Ned Block
Ned Block is Silver Professor of Philosophy, Psychology, and Neural Science at New York University. He is one of the most influential figures in contemporary philosophy of mind, renowned for formalizing the distinction between phenomenal consciousness (what it is like to have an experience) and access consciousness (information available for reasoning, speech, and executive control).
In his seminal 1995 paper “On a confusion about a function of consciousness” and his book The Border Between Seeing and Thinking (Oxford University Press, 2023), Block argued that phenomenal experience rich in perceptual detail routinely “overflows” the narrow capacity of working memory and cognitive reporting mechanisms. His famous “Blockhead” thought experiment demonstrated that a system could exhibit perfect functional and conversational competence via a lookup tree while completely lacking internal mental states.
Block’s critique presents a direct challenge to purely functionalist and behavioral benchmarks for AI consciousness. A language model or autonomous agent can achieve perfect access-consciousness metrics and linguistic reporting capabilities without possessing a shred of phenomenal experience.
Known for. Distinction between Phenomenal and Access Consciousness (1995), Blockhead argument against behavioral tests, The Border Between Seeing and Thinking (2023)
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Every researcher covered on this site is indexed in the directory of consciousness researchers, grouped by the position their published work defends. The positions themselves are set out in the index of consciousness theories.