Ned Block | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | 1942 (age 82–83) |
| Philosophical work | |
| Era | 20th-century philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| School | Analytic philosophy |
| Notable students | Daniel Stoljar[1] |
| Main interests | Philosophy of mind |
| Notable ideas | Blockhead China brain |
Ned Joel Block (born 1942) is an Americanphilosopher working inphilosophy of mind who has made important contributions to the understanding ofconsciousness and the philosophy ofcognitive science. He has been professor ofphilosophy andpsychology atNew York University since 1996, and a Silver Professor since 2005.[2]
Block obtained hisPhD fromHarvard University in 1971 under the direction ofHilary Putnam. He joined theMassachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as an assistant professor of philosophy (1971–1977), and then served as associate professor of philosophy (1977–1983), professor of philosophy (1983–1996) and as chair of the philosophy section (1989–1995). He has, since 1996, been a professor in the departments ofphilosophy andpsychology atNew York University (NYU).
Block received theJean Nicod Prize in 2013, and has given theWilliam James Lectures atHarvard University in 2012 and theJohn Locke Lectures atOxford University in 2013,[3] among many others.
Block is Past President of theSociety for Philosophy and Psychology and was elected a Fellow of theAmerican Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2004.[4]
He is married to the developmental psychologistSusan Carey. Block is ethnically Ashkenazi Jewish.[5]
Block is noted for presenting theBlockhead argument against theTuring test as a test ofintelligence in a paper titled "Psychologism and Behaviorism" (1981). He is also known for his criticism offunctionalism, arguing that asystem with the samefunctional states as a human is not necessarily conscious.[6]: 174
Block has been a judge at theLoebner Prize contest, a contest in the tradition of the Turing Test to determine whether a conversant is a computer or a human.[7]: 14–15
In his more recent work onconsciousness, he has made a distinction betweenphenomenal consciousness andaccess consciousness, where phenomenal consciousness consists of subjective experience and feelings and access consciousness consists of that information globally available in the cognitive system for the purposes of reasoning, speech and high-level action control. He has argued that access consciousness and phenomenal consciousness might not always coincide in human beings.
Ned Block has mounted the overflow argument, which argues against the view that phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness are identical. Instead, Ned Block argues that phenomenal consciousness overflows conscious access, meaning that one can consciously experience something that they do not have conscious access to. Empirically, this means that a subject can have some content included in their conscious experience, but lack the cognitive recognition of the content that is necessary to report that the content was in fact experienced.[8]
