Education
In 1971, he obtained his Ph.D. from Harvard University under Hilary Putnam.
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Ned Block
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Career
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 in the NYU Department of Philosophy at New York University 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 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. 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.
Professor of Philosophy and Psychology at New York University (NYU) 1996 - CurrentChair of the Philosophy Program At Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)Guggenheim FellowSenior Fellow of the Center for the Study of Language and InformationSloan Foundation FellowRecipient of Fellowship from the American Council of Learned SocietiesRecipient of Fellowship from the National Science Foundation. Past President of the Society for Philosophy and PsychologyPast Chair of the MIT Press Cognitive Science Board of SyndicsPast President of the Association for the Scientific Study of ConsciousnessCo-editor of The Nature of Consciousness: Philosophical Debates (MIT Press, 1997).
