First, let me reassure you that the experience you describe, of having random thoughts pop into your head, is extremely common, and not a sign of anything wrong. (That said, if these occurrences are worrying you, or if the content of the thoughts is disturbing, please consult a mental health practitioner). As for control: it is consistent with our having some control over our thought processes that there are *also* random or at least non-rational processes that affect us at times. We know, for example, that concepts, ideas, and images can become linked to each, so that thinking of one thing immediately prompts thought of another. So, for many of us, the word "salt" immediately causes us to think "pepper." Or a few notes of a certain piece of music, or a whiff of a certain fragrance, can stir up particular emotions or memories. Associations occur as a result of things being frequently paired in our experience, (like the conjunction of the word "salt" with "pepper"), but they can also be built...

You may not realize it, but you have presupposed the answer to your question in the way you asked it. You speak of the computer "trying" to execute a code. Trying involves intending to do something. So if you are not speaking metaphorically, you are presupposing that computers can have intentions, and that the computer in your case already has one. If the computer can really be said to be trying, then the additional detail in your example (viz., that there's a temporal gap between the computer's beginning to try, and the execution of the intended act) doesn't matter. Now maybe you meant to be using the term "trying" loosely, or metaphorically, and then your question was whether the term "intention" could be strictly and literally applied to a computer. That's a good question. The answer, however, is not going to depend on whether there's a a temporal gap between the trying and the successful execution. You can see that if you consider some non-controversial cases of something's intending to...

I am not sure you really have a philosophical question here. You worry that it might be morally wrong for you to continue to date a man with autism because he "may not fully understand his feelings or mine." I suspect that you are laboring under a misunderstanding of the nature of "autism." An autistic individual is not necessarily incapable of introspecting or articulating his (or her) own feelings; nor is an autistic person necessarily unable to understand the feelings of others. What appears to be the case, according to the experts I have read, is that autistic individuals lack certain ways of coming to understand the feelings of others that non-autistic people find natural. Autistic individuals typically have trouble "reading" facial expressions and body language, for example. Nonetheless, many autistic people contrive other ways of learning about the psychological states of other people, ways that are often effective enough that these other people don't realize that they're interacting...

In order to answer your question, I need to explain a distinction between two kinds of mental state: propositional attitude states, and qualitative states. A propositional attitude state is, as the name suggests, a state of having an attitude toward a proposition. Take the proposition expressed by the sentence, “there is milk in the fridge.” I can believe that proposition, that is, I can believe that there is milk in the fridge, but I can take other attitudes as well – I can hope that there’s milk in the fridge, want there to be milk in the fridge, regret that there’s milk in the fridge (because its availability caused you to eat the last brownie, perhaps), suppose for the sake of argument that there’s milk in the fridge, pretend that there’s milk in the fridge, etc. The point is that all these kinds of mental state crucially involve propositions or propositional content. A qualitative state is the state of simply experiencing – it’s a state where it “feels like” something to be in that...

Clearly, machines can process information. For the machine to have knowledge, however, this information has to be information for the machine – the machine would have to understand the information it processes. What would that involve? In the first place, the states or events in the machine that store or process the information (including, for example, data bases and the contents of memory registers) would have to be richly integrated with all the other states of the machine, and particularly with the machine’s input and output states, analogously to the way in which our thoughts and memories are integrated with our perceptions and motor commands. This is a functional requirement on machine understanding. The second requirement is that the input states that supply the information be properly related to the states of affairs in the world the information is about. For human beings, the input states are perceptions, and what a visual perception "means" – what it is about – is determined...

There is a lot of debate among philosophers right now as to whether our common sense view of "personality" is accurate. We tend to think of ourselves and of others as having stable psychological characteristics that underlie and explain our behavior in a large range of diverse circumstances. But there’s an increasing body of evidence from social psychology that suggests that a great deal of our behavioral responses depend heavily on what situation we’re in. For example, a study of students at the Princeton Theological Seminary showed that the likelihood of a student’s stopping to help an apparently injured person was strongly depended heavily on whether the student had been advised that he or she was running late for the next phase of the experiment. So what may appear to be "uncharacteristic" behavior on the part of some individual may simply be the result of the individual’s being in an "uncharacteristic" situation. And certainly the people one interacts with are important determinants of...

There are two competing views on this. The first view -- possibly the more popular view among philosophers -- is that thought and language are essentially tied together, so that there cannot be one without the other. (Leave aside all the evidence from casual observation that it's all too possible to talk without thinking). The argument for this view appeals to the evidence we generally need for attributing thoughts to others -- namely, verbal behavior. (You can read a good example of this sort of argument in an article by Donald Davidson called "Thought and Talk." ) There is also the consideration you raise, that thinking sort of "feels" like talking silently to oneself. But the inconvenient thing about this view is that it requires us to deny that pre-verbal children and animals have thought. And while we don't have all the evidence for attributing thinking to such beings that we have in the case of fully verbal adults, we do nonetheless have lots of evidence that such beings think. ...

To say that a condition is a "state of mind" is not to say that there is no objective fact as to whether someone is in that state of mind, so that thinking it so makes it so. So someone could easily come to believe that she's depressed without actually being depressed. Suppose that an otherwise reliable magazine publishes a quiz for the self-diagnosis of depression, but the quiz, unbeknownst to the editors, was written as a hoax. As part of the hoax, the quiz carries an introduction that "informs" readers that depression often be "hidden" beneath superficial signs of happiness, even elation. An unsuspecting reader, who is not in fact depressed, takes the quiz and scores "very depressed." The reader might well come to believe that he is depressed, even though he is not. Now while the hoax victim might, like a genuinely depressed person, might seek psychiatric help, there is no reason to think that the hoax victim would experience any of the actual symptoms of depression, like feelings of...

To properly answer your question, I'd need the help of a cognitive psychologist and a neuroscientist, more money than God has, and at least a hundred years. Make that two hundred years. To the extent that yours is a philosophical question, rather than a question for science, it's a question about what thoughts would have to be like in order to account for the known, everyday facts about beliefs, desires, imaginings, etc. There are a few different philosophical schools of thought on this question. One group of philosophers think that it's unlikely that there is any systematic correspondence between what we ordinarily think of as "thoughts" (?!?) and goings-on in the brain. According to these folks, our talk of beliefs and desires and such just reflects our apprehension of broad and complex patterns in our observable behavior. Philosophers in this group include Willard van Orman Quine, and Donald Davidson. According to another group -- a group to which I belong -- beliefs and desires...

The question of the unity of the self is one that has engaged the attention of a lot of philosophers, particularly in light of phenomena such as the ones you cite. Advances in techniques for investigating the brain have also stimulated philosophical interest. This is all by way of stalling, because, in fact, the question you ask is devilishly difficult and I don't think anyone knows the answer. Some philosophers have interpreted the split-brain data as showing that there are always at least two seats of consciousness, one in each hemisphere, but that normal conditions make the two "selves" so well-coordinated that there is no evidence of the division. (And the fact that one self gets to do all the talking means that introspection is largely under the control of the left "self.") Other philosophers think that consciousness is unified in normal people, but "splits" if and when the corpus callosum is cut. I find this less plausible than the first position, since it entails either that the...