He is a professor of philosophy and neural science at New York University, as well as co-director of NYU's Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness (along with Ned Block).

[5] Chalmers is best known for formulating the hard problem of consciousness, and for popularizing the philosophical zombie thought experiment.

[6] When Chalmers was 13, he read Douglas Hofstadter's 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach, which awakened an interest in philosophy.

[9] After graduating Chalmers spent six months reading philosophy books while hitchhiking across Europe,[10] before continuing his studies at the University of Oxford,[9] where he was a Rhodes Scholar but eventually withdrew from the course.

[11] In 1993, Chalmers received his PhD in philosophy and cognitive science from Indiana University Bloomington under Douglas Hofstadter,[12] writing a doctoral thesis entitled Toward a Theory of Consciousness.

[11] He was a postdoctoral fellow in the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology program directed by Andy Clark at Washington University in St. Louis from 1993 to 1995.

[12] According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, this "lecture established Chalmers as a thinker to be reckoned with and goosed a nascent field into greater prominence.

[14] Having established his reputation, Chalmers received his first professorship at UC Santa Cruz, from August 1995 to December 1998.

Chalmers was subsequently appointed Professor of Philosophy (1999–2004) and then Director of the Center for Consciousness Studies (2002–2004) at the University of Arizona.

[15][16] In 2004, Chalmers returned to Australia, encouraged by an ARC Federation Fellowship, becoming professor of philosophy and director of the Center for Consciousness at the Australian National University.

[17] Chalmers accepted a part-time professorship at the philosophy department of New York University in 2009, becoming a full-time professor in 2014.

Chalmers argues for an "explanatory gap" from the objective to the subjective, and criticizes physicalist explanations of mental experience, making him a dualist.

Chalmers characterizes his view as "naturalistic dualism": naturalistic because he believes mental states supervene "naturally" on physical systems (such as brains); dualist because he believes mental states are ontologically distinct from and not reducible to physical systems.

Chalmers maintains a formal agnosticism on the issue, even conceding that the viability of panpsychism places him at odds with the majority of his contemporaries.

These papers (by Daniel Dennett, Colin McGinn, Francisco Varela, Francis Crick, and Roger Penrose, among others) were collected and published in the book Explaining Consciousness: The Hard Problem.

He concludes that such fading qualia are impossible in practice, and that after each neuron is replaced, the resulting functionally isomorphic robotic brain would be as conscious as the original biological one.

[33] Before Saul Kripke delivered his famous lecture series Naming and Necessity in 1970, the descriptivism advocated by Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell was the orthodoxy.

"[42][43] He was a featured philosopher in the 2020 Daily Nous series on GPT-3, which he described as "one of the most interesting and important AI systems ever produced.

"[44] As of 2012[update] Chalmers was the lead singer of the Zombie Blues band, which performed at the music festival Qualia Fest in 2012 in New York.