothold. Consciousness, long treated as career-risk, is being reframed as a frontier - newly fundable, newly publishable, newly speakable.