American philosopher
Ned Joel Block
(born 1942) is an American
philosopher
working in
philosophy of mind
who has made important contributions to the understanding of
consciousness
and the philosophy of
cognitive science
. He has been professor of
philosophy
and
psychology
at
New York University
since 1996.
Education and career
[
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]
Block obtained his
PhD
from
Harvard University
in 1971 under the direction of
Hilary Putnam
. He joined the
Massachusetts 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 of
philosophy
and
psychology
at
New York University
(NYU).
Block received the
Jean Nicod Prize
in 2013, and has given the
William James Lectures
at
Harvard University
in 2012 and the
John Locke Lectures
at
Oxford University
in 2013,
[2]
among many others.
Block is Past President of the
Society for Philosophy and Psychology
and was elected a Fellow of the
American Academy of Arts & Sciences
in 2004.
[3]
He is married to the developmental psychologist
Susan Carey
. Block is ethnically Jewish.
[4]
Philosophical work
[
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Block is noted for presenting the
Blockhead argument
against the
Turing test
as a test of
intelligence
in a paper titled "Psychologism and Behaviorism" (1981). He is also known for his criticism of
functionalism
, arguing that a
system
with the same
functional states
as a human is not necessarily conscious.
[5]
: 174
Block has been a judge at the
Loebner Prize
contest, a contest in the tradition of the Turing Test to determine whether a conversant is a computer or a human.
[6]
: 14?15
Consciousness
[
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In his more recent work on
consciousness
, he has made a distinction between
phenomenal consciousness
and
access 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.
Overflow argument
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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.
[7]
See also
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]
References
[
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]
- ^
"Tree ? David Chalmers"
. Retrieved
2020-07-22
.
- ^
"The John Locke Lectures - Faculty of Philosophy"
.
www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk
.
- ^
"Press Releases - American Academy of Arts & Sciences"
.
www.amacad.org
.
- ^
"Jewish Philosophers"
.
- ^
Ritchie, S. L.,
Divine Action and the Human Mind
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019),
p. 174.
- ^
van de Gevel, Ad J. W., & Noussair, C. N.,
The Nexus between Artificial Intelligence and Economics
(
Berlin
/
Heidelberg
:
Springer
, 2013),
pp. 14?15
.
- ^
Block, Ned (2011).
"Perceptual consciousness overflows cognitive access"
.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
.
15
(12): 567?575.
doi
:
10.1016/j.tics.2011.11.001
.
PMID
22078929
.
External links
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