Plato's 'cave'
So; what can we know? If the whole of Western philosophy is just a footnote to Plato, it seems like a good place to start is with Plato and his 'cave'. He had prisoners, not literally, chained so that all they could see where shadows on a wall. Since this is all they could see and I'm guessing that literally they had no sense experience of anything else except themselves and the shadows on that wall, those prisoners truly believed those shadows to be 'real' in an empirical truth sense of real.
Now one day that prisoner gets physically dragged away from that wall, that reality that they are comfortable with and are dragged to the light, sunlight, above ground. Pain from bright sunlight after spending most of your life in a cave aside and the fact you are terrified not knowing what the heck is going on, you get through the pain and are forced in to that light and your whole world view changes as you realize there is a massive 'real' world out there. You realise that your whole life was restricted, forcibly, in to believing that those shadows were reality and now you are seeing the truth in an empirical sense.
Plato used this to hammer home the point that what we see here is not the truth and that there is a higher truth, the forms, out there which we cannot access, because we are chained prisoners, beholden to what empirical truth or science can tell us about our world. Plato demonstrates that we can examine our 'cave', but that is as far as our 'truth' can penetrate empirically at least. And that empirical truth has led many of us to become materialists in our thinking and in a sense it is right to believe we are materialists, but only in so far as we accept the limitations of our knowledge base and accept the only thing we can gain knowledge empirically of is our surroundings. Bearing in mind if we are prisoners of a 'cave' all we can ever 'know' are the shadows of higher forms.
I can absolutely agree with Plato's allegory and to make a point that surely if we could only break the bonds that bind us, break our chains, we can explore greater vistas and find our own sunlight, our own truth, even if it is a painful journey, even if it would mean acclimatising and having to question our beliefs at the most fundamental levels.
Of course mankind started that Journey before Plato, the Pre-Socratics started us off with thinking. Philosophy, science as it was then, yearned to find 'truth'. questioned what can we truly know and wanted answers, even if it was painful. Ultimately Philosophy branched off as Science became a topic in itself, but both are needed in order to find the way out of Plato's cave.
Our truth?
But I am writing an analogy of an allegory and I find analogy a better way to put my point across than through the use of language alone, so here are a few examples you may have came across or could go out and get for yourself.
Jim Carrey's The Truman show: 'Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey) has a seemingly idyllic lifestyle: a secure job, a loving family and a peaceful home. Yet, unbeknownst to him, his entire existence has been one long TV series, the people around him Hollywood actors, the town a massive studio set, and the whole show orchestrated by a visionary director (Ed Harris). As the truth begins to dawn on Truman, he resolves to break free, no matter the consequences for the programme's ratings.'
Can we ever really know if our lives are just one big soap opera?
Horton hears a who: 'Horton hearing the faint cry for help from a tiny dust speck atop a small clover and doing his best to protect the inhabitants of that small civilization of Whoville despite the disbelief, disdain, and persecution of his fellow animals.'
That's right, we may be a tiny dust speck atop a small clover; how can we know?
Terry Pratchett's Strata:
Kin Arad is a high-ranking official of the Company. After twenty-one decades of living, and with the help of memory surgery, she is at the top of her profession. Discovering two of her employees have placed a fossilized plesiosaur in the wrong stratum, not to mention the fact it is holding a placard which reads, 'End Nuclear Testing Now', doesn't dismay the woman who built a mountain range in the shape of her initials during her own high-spirited youth.
But then came discovery of something which did intrigue Kin Arad. A flat earth was something new...'
Could we really be living on just one of multiple terra-formed planets? Are we just another creation of, for want of a better term, a God or Gods?
Perhaps I should leave the last word on this to Socrates: "I am the wisest man alive for I know one thing and that is I know nothing!"
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