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naraburns nihil supernum
1yr ago
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Notes -
When I was first introduced to the allegory it was in a Media Philosophy class in college, and we watched The Matrix right afterwards. And it happened to be the first time I had seen the movie so in full context the whole discussion was rather mind-bending to me.
Throw in some information of how one's environment and upbringing can directly influence how they are able to perceive reality with their senses and I think there's quite a bit of meat there.
Yes, scientists have more-or-less literally carried out Plato's cave experiment on young kittens.
If you were one of the cats raised in an environment consisting only of vertical lines and was incapable of perceiving horizontal lines (except by turning one's head sideways!) wouldn't this be a massive 'hobble' on your understanding of baseline reality? And wouldn't we want you to gain a clearer, more accurate image of the world?
So perhaps the point of Plato's cave is to pose the question of whether the prisoners are not just only experiencing a 'flatter' version of reality, but whether they are fundamentally less able to perceive things in 'higher' reality. And, taking that a step further, whether even 'normal' humans raised in a 'normal' environment might be missing out on some facets of their world that they simply haven't gained the ability to see? Shouldn't we be trying to find ways to improve our own perceptions, because we wouldn't even know if there were 'higher' parts of reality and experiences out there unless we make a decision to start looking for them?
Plato's terminal point was, I believe, that there are 'platonic ideals' of certain concepts out there that are beyond our mere senses, and education/reason must be employed to perceive them. Those lacking education or reason are forever cut off from this extra plane. Which is probably where the "foolish mortals, us philosophers have access to whole dimensions of reality that you can't even fathom" part comes from.
Compare that to the idea of the simulation hypothesis, where our simulation masters are the ones who control everything we experience and perceive and can expose us to as much or as little of 'true' reality as they wish, and much of this thought experiment seems prescient.
Managing to generate an idea this 'out there' as an ancient philosopher is, I'd assert, rather impressive!
IMO it's not so much that the cave-dweller is physiologically unable to perceive Truth, in the way that those cats can't see horizontal lines, but about the mind-constraining effects of socialisation/indoctrination/brainwashing that is an inevitable and necessary result of growing up inside a culture.
Once the cave-dweller is shown the outside world/Truth, he recoils. We like to imagine that upon seeing Truth, we will not only recognise it, but accept it. But Plato is right. The cave is comfy and familiar, and besides, all our friends and family are there. And once the ex-cave-dweller accepts the Truth, and returns to the cave, he finds himself mocked and ostracised.
Those who take the red pill often don't end up saving the world. They might end up poor and mad, like Ignaz Semmelweis or van Gogh.
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The objection I have is that this is coloured by hundreds of years of interpretation, people read into it what they want. It's like a story in the bible. Originally the author may have put it there for the stupidest of reasons, he was reffering to a petty fight he had with his neighbour last week. After millions of washing cycles in the minds of clever people, there is no end to the brilliant insights to be found in that story.
I would also assert that the Bible DOES contain much valid wisdom that was inserted there less because of a petty fight with a neighbor, and more because there were society-level problems that were ameliorated by adding in particular cludgy solutions which had to be enforced by an all-seeing God in order to stick.
For instance, consider that many of the more ridiculous behavioral constraints that many Christians assert belief in are based in the books of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. i.e. the ones written when the Israelites were wandering in the desert for 40 years. Seriously, anytime someone cites some 'absurd' rule that Christians believe is an inviolable moral principle, check which book of the Bible it came from. It's gonna be one of those. This includes the Ten Commandments! Many of those rules seem EMINENTLY SENSIBLE in the context of a large group of nomadic people who have to survive for decades under extremely harsh conditions.
So the failure of interpretation is mostly removing those rules from their original context and trying to apply them to a world where we are not under such survival threat.
In Plato's case, I don't think he was motivated by such incentives, but if you're trying to convince people that they should take concepts which cannot be directly perceived seriously, such as this newfangled 'geometry,' maybe it is useful to get them to think about it in terms that are comprehensible to a somewhat bright person.
I guess the question is whether you think future 'better' ideas built off of his work, or replaced it with better understanding derived from superior logic?
I also happen to be reading Neal Stephenson's Anathem right now, and a core theme in there is the conflict between one faction of intellectuals who believe that the ideals of geometry, mathematics, etc. actually exist on a higher level, and spend efforts trying to perceive them, and those who believe that they don't, but are simply symbols which we impose on a messy, uncertain world in order to force it to make sense, and the symbols themselves don't have inherent meaning.
I adore Anathem, in part due to comparisons with my freshman dorm, but I don’t remember those two factions. It certainly fits with the themes!
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Are they eminently sensible, or are they ridiculous? Because if you’re stuck in a desert, I don’t see how not mixing linen with wool and cutting off your enemy’s wife’s hand who’s grabbing your balls helps. Sounds like you’re missing out.
Let’s say plato wrote this purely to diss his uppity neighbour who made fun of him for claiming to have higher knowledge. He didn’t think about the epistemiological or political implications. Is the meaning others have read into the story still there, or was it put there by the readers? I think the latter. They could easily have put it in another story, or made one up. Maybe really weird personal stories can serve as a catalyst, but they don’t produce the material.
