So Simple, a Caveman Could Illustrate it.

Hi, and welcome to Studious! I’m your host, Stuart Byers. Each week on Studious, I’m gonna try and tackle a subject of particular interest to me, and hopefully to you, the listener as well. If not, consider this one of those great podcasts to fall asleep to.

This week on Studious, we are going to explore Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. First, we’ll examine the concept, see what Plato was up to when he came up with it. We’ll see how it informed his worldview, and then, we are gonna check it out from a different angle and see how it may inform our current worldview (or mine at least). We may bring some other thinkers into the conversation and examine concepts like Empiricism or Skepticism. Honestly, I don’t know. I kinda make this shit up as I go. Ready? Let’s get started!

First, Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" is a famous story from his book The Republic that illustrates his philosophy on the nature of reality and knowledge.

In the allegory, a group of people are chained inside a dark cave and are facing a wall. They cannot turn their heads or move their bodies, so all they can see are the shadows cast on the wall by the objects and people passing by behind them. The prisoners believe that these shadows are the only reality and have no knowledge of the world beyond the cave.

One day, one of the prisoners is freed and forced to leave the cave. At first, the bright light outside the cave blinds the prisoner and everything seems confusing and chaotic. But as his eyes adjust to the light, he begins to see the true nature of reality and realize that the shadows on the cave wall were just a distorted reflection of reality.

The freed prisoner then returns to the cave to tell the others about the world outside, but they do not believe him because they have never experienced anything beyond their own limited reality. The other prisoners mock and ridicule him, refusing to accept the possibility of a different reality.

The allegory of the cave is often interpreted as a metaphor for the human condition. The cave represents the world of appearances, the world that we perceive through our senses, while the outside world represents the world of forms, the true reality that is beyond our senses. The shadows on the cave wall represent the illusions and lies that we are often presented with in our everyday lives, while the freed prisoner represents the philosopher who seeks to understand the truth about the world.

Plato uses the allegory of the cave to argue that knowledge is not gained through sensory experience, but rather through reason and intellectual inquiry. He suggests that we must break free from the illusions of the world of appearances and seek to understand the true nature of reality.

Plato believed in the existence of perfect forms, or Ideas, that exist in a non-physical realm that is distinct from the material world. He believed that the physical world is merely a shadow or a copy of the perfect forms. In other words, he believed that there is an ideal version of everything that exists in the physical world, and that the physical objects we encounter in the world are imperfect copies of these perfect forms.

According to Plato, these perfect forms are eternal, unchanging, and absolute, while the material world is subject to change, decay, and imperfection. He argued that the perfect forms exist independently of human thought or perception, and that they are the true objects of knowledge.

For example, Plato believed that there is an ideal form of beauty, which exists in a non-physical realm, and that the beauty we see in the physical world is only an imperfect copy of this ideal form. He believed that by understanding the perfect form of beauty, we can gain true knowledge of what is beautiful.

Plato's theory of perfect forms was an important part of his philosophy, and it had a significant influence on later philosophers and thinkers. It helped shape the development of metaphysics, epistemology, and aesthetics, and it continues to be a subject of debate and discussion in contemporary philosophy.

There have been many criticisms of Plato's theory of perfect forms over the years. First,  let’s explore the criticism called, The Problem of Knowledge: One of the biggest criticisms of Plato's theory of perfect forms is that it is difficult to explain how we can have knowledge of these perfect forms. If the perfect forms are separate from the physical world, how can we know anything about them? Plato's theory implies that knowledge comes from our memory of the perfect forms, but it is not clear how we can have knowledge of these perfect forms without direct experience.

Our second criticism of Plato’s perfect forms is called, The Problem of Participation: Plato's theory suggests that physical objects participate in the perfect forms, which means that they are imperfect copies of the perfect forms. However, it is difficult to explain how physical objects can participate in the perfect forms. Some critics argue that this theory is too vague and does not provide a clear explanation of how participation works.

Conveniently, our third criticism is called, The Problem of the "Third Man": This is a well-known problem in the philosophy of Plato's theory of perfect forms. If we say that physical objects are imperfect copies of the perfect forms, and that we can only know the perfect forms through these imperfect copies, then we have to ask how we can distinguish between the perfect forms and the copies. Plato's theory implies that there must be a "third man" to compare the copies to, and this creates an infinite regress. We discussed infinite regresses back in our talk about determinism. It’s turtles, all the way down, man.

