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Showing posts from July, 2023

Shadows and Sunlight: Plato’s Cave in the Age of Information

The Allegory of the Cave is a famous thought experiment by the ancient Greek philosopher Plato. While the allegory was created to support an argument that Plato was trying to make back then, its implications can also be taken into the context of the modern world. The allegory begins by creating a situation where a row of prisoners are facing a wall with a backlight shined on it. Behind the prisoners, puppets move back and forth, casting a shadow on the wall that the prisoners are watching. The prisoners are also forced to look at these shadows on the wall, and have spent their entire lives in this one spot, staring at the shadows. To them, the shadows are their only world, that is, the real world. They might make theories about which puppets will show up next and debate among themselves about the patterns and behaviors of the shadows. They are fully convinced that the knowledge they gather from these shadows represents the entirety of existence. Now imagine what happens when one of the