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  1. The Border Between Seeing and Thinking.Ned Block - 2023 - New York, US: OUP USA.
    This book argues that there is a joint in nature between seeing and thinking, perception, and cognition. Perception is constitutively iconic, nonconceptual, and nonpropositional, whereas cognition does not have these properties constitutively. The book does not appeal to “intuitions,” as is common in philosophy, but to empirical evidence, including experiments in neuroscience and psychology. The book argues that cognition affects perception, i.e., that perception is cognitively penetrable, but that this does not impugn the joint in nature. A key part of (...)
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  2. Seeing‐As in the Light of Vision Science.Ned Block - 2014 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 89 (1):560-572.
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  3. Perceptual consciousness overflows cognitive access.Ned Block - 2011 - Trends in Cognitive Sciences 15 (12):567-575.
    One of the most important issues concerning the foundations ofconscious perception centerson thequestion of whether perceptual consciousness is rich or sparse. The overflow argument uses a form of ‘iconic memory’ toarguethatperceptual consciousnessisricher (i.e.,has a higher capacity) than cognitive access: when observing a complex scene we are conscious of more than we can report or think about. Recently, the overflow argumenthas been challenged both empirically and conceptually. This paper reviews the controversy, arguing that proponents of sparse perception are committed to the (...)
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  4. What Is Wrong with the No-Report Paradigm and How to Fix It.Ned Block - 2019 - Trends in Cognitive Sciences 23 (12):1003-1013.
    Is consciousness based in prefrontal circuits involved in cognitive processes like thought, reasoning, and memory or, alternatively, is it based in sensory areas in the back of the neocortex? The no-report paradigm has been crucial to this debate because it aims to separate the neural basis of the cognitive processes underlying post-perceptual decision and report from the neural basis of conscious perception itself. However, the no-report paradigm is problematic because, even in the absence of report, subjects might engage in post-perceptual (...)
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  5. Consciousness and accessibility.Ned Block - 1990 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13 (4):596-598.
    This is my first publication of the distinction between phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness, though not using quite those terms. It ends with this: "The upshot is this: If Searle is using the access sense of "consciousness," his argument doesn't get to first base. If, as is more likely, he intends the what-it-is-like sense, his argument depends on assumptions about issues that the cognitivist is bound to regard as deeply unsettled empirical questions." Searle replies: "He refers to what he calls (...)
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  6. Rich conscious perception outside focal attention.Ned Block - 2014 - Trends in Cognitive Sciences 18 (9):445-447.
    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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  7. Do causal powers drain away.Ned Block - 2003 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 67 (1):133-150.
    In this note, I will discuss one issue concerning the main argument of Mind in a Physical World (Kim, 1998), the Causal Exclusion Argument. The issue is whether it is a consequence of the Causal Exclusion Argument that all macro level causation (that is, causation above the level of fundamental physics) is an illusion, with all of the apparent causal powers of mental and other macro properties draining into the bottom level of physics. I will argue that such a consequence (...)
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  8. The Grain of Vision and the Grain of Attention.Ned Block - 2012 - Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 1 (3):170-184.
    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 conclusion, together with new (...)
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  9. Does the prefrontal cortex play an essential role in consciousness? Insights from intracranial electrical stimulation of the human brain.Omri Raccah, Ned Block & Kieran C. R. Fox - 2021 - Journal of Neuroscience 1 (41):2076-2087.
    A central debate in philosophy and neuroscience pertains to whether PFC activity plays an essential role in the neural basis of consciousness. Neuroimaging and electrophysiology studies have revealed that the contents of conscious perceptual experience can be successfully decoded from PFC activity, but these findings might be confounded by post- perceptual cognitive processes, such as thinking, reasoning, and decision-making, that are not necessary for con- sciousness. To clarify the involvement of the PFC in consciousness, we present a synthesis of research (...)
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  10. The mind as the software of the brain.Ned Block - 1990 - In Daniel N. Osherson & Edward E. Smith (eds.), An Invitation to Cognitive Science: Visual cognition. 2. MIT Press. pp. 377-425.
    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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  11. (1 other version)If perception is probabilistic, why doesn't it seem probabilistic?Ned Block - 2018 - Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 373 (1755).
    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, foveally, in good conditions, it does not look at all (...)
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  12. (1 other version)The Harder Problem of Consciousness.Ned Block - 2002 - Journal of Philosophy 99 (8):391.
    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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  13. Conceptual Role Semantics.Ned Block - 1996 - In Edward Craig (ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Genealogy to Iqbal. New York: Routledge. pp. 242-256.
    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 (...)
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  14. Holism, Hyper‐analyticity and Hyper‐compositionality.Ned Block - 2007 - Mind and Language 8 (1):1-27.