Last, let’s consider the final criticism entitled, The Problem of the Physical World: Plato's theory suggests that the physical world is a shadow or a copy of the perfect forms. However, it is not clear how the physical world relates to the perfect forms. Some critics argue that this theory implies a sharp dichotomy between the physical world and the perfect forms, which is too simplistic.

Plato believed in perfect forms, or Ideas, because he was concerned with the nature of reality and the problem of knowledge. He was interested in understanding what makes something a particular thing and how we can know anything about the world. In his view, the world we see around us is constantly changing and in a state of flux, and we can't rely on our senses to give us knowledge of the world.

Plato thought that there must be something more stable and permanent that underlies the changing world, and that these stable and permanent things are the perfect forms. He believed that the perfect forms are eternal and unchanging, and that they are the true objects of knowledge.

So, at the center of his inquiry, Plato is looking for truth. He thinks his senses could deceive him, that this imperfect world in which he belongs is just a shadow of an ideal. Personally, I would possibly consider this world’s “imperfections” as part of its inherent perfection. Joseph Campbell once said, “When we talk about settling the world’s problems, we’re barking up the wrong tree. The world is perfect. It’s a mess. It has always been a mess. We’re not going to change it. Our job is to straighten out our own lives.” I’m going to circle back around to this idea in a later podcast when we discuss grand narratives.

So back to Plato. This notion of not trusting one’s senses kind of flies in the face of Empiricism, which posits that all human knowledge is derived from sense experience. This is where philosophy can get muddy for some. Being existential, experiential beings, it would seem that we are locked to the confines of empirical knowledge. Are you just living in a simulation? How would you ever know? Perhaps, if there were some clues, Scooby Doo… but we’ll save that talk for another time.

I want to point out that Plato isn’t necessarily wrong here. Our experiential data could deceive us. Better put, it could only be showing us part of the bigger picture. We could use our experiential data and deduce something using logic and reasoning, but we could be horrifically wrong in the process.

Ultimately, we are trying to discern the very nature of reality with this podcast, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t talk about Philip K. Dick, science fiction writer extraordinaire. Dick was somewhat obsessed about the nature of reality and it informed most of his works. I will get into Dick in greater detail another time, but for now, I just want to talk about his short story, Roog.

In Roog, we are given a tale through the perception of the family dog named, Boris. Each week, some suspicious, uniformed men sneak about the family domicile while their away and begin to pilfer their valuables. Boris cries out, ROOOOOOG! Every time, pleading, begging, for someone to pay attention, for someone to help. These insidious criminals are making away with the family’s treasures. He hears them approach, hears them collect the precious commodities, and Boris’ senses are so keen, he can even smell when the thieves have made off with the goods. These are bad men, they must be stopped.

Boris has used empirical knowledge to discern and deduce. By his estimations, these men are evil, and their intentions are maligned against the family. They must be stopped at any cost.

Here’s where Plato would stick his big, fat, Greek nose in and say that Boris can’t always trust his senses. We will learn at another date how good and evil might just be a matter of perspective, but for now, we can examine it in part from the perspective of Boris. To him, these men are evil, they are looting the family. However, to the other members of the family, these men are simply garbage collectors, doing their job of removing refuse. One man’s trash (it would seem) is Boris’ treasure, for he can smell the delicious food that the family wastefully casts aside.

Consider for a moment how limiting our senses actually can be. There are multiple divisions within the electromagnetic spectrum of which we don’t readily perceive: Thermal, Microwave, X-Ray. We only grasp a small portion of hertz in the audio spectrum. Our noses are quite inferior to dogs, sharks, bears, or ants. We are so humbly limited in our sensory acumen. We can barely devise tools to assist us into seeing the subatomic universe.

Plato thought of this true reality that existed beyond ours, which is where we get into metaphysics, which simply is just a term encompassing things outside our natural known universe. Things like an afterlife, or supernatural beings, or magic exist within the realm of metaphysics. For Plato, this world of perfection existed beyond ours and informed our reality. He believed humans came to know these concepts because we had a priori knowledge. Simply put, he believed we were born with this knowledge before we ever discover or learn it. Empiricists like Hume couldn’t subscribe to this belief system, for they believed all knowledge had to be derived by sensory exploration. So, who is right here?

