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544The Nature of Consciousness: Philosophical Debates (edited book)MIT Press. 1997." -- "New Scientist" Intended for anyone attempting to find their way through the large and confusingly interwoven philosophical literature on consciousness, ..
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836Philosophical issues about consciousnessIn L. Nadel (ed.), Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, Nature Publishing Group. 2003.There are a number of different matters that come under the heading of ‘consciousness’. One of them is phenomenality, the feeling of say a sensation of red or a pain, that is what it is like to have such a sensation or other experience. Another is reflection on phenomenality. Imagine two infants, both of which have pain, but only one of which has a thought about that pain. Both would have phenomenal states, but only the latter would have a state of reflexive consciousness. This entry will start …Read more
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1763ConsciousnessIn R. L. Gregory (ed.), R. Gregory Oxford Companion to the Mind, Second Edition 2004, Oxford University Press. 2004.There are two broad classes of empirical theories of consciousness, which I will call the biological and the functional. The biological approach is based on empirical correlations between experience and the brain. For example, there is a great deal of evidence that the neural correlate of visual experience is activity in a set of occipetotemporal pathways, with special emphasis on the infero-temporal cortex. The functionalist approach is a successor of behaviorism, the view that mentality can be…Read more
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514If perception is probabilistic, why doesn't it seem probabilistic?Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 373 (1755). 2018.The success of the Bayesian approach to perception suggests probabilistic perceptual representations. But if perceptual representation is probabilistic, why doesn't normal conscious perception reflect the full probability distributions that the probabilistic point of view endorses? For example, neurons in MT/V5 that respond to the direction of motion are broadly tuned: a patch of cortex that is tuned to vertical motion also responds to horizontal motion, but when we see vertical motion, foveal…Read more
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467Is experiencing just representing? (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 58 (3): 663-670. 1998.The first problem concerns the famous Swampman who comes into existence as a result of a cosmic accident in which particles from the swamp come together, forming a molecular duplicate of a typical human. Reasonable people can disagree on whether Swampman has intentional contents. Suppose that Swampman marries Swampwoman and they have children. Reasonable people will be inclined to agree that there is something it is like for Swampchild when "words" go through his mind or come out of his mouth. F…Read more
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449Measuring away an attentional confound?Neuroscience of Consciousness 3 (1): 1-3. 2017.A recent fMRI study by Webb et al. (Cortical networks involved in visual awareness independent of visual attention, Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 2016;113:13923–28) proposes a new method for finding the neural correlates of awareness by matching atten- tion across awareness conditions. The experimental design, however, seems at odds with known features of attention. We highlight logical and methodological points that are critical when trying to disentangle attention and awareness.
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221Consciousness Explained by Daniel C. Dennett (review)Journal of Philosophy 90 (4): 181-193. 1993.
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823QualiaIn Richard L. Gregory (ed.), Oxford Companion to the Mind, Oxford University Press. 1987.Qualia include the ways things look, sound and smell, the way it feels to have a pain; more generally, what it's like to have mental states. Qualia are experiential properties of sensations, feelings, perceptions and, in my view, thoughts and desires as well. But, so defined, who could deny that qualia exist? Yet, the existence of qualia is controversial. Here is what is controversial: whether qualia, so defined, can be characterized in intentional, functional or purely cognitive terms. Opponent…Read more
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2327The mind as the software of the brainIn Daniel N. Osherson, Lila Gleitman, Stephen M. Kosslyn, S. Smith & Saadya Sternberg (eds.), An Invitation to Cognitive Science, Second Edition, Volume 3, Mit Press. pp. 377-425. 1995.In this section, we will start with an influential attempt to define `intelligence', and then we will move to a consideration of how human intelligence is to be investigated on the machine model. The last part of the section will discuss the relation between the mental and the biological
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617Mental paintIn Martin Hahn & B. Ramberg (eds.), Reflections and Replies: Essays on the Philosophy of Tyler Burge, Mit Press. pp. 165--200. 2003.The greatest chasm in the philosophy of mind--maybe even all of philosophy-- divides two perspectives on consciousness. The two perspectives differ on whether there is anything in the phenomenal character of conscious experience that goes beyond the intentional, the cognitive and the functional. A convenient terminological handle on the dispute is whether there are
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4The computer model of mindIn Daniel N. Osherson & Edward E. Smith (eds.), An Invitation to Cognitive Science, Mit Press. 1990.
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98Begging the question against phenomenal consciousnessBehavioral and Brain Sciences 15 (2): 205-206. 1992.
