At the beginning of this semester, we looked at liberty, privacy and freedom of speech. I found this section quite interesting, especially since unlike first semester it applied directly to my life. Freedom of speech was a particularly interesting topic to me, because I couldn’t work out my opinion on it. When I thought about the issue in purely philosophical terms, I thought that there should be unrestricted freedom of speech and that censorship should be kept to a minimum. But when I thought about the issue in relation to the real world, I wasn’t so sure.
This is one of the frustrating things about philosophy – what appears to be philosophically sound in my mind turns out quite differently when applied to the real world. I think it is in finding a balance that the real difficulty lies. Throughout the course of the first essay, I found myself arguing views that I hadn’t thought I believed in – and even now I’m not sure if I do. I think sometimes what works philosophically still can’t apply to the real world for considerations that shouldn’t have to have a bearing on the issue but do anyway.
In the issue of freedom of speech, I found that philosophically hate-speech doesn’t cause any significant harm. But when I think about it in the context of the outside world, I firmly believe that it does. This discrepancy is confusing to me. The unit we studied on eyewitness evidence I found to be rather dry – I couldn’t really relate to a whole lot of legal stuff. When it was put in the context of the real-life rape victim I found it much more accessible. The essay topic that I chose seemed again rather dull, although it raised interesting side-issues, like the nature of our society.
I tried to think why science was regarded as the best way we have to gain knowledge, and came up with a rather depressing view of society – that it was matter oriented, money oriented, concerned with facts and figures, things that were able to be thought of in terms of quantities. And that we tended to ignore the abstract, the indefinable, the unexplainable. This is why I find philosophy occasionally depressing – it forces me to look at the world in which I live, and not like what I see.
And yet it is simultaneously liberating because I can see that through studying philosophy, I can look at those other aspects and move beyond what society thinks. Philosophy exposes the ugly truths, and then invites the philosopher to move beyond them. By acknowledging them, we can move on. The section on metaphysics and artificial intelligence was my favourite section. I love the more imaginative sections of philosophy – beyond reality, beyond the real world, into the imagined world, the “head in the clouds” stuff.
Artificial intelligence is fascinating. And I find the study of it quite challenging, because I personally had some deep-centred blocks against admitting that a machine could be intelligent. I didn’t want it to be true. I couldn’t accept that a machine could be human, could think, could be intelligent. I didn’t want to think that a machine could write poetry or have a soul or fall in love. But I had to eventually force myself to consider the possibility.