I don’t subscribe much to metaphysics, because I lean more into the “seeing is believing,” aspect of learning. We men are visual creatures, so this should come as no big surprise. But I also really enjoy the rational. I need evidence to prove things to me. Plato was an ancient Greek, where science and metaphysics were indiscernible. His was a world of ideas lacking the benefit of technology to prove his points. But the ancient Greeks weren’t without some science and mathematics to guide them.

So back to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. It was designed to represent this superficial reality in which we take part: a shadow of the true reality of which we only understood through a priori knowledge of these perfect forms. Take a circle for example. You and I can attempt to draw a perfect circle, but we would always fall short. Even with the assistance of a computer or drafting table, our circles would be imperfect doppelgangers of what this ideal circle represents. The lines could never be clean enough. The paper or our writing utensil would always create a sketchy line once magnified.

And if we attempted to do it in a virtual world with a computer, well, that would kinda be cheating now wouldn’t it? But even if we did, there would come a moment when we zoomed in close enough, that the pixelation would be imperfect and not smooth.

However, we know what a perfect circle should be, and how to approximate it. Like the illusion of choice, that circle we drew is close enough for our purposes.

Which reminds me of limits and infinity. When I was in high school, I was a subpar student. I got mostly C’s with the occasional D or F from time to time. I didn’t care to apply myself, and honestly, I was probably bubbling with testosterone, distracting my every waking moment. However, I didn’t do poorly because I was stupid. I was lazy and never turned in homework. I’d just listen in class, then get A’s on my tests to balance out my lack of effort.

So senior year, I was taking Calculus. Not pre-calc, the real deal. I honestly should have never signed up for it, because at this point, I’d really checked out on math. One particular day, our teacher was explaining the concept of limits, which for the uninitiated is kinda like the part of a graph where the line just keeps going on forever.

She explained this with a story: Little Red Riding Hood is walking to grandmother’s house. The first day, she travels half the distance. The next day, she travels half the remaining distance. The next, half of the remaining distance again. Like those two Greek sophists: it’s turtles all the way down. Half, half, half, ad infinitum.

She then asks us in the class, “when or if does she ever make it to Grandmother’s house?”

I was in the camp of “never.” No matter how much time progresses, no matter how close she appears to be, there will always be an infinitesimal amount of distance between her and the house. She’ll be at the threshold or event horizon, but never will she cross it.

My teacher said, “well, in Calculus, we call this effective nothing, so we just write it as zero.”

I said, “this is an inexact science.” And I dropped the class soon thereafter.

Now my young brain was being too literal and couldn’t accept the illusion as being a good enough facsimile to the truth. I most likely was just looking for an excuse to drop a hard class and have another study hall.

The effective nothing is like the effective perfect circle, and guess what? If you draw it, they kinda look the same. Mind blown yet? It ain’t that serious, that was an easy one.

So back to Plato. He subscribes to this perfect conceptual reality informing our own, particularly regarding aesthetics, or beauty. And what is beauty anyway?

Well, we’ve devised metrics to illustrate beauty, and they most often are described in proportion. Pythagoras, you know, the guy with the triangle, was probably our oldest known mathematician who wrote about the golden ratio, also known as the golden mean, or divine proportion.  He and his followers were also philosophers who informed the works of Plato, having existed 200 years prior to this revelation of the cave.

The golden ratio was written about heavily by Euclid, in between Pythagoras and Plato. In his work Elements, Euclid described how to geometrically find the ratio, and argued the importance of its properties. This ratio informed much of the art and architecture in Ancient Greece, much in the way that Plato supposed this metaphysical world of perfection informed our own.

And here we are posed with a bit of a chicken or egg puzzle in regards to a priori information. Sure, the Greeks discovered the golden ration, but one could also argue that the ratio was informing their aesthetical choices long before the discovery. In fact, it’s probably been shaping human behavior before the dawn of mankind.

The golden ratio is almost synonymous with pleasing aesthetics or beauty, and modern researchers have applied that to the anthropology or biology of human mating. We tend to find people more attractive that have features illustrating this ratio. From body types to facial patterns and positions: those closer to the ratio rate higher.

So Plato might have been effectively close in his assumptions about a priori knowledge. We may not be aware of this coding of knowledge within us, but surely we are programmed with instinctual knowledge. It may not be as readily apparent as the foal whose wobbly birth dance turns into sured locomotion, but it is data wired into the system, and interestingly enough, showing a preference leaning towards one of these ideals.

