#8 Plato’s Cave and What It Means For Our Reality.
It is late. Amidst the fatigue, a familiar delirium takes hold of me. These small hours have the effect of shrouding my reality in mystery, giving it an other-worldly quality. The darkness makes the routine of tomorrow seem distant and the quiet amplifies the imagination of what could be. Tonight, for reasons unknown, my mind drifts to Plato’s Cave.
The Cave
In your mind, conjure up a cave.
Inside this cave, there are three captives facing the cave wall.
They have been there for as long as they remember. This cave and its stone wall are all that they know.
All three are bound in a way that prevents them from ever turning around to glimpse the true world outside the cave.
Unknown to these prisoners, there is a fire that burns brightly some distance behind them.
Between this fire and the incarcerated, there is a raised walkway, upon which people from outside use to bypass this strange place.
The fire casts shadows of our passersby and their chattel onto the stonewall, which our prisoners are able to perceive.
However, from their vantage point, they do not consider these projections shadows. They don’t think of them as derivatives of a ‘real thing’ because they have never observed the original. To them, these shadows are in every meaningful way, authentic reality.
Our prisoners take turns guessing what objects would appear next on the stonewall and they would congratulate each other for having guessed the right answer and the victor would receive the mantle of master of nature.
Sometime later, one of these inmates escapes his bondage. What he discovers outside the cave truly shocks him and he shutters at the thought that he once considered himself wise.
He returns to the cave to find his former companions still observing the stonewall and playing the same guessing game. He excitedly reports his findings outside the cave but the others weren’t interested. They go as far as threatening him if he dares to set them free of their subjugation.
For Plato, we are those prisoners, only able to perceive phenomena through our feeble senses. We consider what we observe to be real but in truth, they are only interpretations of phenomena, first received by our senses and then interpreted by our brains. It is this second-hand nature of our reality that particularly troubles and intrigues me. Essentially, everything we see, hear, smell, taste and touch are only subjective manifestations of the original. The true nature of our existence will always remain a closed book to us.
Plato believed that the only escape, the only viable path to piercing our subjectivity and acquiring a glimpse of the original reality is through philosophical reasoning rather than empirical observations. He is essentially arguing that because our senses are so limited, everything we record and observe with them will only be a shadow of a higher reality.
I find it difficult to fault this line of argument, although I am not sure if our capacity to reason can free us of this condition. However, it certainly has served us well thus far.
John Locke, the Englishman renowned more for his political philosophy, also has some interesting follow up thoughts of his own.
Locke argues that although we perceive tomatoes to be red, this is not the property of the tomato itself, but rather the result of the human eye’s particular perception of light waves. To a dog, a bee or someone with colourblindness, the tomato would not possess this same quality. Red is not an essence of the tomato but rather a consequence of the interaction between an observer and the subject.
This line of reasoning can be extrapolated to all of our other senses too. Whatever we see, hear, smell, taste and touch, what we observe are not inherent qualities of the things we are perceiving.
To theorise further, there is an idea that I have always gravitated towards intuitively. I have even found it to be romantic. It is the idea that the universe requires an observer to take form and exist. Without a human, an eagle, an ant or an earthworm, our universe would be formless. Something cannot be said to exist in any meaningful way until the moment it interacts with an observer.
In these private hours of tonight, I ponder whether our purpose here is to give shape to the universe. The sky cannot be blue without us looking and the thunder cannot be loud without us listening. The universe without an observer is a murky soup, uncertain of its contents. Similar to humans, it is perhaps a social creature, deriving its identity and form from others. It is vast because human eyes have looked at it. It is majestic because human emotions have felt it.
When I ponder about the contingent nature of our observed reality, the part that troubles me is the imperceivable nature of what lies beneath. I, a feeble and mortal human will never know its true form. At the same time, I am awestruck by it for the same reasons why I am attracted to these hours of the night - the cloaked nature of reality leaves room for boundless possibilities. Although the universe will keep its secrets from me, I am free to muse.
