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About the Centre

The Centre for Consciousness was set up in August 2004 as part of David Chalmers' ARC Federation Fellowship project. The project statement is as follows:

This project aims to develop a research centre that will be a world leader in the study of consciousness. The focus will be the question: how does human consciousness represent the world? The science of consciousness has seen explosive growth internationally in the last decade, but the relationship between consciousness and representation is not well-understood. Through local and international collaboration, researchers will develop a framework for understanding the representational content of consciousness and will analyze experimental work at the leading edge of neuroscience and cognitive science. This will help us to understand the nature of consciousness itself.

The Centre focuses especially on the nature of consciousness, the nature of representation and intentionality, and on the relationship between these domains. A broad approach is taken to these issues, bringing in relevant work from numerous neighboring areas of philosophy and of cognitive science.

The Centre is located within the internationally-renowned Philosophy Program in the ANU Research School of Social Sciences. The Centre's research team includes David Chalmers (Director), Martin Davies, Frank Jackson, and Daniel Stoljar (Management Committee), along with numerous post-doctoral fellows and postgraduate students and an administrator. The Centre also regularly sponsors visitors from elsewhere in Australia and overseas.

The Centre is funded by the Australian Research Council and by the ANU. Along with its ongoing research activities, the Center organizes regular lectures, and organizes a number of focused conferences and workshops every year.