Ned Block

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Western Philosophy 20th-century philosophy

Name	Ned Block
Birth	1942
School/tradition	Analytic philosophy
Main interests	Philosophy of mind
Notable ideas	Blockhead
Influenced by	Alan Turing

Ned Block (born 1942) is a philosopher of mind who has made important contributions to matters of consciousness and cognitive science. He obtained his Ph.D. from Harvard University, and was a student of Hilary Putnam. Block was for many years professor of philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) 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 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.

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.

He is married to the developmental psychologist Susan Carey.

[edit] Positions

Professor of Philosophy and Psychology at New York University (NYU) 1996 - Current
Chair of the Philosophy Program At Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) - ?.....- 1996
Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Guggenheim Fellow
Senior Fellow of the Center for the Study of Language and Information
Sloan Foundation Fellow
Recipient of Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies
Recipient of Fellowship from the National Science Foundation.
Past President of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology
Past Chair of the MIT Press Cognitive Science Board of Syndics
Past President of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness
Co-editor of The Nature of Consciousness: Philosophical Debates (MIT Press, 1997).