Plato's Cave

Do yourself a great favour. Buy a copy of Plato's Republic and read away. You can find a used copy in a book shop that sells old books. University towns are good places to root out treasures.

Why the parable about the cave? Read the portion and decide which way you are facing. Along with the question on perception/reality it also tells us those with absolute knowledge, will be rebuffed by those with relative knowledge.

Remember the lecture I've done on the difference between truth and opinion. Try to determine it opinion is being offered up as truth and look for a reading of the antient charges when I speak on this topic.

Dale

ref. Souls of Distortion.NL

The parable of Plato's cave

A line of prisoners is chained together in a cave looking at a cave wall. Since they are chained they cannot turn their heads to look and see what is behind them. Outside the cave a fire is burning. People pass by projecting from the fire their images on the cave wall. All the prisoners have ever seen is the shadows of persons passing by their cave. They assume, therefore, that the shadows are reality.

Then, one day, one of the prisoners is released. He goes up, out of the cave and into the sunlight. He sees colors and three dimensional images for the first time. He decides that he must go down back into the cave to tell the other prisoner that what they have taken for reality is false. After his return his eyes take a while to readjust to the darkness in the cave. He tells his fellow prisoners what he has seen outside the cave and tells them that what they see is only a projection of reality. What happens is that the prisoners turn mad and make a fool out of the released man. The unreleased prisoners deduct from what they hear and see of the released man that going up out of the cave is dangerous and makes one mad, so they ignore him and return to watch the shadows on the wall again.

Many of us act like the prisoners in Plato's cave when we are confronted with these revolutionary scientific concepts and rather head back to our cave. In the analogy of Plato's parable, it is the skeptic who chooses to stay imprisoned. Now is the time to free your mind!