“Each of us believes himself to live directly within the world that surrounds him, to sense its objects and events precisely, and to live in real and current time. I assert that these are perceptual illusions … Each of us lives within the universe – the prison of his own brain.”
In 380 BC, Plato described prisoners held captive in a cave since birth. The cave allowed some light in – prisoners watched shadows cast upon the wall as people and animals passed by. The shadows were the only representation of the world they knew.
One day a prisoner broke free and stumbled outside… His mind was instantaneously and radically transformed – he saw the world in all its color and fidelity – it was overwhelming. He could never have appreciated how limited his view was without experiencing this.
He rushed back to the cave to alert the other prisoners. Despite his excitement, they dismissed him as crazy.
This cave is a metaphor for the human mind. Our perception of everyone and everything is more constrained and skewed than we can know… until we deliberately (or accidentally) experience an expanded view. Only then do we glimpse our ignorance.
Yet even here, more ignorance remains.
Ignorance Is Forever
“There is a plague on man,“ says Montaigne: “the opinion that he knows something.”
Stephen Batchelor, The Art of Solitude (p. 123)
When considering Plato’s cave allegory, everyone tends to relate to the prisoner who escaped and found truth. Indeed – we all find apparent truth in life, and reflexively want others to see it too. But how do we know OUR truth is right? What if truth we discover in one moment is invalidated in the next?
Are we ever exiting Plato’s cave for good? Or merely discovering, again and again, how ignorant we are? Stumbling from one cave into a more expansive one?
Not as a matter of a personal shortcoming – but as a matter of being a conscious being – entangled with a nervous system and brain.
Consider the ultraviolet vision of a bee (left) vs. the vision of a human (right).
Which representation of the flower is “true”?
The question is silly. Both representations are true relative to the brain that’s creating it. Neither the bee nor the human can know the “true” flower outside their brain’s interpretation.
We can extrapolate this to two humans interpreting a complex social argument. Person A will notice all the aspects of the argument that are emotionally salient to them, based on their unique life experience. Same for person B. These two interpretations of the argument will not reconcile exactly. Neither of them can be objectively true.
Reflection
Plato’s cave beautifully symbolizes what it’s like to be us – experiencing the world in our own unique way – our feelings, instincts, emotions, traumas, and reflexes – haphazardly compounded over decades – forever impoverished in ways we cannot see.
We know how it feels to realize our blindness – to feel embarrassed in how wrong or naive we were in hindsight. These “aha” moments are each another trip outside our cave – but the metaphor ends here… as we are forever in newer caves of biases and deceits.
This allegory illuminates the nature of truth, and its varieties:
- Objective Truth/Reality – everything in the universe exactly as it is – not interpreted through any individual nervous system – just pure existence – God’s eye view
- Relative Truth/Reality – how my brain represents things – how your brain represents things – how bees represent things – dogs represent things – etc…
- Consensus Truth/Reality – when many people cooperate to reconcile their respective truths, and agree on a common version
This last truth, consensus truth, is the most important (and fragile) means we have to cooperate and survive as a species. To establish and maintain consensus truth – values, laws, governments, institutions – takes an extraordinary amount of vigilance, patience, good faith, humility, reason, and sympathy to get right. And it’s easy to exploit and destroy.
More on the precariousness of consensus reality, here.
Consensus reality aside, it would do us all well to investigate the distortion and weaknesses within our own minds. Although none of us can know objective truth, it is possible to aim for “as close to truth as possible”. This takes humility, and an admission that we’re always shortsighted in ways we don’t yet understand.