Ned Block

Ned Block (born 1942) is an American philosopher working in the field of the philosophy of mind who has made important contributions to matters of consciousness and cognitive science. He obtained his Ph.D. from Harvard University under Hilary Putnam and was a professor of philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for many years, and now teaches at New York University (NYU). Block is noted for presenting the Blockhead argument ... more

Ned Block (born 1942) is an American philosopher working in the field of the philosophy of mind who has made important contributions to matters of consciousness and cognitive science. He obtained his Ph.D. from Harvard University under Hilary Putnam and was a professor of philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for many years, and now teaches at New York University (NYU). Block is noted for presenting the Blockhead argument against the Turing Test as a test of intelligence in a paper entitled Psychologism and Behaviourism (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. 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... less