You don't see, because you're living in a culture where the problems these were designed to solve simply do not exist.
The interesting thing about these old testament rules is that the Jews who still follow them tend to have a lengthy traditions of examining them and maybe the original reasons were even written down and preserved over generations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shatnez
Also, consider the fact that even if the reasons are lost, that doesn't mean they didn't exist.
https://philife.nd.edu/henrichs-the-secret-of-our-success/
Check the section on Cassava/Manioc. This plant is literally able to kill you with it's cyanide content, unless it is prepared/processed in a very specific, comprehensive fashion.
The societies that were preparing it didn't know what cyanide was. They had no scientifically verified reason to believe that you needed to do all these steps:
These were just traditions and rules passed down without any reason for them on the record. And yet, if you DIDN'T follow the process quite precisely, you'd probably get sick or die from eating it.
In that light, it might be hard to judge an ancient culture's rules as 'irrational' without considering that they may have been developed over multiple generations of experience that certain problems were solved via weird-looking behaviors that nonetheless prevent the issue from arising.
If you want to point at the irrationality of sticking to these rules against all evidence, you've got a stronger case.
I think the conceit that a modern viewpoint is inherently superior to an older one is usually flawed when it doesn't account for the fact that these older societies faced a different set of challenges AND had to come up with de novo solutions without as much benefit of hindsight.
And societies that didn't manage to solve the issues fail, die out, and are not included in our sample of surviving rules.
I genuinely don't know Plato's logic in creating an analogy like the Cave, and yet I would expect he had some reason for it that was rational enough at the time.
It certainly wasn't written to placate modern critics.
This doesn't mean the analogy isn't tortured and perhaps inapplicable to any practical use.
Yes, they start with the assumption that those laws and stories are valuable and good because god said so, and then expand vast amounts of brainpower to delimit and explain those laws in a more "secular" sense. If they'd started with figuring out what laws would make the most sense first, I guarantee they would not come anywhere close to those laws.
A lot of those laws seem ridiculous because they are, manioc is the exception (and we figured that one too btw, and I don't think it's in the torah either) . They can justify them all, but how likely is it that nomads thousands of years ago were not just generally right, but right on everything? Do our present leaders never make mistakes?
Yeah, this seems to be the downstream effect of assuming an all-seeing, all-powerful God who is enforcing the rules.
But if you don't have the all-seeing God assumption, it's presumably much harder to ensure people will actually follow the rules.
If you DO have one, then you better keep following his rules exactly until he gives you permission to do otherwise.
They were right often enough to survive, and rules, cultures, and principles that survive, especially for centuries, should probably not be disregarded without strong evidence. Because this means that these rules have successfully gone through various shocks, disasters, long periods of strife, and have proven resilient against all such stressors and challenges. The ones that don't just... die. So we often don't have examples to compare to.
Long-term survival is basically self-evidence that a particular behavior was 'rational' in terms of it contributing to a society's success. This is perhaps the big tension between conservatism and progressivism. Which rules are important and actually should be preserved because their function is vital to society functioning well and surviving, and which rules are a vestigal remainder of a past time that is no longer relevant?
It may be that we cannot know that until faced with the situations such rules were designed to handle, and then it may be too late.
A good way I've heard it expressed: you may be smarter than your parents. You're NOT smarter than 100 generations of ancestors.
Does it matter if they are my ancestors, or is the weight of time sufficient? I'm sure bushmen and sentinelese have long-running traditions in the style of the old semites, but I would not think they contain superior knowledge to me and my internet connection. As to my ancestors, they have been mixing wool and linen for 100 generations, and they've been fine. Is this a case of "my dad's dad's dad's dad's.... could beat up your dad's dad's dad's dad's..." . If these last few millenia were a thorough scientific experiment on appropriate clothing alloys, shouldn't the verdict be in by now?
Do you think you could survive in the African bush, the Australian outback, or the Sentinel islands for any extended period of time, if you were dropped off there and given an internet-connected smartphone (and weren't allowed to call an uber nor order supplies)? Is that knowledge useful to you, merely by having access to it?
That's what I'm getting at. Survival traits tend to be optimized for the environment in which they arise, and may protect against risks that you don't even perceive because they only arise if you fail to adhere to the processes that ward them off.
If, due to some major disturbance of global civilized society, we were to revert to a pre-industrial standards of living, I daresay you would find that your superior knowledge wouldn't be much use in ensuring your survival in this new environment.
Versus people who have a longstanding culture that has survived for eons might be able to just fall back on well-known behaviors that were inculcated in them and are thus more-or-less automatic and nigh-instinctual. See: the Amish.
Or, for another analogy, consider that there exist diseases which were frozen in Artic permafrost and contemporary humans might be susceiptible to. Whereas humans whose immune systems were adapted to these diseases might not be threatened at all, those without the resistance might die simply because they've never encountered this particular threat.
Whether you think our modern medical and scientific edifice is up to the task of shoring up this weakness may have to do with your take on how they responded to Covid19.
The loss of a cultural 'immune response' might, likewise, expose a society to hazards that it has long forgotten.
Probably! But in some cases, if the tradition is relatively cheap to adhere to, might be acceptable to stay 'on the safe side' and just keep following it since it costs little to do so, and may be providing a large benefit.
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