Saturday, September 29, 2018

¿matrix?

Plato's allegory of the cave questions the entire reality we have grown to know. Plato challenges what is real and claims that the universe we can create through our five senses is artificial. In the allegory, it is the shadows that the cave dwellers consider reality, it is all they know and it is the source of their entire wealth of knowledge.

It makes one wonder whether Plato had any truth to his allegory. Is anything we perceive reality. We would like to think that it is and that of course what we sense is actual. But isn't that exactly what the cave dwellers though. They were under impression that of course, their knowledge was all there is.

I think a more interesting question and one more disturbing to think about is whether or not any of the knowledge that we hold so dearly and any of the knowledge that we have yet to discover is tainted, not because it is wrong but because it is fake. What if the knowledge we carry is simply properties of a world that is just a representation of something more real?

Boo, scary I know.
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3 comments:

Unknown said...

You make a very good point in this post. Plato's allegory certainly seems to be hinting at the idea that our reality isn't what it seems to be. Thinking about it philosophically, not only does the allegory of the cave hint at the objects around us being unreal but also the people as well. The prisoners in the story only are able to see other people through shadows. They don't look at each other so he is to say that the other prisoners are even there and not just a figment of one of their imaginations? After all, it is impossible to tell whether any other person technically exists because you aren't them. This idea is something that was present in another story that we read from last year, Grendel. This way of thinking, solipsism, is a belief that the only thing that can exist is you. Grendel believes that the world around him is fake and only something that is made within him. Truly, it is a sort of "matrix" as your title says.

September 29, 2018 at 7:33 PM
Unknown said...

Open your eyes people! I think Plato's allegory and your way of thinking about it is somewhat unrealistic. It is hard to compare the reality of free people like us who live in a world that is not really interfered or "tainted." Sure, we have fake news, sci-fi books/movies, crazy theories, photo-shop, and other ways to change someones perspective. All of these things definitely have the ability to sway someone's opinion or make someone believe an idea that is not true. But, for the most part, no one questions if the things they experience with their five senses are reality. God of course can always intervene in our lives to cause certain things to happen or not too happen, but other than that, there is nothing controlling our reality, unlike the prisoners in the allegory. The prisoners were put there by other people and were forced to stare at the wall and observed puppet shadows caused by other people. You can't compare their experience and their false sense of reality to everyone else in the world. Those prisoners had no freedom to think for themselves. All of us in society can observe our surroundings with out anyone altering it. We an obviously tell it's real. This world we live in now is not a representation of something more real. Everything we perceive is reality. But, I do think it important to question what occurs in our everyday reality. Such a way of thinking is needed for progress and the development of ideas.

September 30, 2018 at 1:45 PM
Anna Beth Talbot said...

I definitely think that the allegory of the cave reflects the truths of our world as we know it. There are so much more things we are ignorant of in the world compared to the things we think we know. I think more and more people have adopted the fact that our world could just be some big cover up. An example of these kind of people would be conspiracy theorists, which have been taking social media by storm lately. People labeled as "crazy" who go on TV claiming they've been abducted by aliens aren't usually taken seriously by the media. Plato would be unsurprised by this, considering in his allergy he explains that the person who has been "enlightened" won't easily sway the people that are still in the dark. Though I'm not saying I actually believe conspiracies/phenomenons like this exist and are the actual way of being enlightened, it would be easy for someone to believe this to be the equivalent of being "outside the cave".

October 1, 2018 at 8:18 PM

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