Mind, Matter, and Meaning

Ned Block

Ned Block (b. 1942) has taught philosophy at New York University since 1996, after twenty-five years at MIT. His work ranges across consciousness, perception, and the foundations of cognitive science, and his distinctions have a way of becoming the field’s standard equipment: nearly every current debate about consciousness sorts itself with his phenomenal/access divide.

Major Works

  • “Troubles with Functionalism” (1978) — the absent and inverted qualia objections to functionalism
  • “On a Confusion about a Function of Consciousness” (Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1995) — introduces the phenomenal/access consciousness distinction
  • “Mental Paint” (2003, in Hahn & Ramberg, eds., Reflections and Replies) — the anti-representationalist critique of transparency
  • “The Mind as the Software of the Brain” — survey article on functionalism and its limits

Key Positions

Phenomenal vs. access consciousness. Block’s most widely adopted contribution is the distinction between P-consciousness (phenomenal consciousness: what it is like) and A-consciousness (access consciousness: availability for reasoning, report, and the control of behavior). A state is A-conscious when its content is freely available to processes of reasoning and verbal report; it is P-conscious when there is something it is like to be in it. These can come apart: Block’s imagined “super-blindsighter” would have A-conscious access to visual information with no P-consciousness of it, and rich experience may be P-conscious yet exceed what its subject can report.

Mental paint: the anti-representationalist case. Block’s “Mental Paint” is the central contemporary challenge to strong representationalism. His thesis: purely externalist representationalist accounts of consciousness fail to capture the intrinsic qualitative character of experience — the “mental paint” that colors experience from the inside. Against transparency, Block argues that there are features you can notice by introspecting that no difference in the represented world will account for. His strategy is to find phenomenal differences without representational differences:

  • Blurry vision. When a sharp edge blurs, something in how things seem changes, yet (Block claims) you do not see the edge as fuzzy the way a watercolor edge is fuzzy — the change is in the experience, not in the represented world.
  • Pressure phosphenes. Press on a closed eye: drifting blobs of light appear. No external object is being represented, making it hard to relocate the phenomenal character into worldly content.
  • Inverted Earth / inversion cases. Scenarios designed to hold representational content fixed while phenomenal character differs, or vice versa, to show the two can come apart.

If even one such case establishes a phenomenal difference without a representational difference, strong representationalism’s identity claim fails.

Absent and inverted qualia against functionalism. Block’s earlier work presses the absent-qualia and inverted-qualia objections against functionalism: a system could satisfy every functional specification of a mental state while having no experience at all, or systematically inverted experience. His most vivid illustration is the homunculi-headed system of “Troubles with Functionalism”: let the population of China, linked by two-way radios, realize the functional organization of a mind, and ask whether that vast system feels anything at all.

My View

Ned Block is the book’s most formidable opponent on its own turf. Where Searle attacks computationalism from outside and the dualist attacks physicalism from outside, Block attacks the book’s positive theory, strong representationalism, from inside the broadly physicalist, scientifically serious camp the book itself occupies. He is a naturalist, no friend of dualism, and he still thinks the central identity claim is false. That makes him the opponent worth meeting at his best.

The book uses Block’s P/A distinction while resisting the moral he draws from it — that P-consciousness floats free of representational facts in a way that defeats representationalism. On my view, the “what it is like” is itself representational; the distinction marks two roles, not two kinds of stuff.

On mental paint, I answer blur through determinacy and manner: blurry vision presents edges less determinately rather than revealing a smear on an inner canvas. Afterimages and phosphenes press harder. A nonconceptual visual state may present a colored, filmy shape at an apparent location while the subject’s higher-level judgment correctly identifies the episode as an afterimage or phosphene. That reply remains contested rather than settled, and transparency alone cannot establish the identity claim. Block is the reason the book must specify content, mode, attention, and state-consciousness independently rather than enlarging “content” whenever a difficult case appears. The pressure is real; the further mental paint still explains nothing the complete intentional profile does not explain better. See Transparency, Qualia, and Tye.

  • Transparency — the thesis Block’s mental-paint cases target
  • Qualia — Block is the most serious contemporary qualia realist the book engages
  • Intentionalism — the representationalism Block argues is incomplete
  • Tye — the book’s ally; Tye’s replies to Block on absent qualia and transparency
  • Functionalism — the target of Block’s absent/inverted qualia objections
  • Higher-Order Thought (HOT) Theories — adjacent debates on consciousness Block’s P/A distinction informs