Ned Block

American philosopher of mind at New York University, previously at MIT, whose distinctions and thought experiments structure debates about machine minds. In 'Troubles with Functionalism' (1978) he imagined the population of China simulating a brain's functional organization by radio, arguing that such a system might have no experiences at all, a challenge to functionalismfunctionalism, n.: The view that minds are defined by how they work, not what they are made of: pain, for example, is whatever inner state plays pain's part, linking injury, other thoughts and behavior.. In 'Psychologism and Behaviorism' (1981) he described the machine later nicknamed BlockheadBlockhead, n.: An imagined machine that passes any conversation test by looking up prewritten replies in an unimaginably huge table. Most people judge it unintelligent, which suggests that behavior alone does not prove intelligence., which could pass a Turing testTuring test, n.: Alan Turing's proposed test of machine intelligence: a judge holds typed conversations with a hidden person and a hidden computer, and the computer passes if the judge cannot consistently pick it out. of any fixed length by looking up canned replies in an enormous table, to show that intelligent-seeming behavior does not by itself establish intelligence — an argument often revisited for language modelslarge language model, n.: A computer program trained on enormous amounts of text to predict the words that come next. At vast scale, that simple skill lets it chat, answer questions, translate, summarize and write code. trained on vast text. His 1995 distinction between phenomenal consciousnessphenomenal consciousness, n.: The felt, experiential side of the mind — what it is like to taste coffee or to feel sad — as opposed to simply processing or reporting information. (what experience is like) and access consciousnessaccess consciousness, n.: Information in the mind that is available for use — for thinking, speaking and guiding behavior — whether or not any feeling comes with it. (information available for reasoning and report) is now standard, and he argues that the two can come apart, a point at issue in assessing machine consciousnessmachine consciousness, n.: Whether a machine such as an AI system could have genuine experiences of its own — and the research field that tries to find out, or to build such a machine..