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269How to Find the Neural Correlate of Consciousness*: Ned BlockRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 43 23-34. 1998.There are two concepts of consciousness that are easy to confuse with one another, access-consciousness and phenomenal consciousness. However, just as the concepts of water and H 2 O are different concepts of the same thing, so the two concepts of consciousness may come to the same thing in the brain. The focus of this paper is on the problems that arise when these two concepts of consciousness are conflated. I will argue that John Searle's reasoning about the function of consciousness goes wron…Read more
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2517Seeing‐As in the Light of Vision SciencePhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 89 (1): 560-572. 2014.
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129Are mechanistic and teleological explanations of behaviour incompatible?Philosophical Quarterly 21 (April): 109-117. 1971.
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29Functional Role and Truth ConditionsProceedings of the Aristotelian Society 88 (1): 273-292. 1988.Ned Block, John Campbell; Functional Role and Truth Conditions, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 88, Issue 1, 1 June 1988, Pages 273–292, https:/
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87Response to Kouider et al. : which view is better supported by the evidence?Trends in Cognitive Sciences 16 (3): 141-142. 2012.
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1244The Canberra Plan Neglects GroundIn Terence Horgan, Marcelo Sabates & David Sosa (eds.), Qualia and Mental Causation in a Physical World: Themes from the Philosophy of Jaegwon Kim,, Cambridge University Press. pp. 105-133. 2015.This paper argues that the “Canberra Plan” picture of physicalistic reduction of mind--a picture shared by both its proponents and opponents, philosophers as diverse as David Armstrong, David Chalmers Frank Jackson, Jaegwon Kim, Joe Levine and David Lewis--neglects ground (Fine, 2001, 2012). To the extent that the point of view endorsed by the Canberra Plan has an account of the physical/functional ground of mind at all, it is in one version trivial and in another version implausible. In its mo…Read more
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1171Conceptual Role SemanticsIn Edward Craig (ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Genealogy to Iqbal, Routledge. pp. 242-256. 1998.According to Conceptual Role Semantics, the meaning of a representation is the role of that representation in the cognitive life of the agent, e.g. in perception, thought and decision-making. It is an extension of the well known "use" theory of meaning, according to which the meaning of a word is its use in communication and more generally, in social interaction. CRS supplements external use by including the role of a symbol inside a computer or a brain. The uses appealed to are not just actual,…Read more
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1460Rich conscious perception outside focal attentionTrends in Cognitive Sciences 18 (9): 445-447. 2014.Can we consciously see more items at once than can be held in visual working memory? This question has elud- ed resolution because the ultimate evidence is subjects’ reports in which phenomenal consciousness is filtered through working memory. However, a new technique makes use of the fact that unattended ‘ensemble prop- erties’ can be detected ‘for free’ without decreasing working memory capacity.
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The philosophy of psychologyIn Philosophy 2: Further Through the Subject, Oxford University Press. 1998.
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567Consciousness and cognitive accessProceedings of the Aristotelian Society 108 (1pt3): 289-317. 2008.This article concerns the interplay between two issues that involve both philosophy and neuroscience: whether the content of phenomenal consciousness is 'rich' or 'sparse', whether phenomenal consciousness goes beyond cognitive access, and how it would be possible for there to be evidence one way or the other.
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1260Psychologism and behaviorismPhilosophical Review 90 (1): 5-43. 1981.Let psychologism be the doctrine that whether behavior is intelligent behavior depends on the character of the internal information processing that produces it. More specifically, I mean psychologism to involve the doctrine that two systems could have actual and potential behavior _typical_ of familiar intelligent beings, that the two systems could be exactly alike in their actual and potential behavior, and in their behavioral dispositions and capacities and counterfactual behavioral properties…Read more
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1252The harder problem of consciousnessJournal of Philosophy 99 (8): 391-425. 2002.consciousness comes about as a result of irritating nervous tissue, is just as unaccountable as the appearance of Djin when Aladdin rubbed his lamp.
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1588Sexism, racism, ageism and the nature of consciousnessIn Richard Moran, Alan Sidelle & Jennifer E. Whiting (eds.), Philosophical Topics, University of Arkansas Press. pp. 71--88. 2000.Everyone would agree that the American flag is red, white and blue. Everyone should also agree that it looks red, white and blue to people with normal color vision in appropriate circumstances. If a philosophical theory led to the conclusion that the red stripes cannot look red to both men and women, both blacks and whites, both young and old, we would be reluctant (to say the least) to accept that philosophical theory. But there is a widespread philosophical view about the nature of conscious …Read more
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Anti-reductionism slaps back: Mental causation, reduction and superveniencePhilosophical Perspectives 11 107-132. 1997.
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