Allegory of the cave

Plato

The Allegory of the cave is an allegory presented in “Republic” a philosophy work of the famous Plato.

The story is presented as a dialogue between Socrates (Plato’s mentor) and Plato’s elder brother, Glaucon.

The plot begins with a cave where people are imprisoned from their childhood. They are not simply imprisoned but actually chained by their neck and by their legs, this way their vision is only towards the wall in front of them. They can’t see each other; they can’t gaze at any other point in the cave.

Right behind the people chained, there is a pathway with a low wall. Behind that pathway, there is a strong fire. On this pathway, some people are walking about, but because of this low wall, their shadow is not cast upon the wall. However, the objects that these walking people are carrying do cast a shadow on the wall, which the imprisoned people can see.

The images of shadows are appearing as producing sounds, which are echoed from the real persons that walk behind them unseen.

As the prisoners have been imprisoned since childhood, they cannot know what the objects really look like or anything of the real actions taking place behind them, and therefore they perceive just the shadows as reality.

While the people walking do take care of the fire, and they cast the shadows of the objects like a puppet show, as artists, almost none of the prisoners and very few of the walking people will escape the cave.

The story takes a turn when one prisoner is freed. The first thing the prisoner would realize is seeing the fire, the light of which will hurt his eyes, as he never gaze directly upon it, but the same blindness of the fire will obturate the objects that made the shadows. If someone would tell him that those objects are real, and the shadows were not, he might not believe it at first, maybe even wanting to go back to look just at the shadows that he was so accustomed to.

If eventually, or by force, he would be taken outside of the cave. Eventually, he would see outside of the cave, he would see the sun. Once more eyes would hurt, and he would be in pain. Eventually, the eyes would adjust and see other people, he would see a different environment, the stars and the moon and a lot of unseen and extraordinary images.

With this newly acquired knowledge, the person would want to share it, so he would return to the cave, to the prisoners, wanting to tell them what he has seen and wanting to free them, so that they can see it with their own eyes. Entering the cave, he would now have a different eye strain, the darkness will now seem to much dimming of his sight.

But if he would try to drag them outside and tell them of such things never seen and not being able to understand them, or to understand him, surely a lot of the prisoners would try to kill him, to stop something that would seem of such madness for them.

Subjective opinion:

I once had a Physics teacher. He would get so angry when a pupil would be cheating on a test. He would get so angry when a person was attempting to reach a conclusion without going through some logical steps, looking at the answers from the end of the school manual. His reason for getting so angry, was according to him, that the only thing we need to worry about is to think for ourselves. “Soon enough there will be a lot of smart guys, tech-wise guys are emerging and if we do not think for ourselves, they will manipulate us into whatever they would want because you do not think for ourselves”.

How many times have we heard to be careful about “fake news” and so many sources accuse other sources of fake news? But who are the real news sources, and who are not? And what if there are cases when today source A is giving fake news and source B is giving real news, but tomorrow source A is giving real news and source B is giving fake news. Sometimes there are not even malicious intentions involved, sometimes both sources believe the news they are delivering is true.

There is a lot of tech giants that track us in every second, every click we take, all not to track what are our interests and serve us ads based on our interests, but actually tracking us to algorithm us to see how susceptible we are to be influenced, and this way to persuade us that we want to see certain ads, and eventually that it was our opinion, our decision all along.

So, these are some of those “smart tech guys” that will make us believe their decisions are our thoughts. And if we can not think for ourselves, we are in danger.

Now there is yet another danger coming along. Maybe even bigger. This tech giant smart guy created some platforms. But on these platforms, you can get so much noise. So many opinions. And anyone on these platforms can have an opinion on everything. They do not have to be qualified; they do not even have to research too much on the subject. Just make it commercial enough, clickbait enough, to make it outrageous enough.

And nowadays make it is so politically correct, that people will jump on it straight away. Everyone loves a cancel culture article, to destroy a famous person for an opinion that can be twisted so that it seems they said something so scandalous that they deserved to be trashed down.

There are so many video vloggers nowadays, and so many short videos teaching people to do everything and anything, by people that do not have any real qualification in the field. They do not have to have it, to become “viral”. A book on history takes probably around 3, 4 authors, just as many researchers, one or two editors, some people checking the facts, then a publisher, and at least a couple of months or years of work on it. A video takes less than a day to produce by a single person with a good camera. And all it takes is an audience that would prefer to watch a free video of a vlogger pretending to be an ace in history, which takes less than half an hour than to go to a bookshop, buy an actual book, and spend a couple of days reading it.

Our capacity of seeking quality is so deemed. And what is worse our capacity to maintain focus is so reduced that we went from the capacity on focusing a couple of hours a day of reading a book to a couple of hours of watching a documentary, reduced to a maximum of an hour to listen to a podcast or watch a video online, eventually, that is too long. We reached the point where to be competitive these social media platforms need to present us with 10 seconds, 15 seconds max videos, we get bored if something takes longer than that. We cannot maintain focus for more than a couple of seconds. And we even think that is our decision, it is because the world is moving that fast, we are that better generation where we have reached that speed.

The human brain and the real memory cannot achieve anything at that speed. Cannot memorise anything at that speed. How many things do we actually struggle to memorize, now that we know the answers are a click away, and a couple of seconds later a mobile phone screen shows the answer? But that is not our own inner research that revealed the answer, is a smartphone, certainly became smarter than us. Not because of technology, because we become less knowledgeable.

A useful thing when we search in our own intellect and not on a phone. Is because a phone can show information based on what we searched. The human mind can still make a lot more connections between its information, a lot more than any present software or any artificial intelligence modeller. Accumulated information in a human brain will produce new, innovative, creative ideas, a computer will only produce a pattern that was at some point in one form or another revealed to them. So, we still are smarter than our smart devices, if we want to be.

It only needs to start with a book. A paper typed book. Not a screen, not a software algorithm, but a book. A recent study shows that 10 minutes of reading literature, per day, will decrease the over burning syndrome, increase imagination, and produce so many triggers in the brain, that it will constantly and exponentially increase the capacity of the brain. Not to mention reducing the risk of Alzheimer, Dementia, and causing a release of oxytocin so big, similar to eating chocolate a day. That is just by reading. Thinking for ourselves. Watching fewer social media photos, videos and opinionated persons on anything and everything… that sells. It might take longer to accumulate, but the memory will be more fixed, and easier to reach, not to mention able to access the information even without electricity or a broadband plan and will increase the capacity to focus. Just by reading.

Reading can be us looking into the sun, seeing the outside environment and not just some shadows on a wall of a cave. Sure, there will be neck bounded prisoners that would not accept looking into the sunlight, but we know to expect that from Plato’s Allegory of the cave, don’t we? Should we investigate the sun a book can reveal, or on a dark, cave-like mobile phone screen?

Just an opinion. Just a thought. Just Steven J. Scott.