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148IX*—An Argument for Holism1Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 95 (1): 151-170. 1995.Ned Block; IX*—An Argument for Holism1, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 95, Issue 1, 1 June 1995, Pages 151–170
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Readings in Philosophy of PsychologyBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 33 (2): 227-230. 1980.
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12Readings in the Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. 2. Ned BlockPhilosophy of Science 50 (1): 175-176. 1983.
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11Sexism, Racism, Ageism, and the Nature of ConsciousnessPhilosophical Topics 26 (1-2): 39-70. 1999.
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20Is Experiencing Just Representing?Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 58 (3): 663-670. 1998.
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9Troubles with functionalismIn W. Savage (ed.), Perception and Cognition, University of Minnesota Press. pp. 9--261. 1978.
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89Author's responseBehavioral and Brain Sciences 20 (1). 1997.The distinction between phenomenal and access consciousness arises from the battle between biological and computational approaches to the mind. If P = A, the computationalists are right; but if not, the biological nature of P yields its scientific nature.
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1763ConsciousnessIn Patrick Wilken, Timothy J. Bayne & Axel Cleeremans (eds.), The Oxford Companion to Consciousness, Oxford University Press. 2009.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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547The 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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522If 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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454Measuring 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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1092Some concepts of consciousnessIn David John Chalmers (ed.), Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings, Oxford University Press Usa. pp. 206-219. 2002.Consciousness is a mongrel concept: there are a number of very different "consciousnesses". Phenomenal consciousness is experience; the phenomenally conscious aspect of a state is what it is like to be in that state
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112Partial awareness and the illusion of phenomenal consciousnessBehavioral and Brain Sciences 30 (5): 510-510. 2007.The dissociation Block provides between phenomenal and access consciousness (P-consciousness and A-consciousness) captures much of our intuition about conscious experience. However, it raises a major methodological puzzle, and is not uniquely supported by the empirical evidence. We provide an alternative interpretation based on the notion of levels of representation and partial awareness
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121How many concepts of consciousness?Behavioral and Brain Sciences 18 (2): 272-287. 1995.With some help from the commentators, a few adjustments to the characterizations of A-consciousness and P-consciousness can avoid some trivial cases of one without the other. But it still seems that the case for the existence of P without A is stronger than that for A without P. If indeed there can be P without A, but not A without P, this would be a remarkable result that would need explanation.
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141Ruritania revisitedPhilosophical Issues 6 171-187. 1995.Perhaps you are wondering what I mean by ‘holism’. After all, everyone seems to use the term in a different sense. Even if we restrict ourselves to holism of meaning and content, we have many different holisms. Some take holism about meaning to be the doctrine that if you’ve got one meaning, you’ve got lots of them.2 On other views, to say meaning is holistic is to say that the meaning of each term depends on the meanings of all or most other terms.3 Others take meaning holism to be the doctrine…Read more
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1130Review of Julian Jaynes, Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (review)Boston Globe. 1977.Review of Julian Jaynes, Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind from the Boston Globe, March 6, 1977, p. A17
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3846Troubles with functionalismMinnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science 9 261-325. 1978.The functionalist view of the nature of the mind is now widely accepted. Like behaviorism and physicalism, functionalism seeks to answer the question "What are mental states?" I shall be concerned with identity thesis formulations of functionalism. They say, for example, that pain is a functional state, just as identity thesis formulations of physicalism say that pain is a physical state
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1126What is Functionalism?In Ned Joel Block (ed.), Readings in Philosophy of Psychology: 1, Harvard University Press. 1980.What is Functionalism? Functionalism is one of the major proposals that have been offered as solutions to the mind/body problem. Solutions to the mind/body problem usually try to answer questions such as: What is the ultimate nature of the mental? At the most general level, what makes a mental state mental? Or more specifically, What do thoughts have in common in virtue of which they are thoughts? That is, what makes a thought a thought? What makes a pain a pain? Cartesian Dualism said the ultim…Read more
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457Concepts of ConsciousnessIn David John Chalmers (ed.), Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings, Oxford University Press Usa. pp. 206-218. 2002.
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1Two kinds of lawsIn Cynthia MacDonald & Graham MacDonald (eds.), Philosophy of Psychology: Debates on Psychological Explanation, Blackwell. 1994.
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845The Grain of Vision and the Grain of AttentionThought: A Journal of Philosophy 1 (3): 170-184. 2012.Often when there is no attention to an object, there is no conscious perception of it either, leading some to conclude that conscious perception is an attentional phenomenon. There is a well-known perceptual phenomenon—visuo-spatial crowding, in which objects are too closely packed for attention to single out one of them. This article argues that there is a variant of crowding—what I call ‘‘identity-crowding’’—in which one can consciously see a thing despite failure of attention to it. This conc…Read more
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787Consciousness, Accessibility, and the Mesh between Psychology and NeuroscienceBehavioral and Brain Sciences 30 (5): 481--548. 2007.How can we disentangle the neural basis of phenomenal consciousness from the neural machinery of the cognitive access that underlies reports of phenomenal consciousness? We can see the problem in stark form if we ask how we could tell whether representations inside a Fodorian module are phenomenally conscious. The methodology would seem straightforward: find the neural natural kinds that are the basis of phenomenal consciousness in clear cases when subjects are completely confident and we have n…Read more
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Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Philosophy of Neuroscience |
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