Ned Block
(1942–). American philosopher, best known for his work on images and his inventive objections to behaviourism and functionalism . Consider a chess playing computer in which every possible position has been stored in memory, together with a good move which it makes automatically if that position turns up. Its high standard of play could hardly be ascribed to its intelligence. Block describes an analogous program (even more remote from practical possibility) for a robot. It would have the behavioural capacities of an intelligent person, but ‘the intelligence of a toaster’. If its practical impossibility may be disregarded, it looks like a counter-example to behaviourism. Against functionalism Block uses similarly ingenious examples to emphasize the problems posed by the alleged possibilities of transposed and absent ‘ qualia ’. Functionalists reply that his reasoning begs the question.
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| Born | 1942 Chicago |
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| Era | 20th-century philosophy |
| Region | Western Philosophy |
| School | Analytic philosophy |
| Main interests | Philosophy of mind |
| Notable ideas | Blockhead |
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Influenced by |
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. In 1971, he obtained his Ph.D. from Harvard University under Hilary Putnam. He went to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as an assistant professor of philosophy (1971-1977), worked as associate professor of philosophy (1977-1983), professor of philosophy (1983-1996) and served as chair of the philosophy section (1989-1995). He has, since 1996, been a professor in the departments of philosophy and psychology and at the Center for Neural Science 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.
Positions
- Professor of Philosophy and Psychology at New York University (NYU) 1996 - Current
- Chair of the Philosophy Program At Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
- 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).
See also
External links
- Block's Professional page
- Discussion of Block in a wikibook about consciousness.
- Minds and Machines course by Ned Block
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