: please explain plato’s allegory of the cave theory
In: 8
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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