: please explain plato’s allegory of the cave theory
In: 8
If shadows and silhouettes were the only thing you and your buddy Mike ever saw your entire lives, you would have built your views of the world based on only these shadows, but one day you walk outside the cave and see that there is way more to the world than just shadows. You wanna tell your buddy Mike about this whole other world, but he’s only ever known shadows, and he can’t see you, just your shadow.
Basically it’s explaining the difference between belief and knowledge. You can believe that the only thing to life is shadows, and someone can know that there’s more, but you’re so intent on your belief that you yourself think that you know the truth.
The dwellers of the cave are unable to see the source of the light only the shadows projected.
The idea is we are limited, we can be confined by our ability to perceive.
It’s an allegory for perception vs. education/higher reasoning. Basically, the shadows on the wall seem like the real world to the people in the cave because that is all they have known, and few question there is anything more to it than that. Whereas those that seek a higher level of reasoning find out that the shadows were just a poor representation of the world’s truths.
The story itself was about philosophers and a sort of justification or explanation of what they seek to do. But you could argue it’s a kind of warning to people to keep seeking to understand and stay educated lest you remain a prisoner chained up in a shallow cave the rest of your life.
Edit: Was just rereading this and imagined Plato yelling “wake up, sheeple!”
You think that everything around you is reality, because it’s everything you see.
The Cave concept is asking: What if everything you see is just a *projection* of actual reality? Just like how the shadow of a tree is the *projection* of the actual tree, but the shadow is not the tree.
You don’t ‘live in’ the real world.
You ‘live in’ a patchwork model your brain puts together based on biased information, clues, hints, rumours, educated guesswork and a hell of a lot of ad-libbing.
The simplest example:
All the words on the screen look sharp and clear enough, yeah? Your eyes are providing a nifty high-res view of the whole thing, aren’t they?
Focus your gaze on any word, and try to read the next three.
You cannot. You can get a rough sense of them, enough to confirm them if you already know what they say, but you can’t glean enough detail to actually decipher them.
The actual hi-res part of your vision is about the size of a blueberry at arm’s length. You’re looking through a drinking straw wrt actual details; all the rest is just peripheral vision – vague patchy handwave that does little more than agree with what you’ve already seen, like it’s la-la-ing along to the words past the first verse of the anthem.
But that’s not what you *see*. The illusion is pervasive; your brain takes bits from all your senses, munges it together with memory and assumptions and builds a seemingly-detailed virtual environment for you to inhabit mentally, with total confidence in what it’s saying, even when it’s incredibly wrong.
That’s the cave. There’s a world out there, more or less *consistent with* the shadows, but we can’t see it directly. All we can see is the model our brains build out of those shadows, and we cannot help but perceive that as reality.
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