The Allegory Of The Cave In Plato's Republic Book VII

Socrates’s allegory of the cave in Plato’s Republic Book VII is an accurate depiction of how people can be blinded by what they are only allowed to see. The allegory does have relevance to our modern world. In fact, all of us as a species are still in the “cave” no matter how intelligent or enlightened we think we have become.

In Plato’s Republic Book VII, Socrates depicts the scenario in a cave where there are prisoners who are fixed only being able to look at the shadows on the wall which are projections of things passing between them and the light source. Socrates claims that “what people in this situation would take for truth would be nothing more than the shadows of manufactured objects”. (221)

Indeed, if a person sees only two-dimensional shadows, he may never intuit that there could be a three-dimensional interacting in ways that make a lot more sense. We, human beings, live in a three-dimensional space. If we are told that a fourth dimension exists and asked to imagine what does a fourth-dimensional object look like, one will not be able to give an answer. Our experience and perception are limited to the three-dimensional space just as the prisoners are

In order to understand them it may require a brand new level of knowledge. In other words, some people might need to walk out of the “Cave”. The one famous experiment from the field of quantum mechanics, the Double-Slit Experiment, demonstrates the fact that the existence of an observer determines the outcome of the experiment. In short, the fascinating part is that the photons are being tested on seem to be aware of whether there exists an observer or not and react completely differently to the two circumstances. In this case the observer can be a human, a dog or even a machine. Yet how exactly does the existence of an observer affect how photons behave still remains an enigma in the modern