And why do we have this programming in the first place? It’s all to aide us in selecting healthy partners to mate with. Nature designed (or a god, let’s not rule that out completely) a way mathematically to ensure reproductive success.

I still feel we are almost at an infancy of knowing all there is to know about this reality, but we are starting to make some big strides. Take the last mathematician to make some big waves: Benoit Mandlebrot. In the 1979 Benoit published his work now commonly known as The Mandlebrot Set. I’m not going to bore you with the logistics of how the set works, but it has to do with factorials, if that sounds familiar to you. So basically, if you use a computer to illustrate the set, you can get these trippy spirally patterns that branch off in all different directions, and if you zoom into each different branch, it looks like a perfect copy of the enlarged image. Again, we are back to these infinite regresses.

So, the set just kinda hung out for a minute, until a few years later when the use of the Mandelbrot set in computer graphics was pioneered by a mathematician and programmer named Robert W. Brooks, along with his collaborator Peter Matelski. Brooks and Matelski were the first to engineer and color these images for visual display of the set. This fractal geometry that Mandlebrot had discovered was his way of describing shapes more commonly found in nature. Once applied to computer graphics, fractal geometry made for more realistic complex patterns, ones closer to approximating mountain shapes, than simple 3-dimensional pyramids.

Then more researchers come along and start applying the set to biology. They begin to find that our flora uses the set in many of their design features. What was once seemingly random in how a tree would branch out, was now starting to take shape: fractal shape.

They even applied this to how many beings lived in an ecosystem. They found that by studying the branching of any one particular tree, they could mathematically deduce how many other similar plants lived int the nearby region.

And don’t get me started about mycelium. So, we have this underground network of fungus, that are connecting all of this plantlife together. Sending signals via the network. In fact, when one tree or plant is in need, the others will support it with nutrients via the network. This is just another tiny example of the reality happening around us that we were previously unaware of.

And it’s like our own internet. Have you ever seen a visual representation of our known universe? Even if you look at a portion, like the Large Quasar Group one of the largest observable things in our known universe, much larger than galaxies, it resembles our brains under the microscope. These networks all really start to resemble each other, the brain, the internet, mycelium. What if information is being passed all around us, much like the case of the mycelium? It’s starting to feel less like a “what if,” and more like a “probably so.”

And now we are back to the allegory of the Cave. What is reality? We’ve discussed earlier how it seems much like this subjective experience. And weirdly, our subjective realities bleed into and inform our shared reality. And then you have Plato over here talking about a grander reality, one that we only glimpse a shadow of.

Have you ever seen Cosmos with the late, great Carl Sagan? In it, he begins to try and illustrate an encounter between two beings, strangers in fact. And they could not be stranger, for one lives in what he can observe as a 2 dimensional experience. He can only experience things by width and length, never depth.

As he encounters an orange. The 2-dimensional man first sees a dot, and as the orange enters his view more, the dot increases in size, from a tiny circle into larger and larger circles, until it is the full size of the orange. It then recedes into smaller circles, until it finally turns back into a dot, and then vanishes from existence.

This was the reality based on perception for the 2-dimensional man. However, the 3-Dimensional man just saw an orange moving slowly through 3-dimensional space. They both also witnessed this through an additional dimension of time. Like the prisoner who escaped the cave and saw the world that cast shadows, the 3-dimensional man witnessed what is congruent with our take on reality. No matter how hard he could try, it would be impossible for him to describe depth to the two-dimensional man and what he just experienced. He's incapable of understanding, even in theory, because his mind has no experience to inform him of how this mystery was achieved.

And we were only describing 4 dimensions. Theoretically, if you talk to string theorists, there’s possibly 11 dimensions. I don’t have the time to even attempt tackling string theory today, but we will circle back around again in the future. Is it just me, or am I talking about circles a whole fucking lot today?

Ok. So briefly… these other dimensions happen in the subatomic universe… They’re called Calabi-Yao manifolds, they’re twisty and multi-dimensional. I’ve seen the Calabi-Yao manifolds illustrated, and they’re just approximations of extradimensional shapes, being conformed to a 3-dimensional drawing. We can’t begin to comprehend it, because we are like the 2-dimensional man in this case.

Quick aside: I just now get the term manifold. I’ve always heard it in relation to a part, like in mechanics. It literally is the two words that make it, many folds. Kinda like how Arby’s is R and B… RB for roast beef, or how Ore-Ida, the potato company is just an abbreviation for Ore-gon, Ida-ho. It’s all just there existing right in front of our face, but we are too blind to see it, much like the reality that exists beyond our purview. It’s right in front of us, and we still can’t see the forest through the trees.

