David Deutsch

Deutsch is a physicist at the Oxford University Centre for Quantum Computation (http://www.qubit.org/). His papers on quantum computation laid the foundation for the field (similar to Alan Turing's contribution to non-quantum computation.) He is the author of the widely praised book The Fabric Of Reality.

He was interviewed for the December/January 2001 issue of Philosophy Now magazine:

"First of all, I do not believe in the supernatural, so I take it for granted that consciousness has a material explanation. I also do not believe in insoluble problems, therefore I believe that this explanation is accessible in principle to reason, and that one day we will understand consciousness just as we today understand what life is, whereas once this was a deep mystery."

For more background check out his homepage at:

http://www.qubit.org/people/david/David.html

and an interview at John Brockman's EDGE:

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/deutsch/deutsch_index.html