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  15. Finessing the Bored Monkey Problem.Ned Block - 2020 - Trends in Cognitive Sciences 24 (1):1-2.
    This is a response to Ian Phillips and Jorge Morales, "The Fundamental Problem with No-Cognition Paradigms," Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2020.
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  16. Seeing and Windows of Integration.Ned Block - 2013 - Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 2 (1):29-39.
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  17. The Canberra Plan Neglects Ground.Ned Block - 2015 - In Terence Horgan, Marcelo Sabates & David Sosa (eds.), Qualia and Mental Causation in a Physical World: Themes From the Philosophy of Jaegwon Kim. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press. pp. 105-133.
    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 most general (...)
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  18. The Defective Armchair: A Reply to Tye.Ned Block - 2014 - Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 3 (2):159-165.
    Michael Tye's response to my “Grain” (Block ) and “Windows” (Block ) raises general metaphilosophical issues about the value of intuitions and judgments about one's perceptions and the relations of those intuitions and judgments to empirical research, as well as specific philosophical issues about the relation between seeing, attention and de re thought. I will argue that Tye's appeal to what is (§. 2) “intuitively obvious, once we reflect upon these cases” (“intuition”) is problematic. I will also argue that first (...)
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  19. Top-down attention and consciousness: comment on Cohen et al.Naotsugu Tsuchiya, Ned Block & Christof Koch - 2012 - Trends in Cognitive Sciences 16 (11):527.
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  20. The Anna Karenina Theory of the Unconscious.Ned Block - 2011 - Neuropsychoanalysis 13 (1):34-37.
    The Anna Karenina Theory says: all conscious states are alike; each unconscious state is unconscious in its own way. This note argues that many components have to function properly to produce consciousness, but failure in any one of many different ones can yield an unconscious state in different ways. In that sense the Anna Karenina theory is true. But in another respect it is false: kinds of unconsciousness depend on kinds of consciousness.
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  21. Attention and perceptual adaptation.Ned Block & Susanna Siegel - 2013 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 36 (3):205-206.
    Commentary on Andy Clark's target article on predictive coding.
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  22. Consciousness, Big Science and Conceptual Clarity.Ned Block - 2014 - In Gary Marcus & Jeremy Freeman (eds.), in The Future of the Brain: Essays by the World’s Leading Neuroscientists. Princeton University Press. pp. 161-176.
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  23. IX*—An Argument for Holism1.Ned Block - 1995 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 95 (1):151-170.
    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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  24.  26
    Memory representations during slow change blindness.Haley G. Frey, Lua Koenig, Ned Block, Biyu He & Jan Brascamp - 2024 - Journal of Vision 24 (9):1-8.
    Classic change blindness is the phenomenon where seemingly obvious changes which coincide with visual disruptions (such as blinks or brief blanks) go unnoticed by an attentive observer. Some early work into the causes of classic change blindness suggested that any pre-change stimulus representation is overwritten by a representation of the altered post-change stimulus, preventing change detection. However, recent work revealed that even when observers do maintain memory representations of both the pre- and post-change stimulus states, they can still miss the (...)
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  25. Le fonctionnalisme face au problème Des qualia.Ned Block - 1992 - Les Etudes Philosophiques (3):337-369.
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  26. Let's get rid of the concept of an object file.Ned Block - forthcoming - In Brian McLaughlin & Jonathan Cohen (eds.), Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Mind, Second Edition. Wiley. pp. 494-516.
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  27. States' rights.Ned Block & Sylvain Bromberger - 1980 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3 (1):73-74.
    This is a response to Jerry Fodor’s article, Fodor, J. (1980). "Methodological solipsism as a research strategy in cognitive psychology." Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3: 63-109.
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  28. Measuring away an attentional confound?Jorge Morales, Yasha Mouradi, Claire Sergent, Ned Block, Vincent Taschereau-Dumouchel, David Rosenthal, Piercesare Grimaldi & Hakwan Lau - 2017 - Neuroscience of Consciousness 3 (1):1-3.
    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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  29. (1 other version)Holism, mental and semantic.Ned Block - 1996 - In Edward Craig (ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Genealogy to Iqbal. New York: Routledge.
    Mental (or semantic) holism is the doctrine that the identity of a belief content (or the meaning of a sentence that expresses it) is determined by its place in the web of beliefs or sentences comprising a whole theory or group of theories. It can be contrasted with two other views: atomism and molecularism. Molecularism characterizes meaning and content in terms of relatively small parts of the web in a way that allows many different theories to share those parts. For (...)
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  30. (1 other version)States of mind: a neuroscientist searches for the seat of consciousness. [REVIEW]Ned Block - 2024 - Science 384 (6696):629.
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  31. review of Julian Jaynes, Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. [REVIEW]Ned Block - 1977 - Boston Globe.
    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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