Plato, or How to escape from a Nuclear Bunker?

Plato was a Greek philosopher who lived in Athens c. 428–348 BC. His allegory of the cave is probably the best-known parable of Ancient Greek philosophy.

According to the story, three prisoners live their whole lives in a cave. People, animals and carts pass by the entrance of the cave, but the prisoners cannot see them, because they never look towards the entrance. All they know about the outside world is the shadows on the cave walls.

Plato states that we are like these prisoners. The cave is built of our beliefs about the world. The shadows show how we interpret reality based on our beliefs.

Let’s imagine what happens when Connor, whose hobby is potholing, enters the cave with his friend, Rowan.

Connor equipped himself with a strong headlamp, but he didn’t need to switch it on, because there was enough light in the cave. They heard a hollow sound, as if a stream were running somewhere down in the cave.

“Can you hear this?” asked Connor.

“Yes! I should have put on my rubber boots,” shouted Rowan, who followed Connor into the cave.

They descended a few hundred meters when they saw three men sitting next to each other staring at the wall of the cave. Rowan and Connor looked at each other in surprise. They had never met anybody during their expeditions.

“Hi, there,” Connor’s voice echoed in the cave.

There was no answer.

“Do you think they are junkies?” whispered Rowan.

“Probably. Why would anyone sit and stare at a wall otherwise?”

“LSD? Magic mushrooms?”

Connor shrugged his shoulders. “Maybe they are just potholers like us.”

The stones under their shoes rolled noisily as they were going down the path. None of the three turned around. They were looking at the wall so intensely, as if they were absorbed in a film that made them forget reality.

“Hi there! Are you potholers too?” Connor asked again, loudly. The three men turned around, but they did not seem surprised.

“Hi, we live here. A potholer? What is it?”

“Someone who explores caves. Like us,” he pointed at himself and Rowan.

“Caves?”

“The place you live. This is a cave.”

“We just call it home. You can call it whatever you want.”

The man who responded was in his thirties. He looked like a hermit with his long, ungroomed, light-brown beard.

“I’m Connor, and he is my friend Rowan. The weather is horrible; it’s better to be in the cave than outside, isn’t it?”

“Outside? What is outside?”

“Outside the cave.”

“I don’t understand what you are trying to say. There is nothing outside.”

“Yes, there is. We came from outside.” Connor and Rowan looked at each other in confusion.

“It’s impossible. There is nothing outside,” repeated the hermit-looking man bluntly.

“Yes, there is! Come, I’ll show you.”

I think we can leave the cave now. This little example shows how hard it is to change someone’s deeply rooted beliefs. Plato would say that the potholer who can show the way out of the cave is a philosopher. If Plato were alive today, he would probably say the potholer must be a psychologist or a therapist.

Escape from the cave

The prisoners, like us, think that the shadows that they can see on the wall of the cave are the whole world. They know nothing else; that’s why they don’t have any reason to suspect that they see only shadows. They don’t even suspect that they are in a cave.

If we want to escape from the cave, we must realise that our interpretation of the world is never full and never accurate.

It cannot be full because our knowledge is limited. It cannot be accurate because it is largely based on our beliefs.

Let’s update Plato’s 2,500-year-old parable. Let’s imagine a cataclysm — a nuclear war, say — that forces a small group of people into an underground bunker. They cannot leave the bunker because the radiation level is too high outside, so the new generation grows up in the shelter. Let’s suppose that we are this new generation. We have never had the chance to get to know the world outside the bunker.

We can assume that the radiation level outside the shelter is so high that we would die within days if we went out. Our beliefs can be true or false, but even if they are true, they are not fully justified. We never measured the level of radiation. The information that we have about the world outside the bunker is just a belief, not knowledge. Knowledge is justified true belief. It would be justified if we could measure the level of radiation. It would be true if the radiation level were as high as we expected.

Usually, we don’t make decisions based on knowledge, but on beliefs. Even if they are true, they can be true in some situations, but false in others. Nevertheless, we fully trust in them.

Beliefs hide behind our everyday deeds. They constitute the framework of our actions. When we react to an event, we don’t register every aspect of the situation, but our perceptions trigger a rather superficial, generalised interpretation of the situation. Then we react to this interpretation, which may or may not be in accordance with the actual situation. We never react to the situation, but to the interpretation of the situation. This interpretation is always based on some kind of generalised belief that does not match reality in every situation. That’s why we need to revise our beliefs so that we can change our actions. We may live our lives never questioning our beliefs about the world, we may never think out of the box, out of the “cave”. But if we do so, don’t we just live our entire lives half-blind like the prisoners of the cave, who see only the shadows on the wall and believe that they can see the whole world?

I think that this is just one layer of the message in the allegory of the cave. If we do nothing else, just review our deeply rooted beliefs, including our prejudices and biases, we can take a big step towards a more fulfilling and freer life.

#philosophy

#Plato

#beliefs