Editing Ned Block (section)

==Philosophical work==

===Philosophy of artificial intelligence===
Block is noted for presenting the [[Blockhead argument]] against the [[Turing test]] as a test of [[Intelligence (trait)|intelligence]] in a paper titled "Psychologism and Behaviorism" (1981). He is also known for his criticism of [[Functionalism (philosophy of mind)|functionalism]], arguing that a [[system]] with the same [[Functionalism (philosophy of mind)|functional state]]s as a human is not necessarily conscious.<ref>Ritchie, S. L., ''Divine Action and the Human Mind'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), [https://books.google.com/books?id=himhDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA174 p. 174.]</ref>{{rp|174}}

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.<ref>van de Gevel, Ad J. W., & Noussair, C. N., ''The Nexus between Artificial Intelligence and Economics'' ([[Berlin]]/[[Heidelberg]]: [[Springer Science+Business Media|Springer]], 2013), [https://books.google.com/books?id=uek_AAAAQBAJ&pg=PA14 pp. 14–15].</ref>{{rp|14–15}}

===Consciousness===
In his more recent work on [[consciousness]], he has made a distinction between [[phenomenal consciousness]] and [[Phenomenal consciousness#Types of consciousness|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.

====Overflow argument====

Ned Block has mounted the overflow argument, which argues against the view that phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness are identical. Instead, Ned Block argues that phenomenal consciousness overflows conscious access, meaning that one can consciously experience something that they do not have conscious access to. Empirically, this means that a subject can have some content included in their conscious experience, but lack the cognitive recognition of the content that is necessary to report that the content was in fact experienced.<ref name="Block 2011 pp. 567–575">{{cite journal | last=Block | first=Ned | title=Perceptual consciousness overflows cognitive access | journal=Trends in Cognitive Sciences | volume=15 | issue=12 | date=2011 | doi=10.1016/j.tics.2011.11.001 | pages=567–575| pmid=22078929 | url=https://philpapers.org/rec/BLOPCO-2 }}</ref>