Reality can be studied at different levels, so forms of “levelism” have often been advocated in the past.[^1] In the 1970s, levelism nicely dovetailed with the computational turn and became a standard approach both in science and in philoso…Block, N. (1997). Anti-reductionism slaps back. In J. E. Tomberlin (Ed.), Philosophical perspectives 11: Mind, causation, and world (pp. 107–133). Oxford, New York: Blackwell.
Brown, H. C. (1916). Structural levels in the scientist’s world…
Ned Block
philosopher · 2 mentions across 1 reading
In this course
Ned Block is a philosopher of mind concerned with questions of consciousness, representation, and the explanatory levels at which mental phenomena should be understood. His work on anti-reductionism—the view that higher-level mental properties cannot be fully explained by lower physical levels—appears in the readings to challenge computational and mechanistic approaches that assume consciousness can be captured through layer-by-layer analysis. Block's arguments are being mobilized here to complicate the "levelism" that emerged with computational theory, suggesting that certain aspects of mind resist reduction even as AI and cybernetic systems attempt to model them.
Mentioned in 1 reading
Appears alongside
People mentioned in the same passages — sorted by co-occurrence weight.
Allen Newell 1Daniel Dennett 1David Marr 1Herbert Simon 1Hilary Putnam 1John Foster 1John Heil 1Jonathan Schaffer 1Mihajlo Mesarovic 1Paul Oppenheim 1William Wimsatt 1Akos Egyed 1Carl F. Craver 1Daniel C. Dennett 1Donald Davidson 1Harold Chapman Brown 1James E. Tomberlin 1Karsten Engelhardt 1Luciano Floridi 1Nenad Medvidovic 1Richard P. Feynman 1Tom Mailbaum 1Willem-Paul de Roever 1