With the publication of his 1996 book The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory, David Chalmers established himself as one of the most assiduous, honest, imaginative and talented thinkers working in the vast and overpopulated field of the philosophy of mind. In that tome, Chalmers did not avoid the abstruse and the technical where they were unavoidable, and only intermittently lost touch with the mysteries that strike us all when we think about consciousness. And for the most part, despite the difficulties, he also managed to explain his enquiries with admirable clarity; in this respect, he came across like the philosopher John Searle, only less combative, less sure of himself and less liable to brush aside or overlook the true problems of consciousness with dogmatic assertions such as that “consciousness is as much a biological process as digestion or photosynthesis” (which comes, incidentally, from a savage attack on Chalmers's book collected in Searle's The Mystery of Consciousness [1998]). If Chalmers's scrupulousness and attention to contrary views made his arguments long – sometimes wearyingly so – this was an indirect tribute to his seriousness of purpose.

The opposite of a sophist, Chalmers – then a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and now a professor at the Australian National University and New York University – seemed in the book that launched him to prominence to be someone who really wanted to advance our understanding and his own, rather than simply to win adherents to a position.