Did you like how I circled back around to that? Again with the circles!?!?!?

So, let’s take a quick inventory: we can’t trust our sensory input, because out of context, it might deceive us. Knowing only part of the bigger picture is exactly how we could describe empiricism and gaining knowledge through our senses. We have covered how limited those senses can be in the grand scope of things; they can only show us part of a very large electromagnetic spectrum. We barely can devise tools to glean the subatomic universe accurately.

Where does this leave us? Do we go back to a belief in meta-physics like Plato? There’s this notion that magic is just science without the whys or hows. You go back 500 years, and our modern technologies would surely look like magic to those folks. Magic tablets, horseless carriages and flying machines… you catch my meaning. Perhaps what I’m suggesting is the simplest explanation of metaphysics, which simply put are abstract concepts with no basis in reality.  Maybe we shift that perspective to abstract concepts with no basis in known reality.

Part of the goal of science is to know where your blind spots are, and to keep an open mind. Creative, innovative thinking keeps channels open to think outside the box. Like an improv performer, it’s all “yes, and…”. Maybe there isn’t a perfect reality of forms superseding our own, and honestly, I don’t think we would enjoy it if there was. Who wants a problem-free existence? It may sound grand at first, but we would quickly tire of it. We humans are pattern-solving primates. This is what separates us from most of the other species on the planet, the scale of which we have adapted to solve problems.

It’s like that movie The Matrix, in which the antagonist Mr. Smith is explaining to Morpheus how they had previously tried to devise a heavenly construct for the humans to exist in their false reality, but the humans rejected it. Life is after all how your boy Hobbes put it: nasty, poore, brutish, and short, and according to my man Joey Campbell, it’s perfect that way. There will always be Chicken Littles out there claiming the sky is falling, but we humans have a pretty good track record of putting our minds to a solution to solve these grand problems. We’ve also come perilously close to eradicating our species a few times, so we shouldn’t get too cocky about problem solving skills just yet.

Have you ever thought about how far we have come as a species? I have. I do it quite regularly. Isaac Newton invented Calculus by the time he was 21. What have you or I done that is close to that? And he’s just one human in an unfathomable amount of people tackling problems. Stop for a moment and think about a radio. I used to fix them in the military. The principles of electronics are simple enough. You have capacitors that store a charge, resistors that control the flow of the current, transformers that step up or down the voltage. Induction can create magnetic fields. You combine all these principles, and add a few antennas and boom, there’s a radio. How simple, huh?

Honestly, I used to fix them, and I barely understand how they work. The shorthand version is simple enough: you take audio and transmit or piggyback it on a larger radiowave, then the receiver removes the radiowave, and all that is left is the audio to hear on the other side.

Here's where I get lost: how the fuck do you create a radio wave? I’m not gonna even do the research to explain it to you. I’m sure it’s rather clever. The point is, is that all these little steps and discoveries had to happen to lead up to the production of the radio, and if you can’t see those along the way, the shit looks magical. It’s the same exact thing for the evolution of flight. This world is so utterly complex, and we’ve probably only began to understand a fraction of it. We’re still pretty much cosmically stranded on this rock, like the castaways of Gilligan’s Island making radios out of coconuts. It’s both terrifying and exhilarating when I consider our current ignorance, but hey, more problems to solve in the future!

The point of all this, is that I think the Allegory serves as a practical example of our limitations. We should be ever mindful of these limitations in our hubris of “following the science.” We should not be quick to dismiss or write things off out of a convenience to our personal worldviews. We may have come far as a species, but we have so much further to go. To infinity and beyond? It’s a great line and a great joke, but it’s perhaps a literal translation of where we find ourselves: always on the cusp of exceeding our own limits and into the previously unknown. We sit at that event horizon, peering into the abyss of the black hole, threatening to stretch us out of time and existence, or possibly transporting our conscious and energy into the grand beyond.

So, what have we learned today? Well, I guess life is all about circles. The cave has a mouth, kinda like a circle. Your earholes are listening to this pod cast, which are circles. On a planet shaped like a circle. I can go round and round with this. It’s the never-ending hoops that we all are jumping through in life. Remind me to circle back around to that idea when we talk about grand narratives. I gotta motor. This has been Studious. Thanks again for listening.