Consciousness, Function, and Representation: Collected Papers, by Ned Block

Abstract

Ned Block believes in mental paint. He is also inclined to believe in mental oil. That is, he believes that the phenomenal character of experiences, what it is like to have experiences, cannot be completely captured by functional or representational facts, or by facts about cognition. An experience involves ‘mental paint’ if it represents, but, like paint, has a nature that goes beyond what it represents. A plausible example: the phenomenal red in my visual experience represents the red colour of surfaces, but the quality of phenomenal red — what it is like to see red — cannot be reduced to its representing the red colour of surfaces. An experiences involves ‘mental oil’ if it does not represent. Perhaps orgasms are a form of mental oil: pure what it is likeness unheeded by the task of mirroring the world. Many of the essays in Block’s first volume of collected papers ‘Consciousness, Function and Representation’ argue in this direction, which gives his diverse work in philosophy of mind an overall unity and coherence. He argues in part using traditional thought experiments, offering us some of the most memorable and powerful thought experiments in philosophy. Perhaps most notably, Block gives us the pleasure of contemplating the Chinese nation collectively replicating the functioning of the human brain, the aim of which is to show the possibility of something functionally indiscernible from us but lacking phenomenal consciousness.