Ned Block

Silver Professor of Philosophy, Psychology and Neural Science, New York University

Ned Block (Ph.D., Harvard), Silver Professor of Philosophy, Psychology and Neural Science, came to NYU in 1996 from MIT where he was Chair of the Philosophy Program. He works in philosophy of mind and foundations of neuroscience and cognitive science, and is currently writing a book on attention. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society, has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Senior Fellow of the Center for the Study of Language and Information, a Sloan Foundation Fellow, a faculty member at two National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institutes and two Summer Seminars, the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Science Foundation; and a recipient of the Robert A. Muh Alumni Award in Humanities and Social Science from MIT. He is a past president of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, a past Chair of the MIT Press Cognitive Science Board, and past President of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness. The Philosophers’ Annual selected his papers as one of the “ten best” in 1983, 1990, 1995, 2002 and 2010. He is co-editor of The Nature of Consciousness: Philosophical Debates (MIT Press, 1997). The first two volumes of his collected papers, Functionalism, Consciousness and Representation (MIT Press) came out in 2007. Blockheads!  Essays on Ned Block’s Philosophy of Mind and Consciousness was published by MIT Press in 2019 and The Border Between Seeing and Thinking is in press with Oxford University Press.

He has given the William James Lectures at Harvard, the Immanuel Kant Lectures at Stanford, the John Locke Lectures at Oxford and the Jean Nicod Lectures at École Normale Supérieure, Paris.

Participant In These Roundtable Discussions

Sat
Oct 22nd
2016
  Watch

Embodied AI

This roundtable examines the concept of embodied cognition and its implications for artificial intelligence systems that integrate perception, action, and interaction with the physical world. It considers how technologies such as machine learning and natural language processing, when combined with sensory and motor capabilities, can move beyond abstract computation to engage with real-world environments, augment human abilities, and support complex tasks across domains such as healthcare, industry, and human–machine collaboration.
Sat
Oct 15th
2022
  Watch

Coding and the New Human Phenotype

This conference explores the concept of life, knowledge, and experience through the lens of “code,” examining how meaning is encoded, transmitted, and transformed across biological, digital, and cultural systems. Through five roundtables, it investigates how we reconstruct the past, navigate authenticity in a digital world, interpret fiction and ideas, engage with AI-generated language, and consider the possibility that reality itself may be fundamentally computational—together asking what is gained, and what may be lost, as code increasingly mediates our understanding of the world.