Epigraph:

And they ask you concerning the soul. Say, ‘The soul is by the command of my Lord; and of the knowledge thereof you have been given but a little.’ (Al Quran 17:85)

The Muslim Times has a large collection of articles about consciousness

The Muslim Times’ Chief Editor’s comments: Ned Block is coming from a Jewish background, but in these videos appears to me to be an agnostic or an atheist. He clearly says that he is a materialist. I agree with most that he has to say about consciousness, especially his criticism of Daniel Dennett, but I am an unashamed Monotheist coming from the Muslim tradition but learning from Jewish and Christian philosophers and theologians as well.

Ned Joel Block (born 1942) is an American philosopher working in philosophy of mind who has made important contributions to the understanding of consciousness and the philosophy of cognitive science. He has been professor of philosophy and psychology at New York University since 1996.

Block obtained his PhD from Harvard University in 1971 under the direction of Hilary Putnam. He joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as an assistant professor of philosophy (1971–1977), and then served as associate professor of philosophy (1977–1983), professor of philosophy (1983–1996) and as chair of the philosophy section (1989–1995). He has, since 1996, been a professor in the departments of philosophy and psychology at New York University (NYU).

Block is noted for presenting the Blockhead argument against the Turing test as a test of intelligence in a paper titled “Psychologism and Behaviorism” (1981). He is also known for his criticism of functionalism, arguing that a system with the same functional states as a human is not necessarily conscious.^[5]: 174

Block has been a judge at the Loebner Prize contest, a contest in the tradition of the Turing Test to determine whether a conversant is a computer or a human.^{[6]: 14–15}

In his more recent work on consciousness, he has made a distinction between phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness, where phenomenal consciousness consists of subjective experience and feelings and access consciousness consists of that information globally available in the cognitive system for the purposes of reasoning, speech and high-level action control. He has argued that access consciousness and phenomenal consciousness might not always coincide in human beings.

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