What is Real? (Plato's Allegory of the Cave) - 8-Bit Philosophy 

My philosophy teacher in college would appreciate my understanding of this video.

Probably not the game designers we put meaning into objects that have no meaning

Its basically Plato who has so much depth...

Luke Xaxas Frankly, I'm more of a Socrates and Aristotle fan, myself. Plato CAN be interesting, but he's also a giant dick.

Too scary; would not bang.@_@

+Nick Schafer threw*

i read this in rick sanchez' voice with all the extra letters as burps i don't know why

I wish philosophy had presented this way when I took it so many years ago. :)

You don't ever had any drug trip, do you ?

Vault Technition you would have no shit to loose .just utter acceptance of it

Hеу Yоutubе ! *GEТ Unlimitеd Gоld Bаrs & Аngеls Рееermаnеnt to уоur АdVеnturе Cаpitalist Aсcоunt* nоw => twitter.com/5b410a1c15aa13ea5/status/779269023557038080 Whаt is Reеаl Рlаtо s Allegоry of thееее Cаvеe  8 Bit РРPРhilosoрhу

that's the problem isn't it. the trip only makes some people's view of reality more clear, so it nothing really changes. thus perception intensifies and so does insanity.

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Love this!

Concrete

Loving this!

Amazing, how your simple cartune helps you ponder the deepest questions of life.

"Well excuuuuuuse me princess! That's just a imperfect form!"

Shackled

But this artificially produced drug I heard people were doing could help us ascend into cosmic beings!

Sorry. You are still in the cave.

do you mean Jesus?

+Lash i'm curious, what do you mean when you say that if he's talkig about Jesus He's got the story wrong?

+G Haslam yeah, he's talking about Jesus.

Truth is not subject to time. Also the Jews foretold his coming hundreds of years earlier as well so...

+shaun Brown The "mainstream Jews" of the time also rejected him and to this day dont see him as prophet, since their savior is still to come. Thats the thing with prophecy, anyone at any given time can fit into its mold and can even be manipulated into him/herself belive it to be true. So its always the question of if the prophecy was truly fullfilled, or was it acknowledged by enough people which saw personal gain in it?

If you want your mind blown watch "why didn't anybody tell me" on you tube!

+monolyth421 Or maybe DMT and any drug revelation is just another kind of shadow, in this case a shadow being cast by the chemical reaction in your brain. Just a theory.

+DriscolDevil I agree, experience on hallucinogens tells us these chemicals break down a lot of our brain's connections (and in limited cases heightens some) and what we see or feel is just our brains filling in the gaps for our bent perception at the time. I know of the drug revelations, but on reflection it's just yourself making sense of the world when you have a lack of core thought processes.

Jason Cornish That's how I feel too. I don't want to seem to be dismissing the experience, a psycedelic experience can be amazing, but too often people forget that it's not some divine union but it's something caused by ingesting a chemical.

+Jason Cornish Actually I would argue that DMT actually temporarily increases the feedback of certain connections, especially in the visual cortex. It's this increasing feedback that creates the DMT trip and I believe it's this feedback that informs the majority of hallucinogens. I feel it's also the reason why some people tripping on different hallucinogens can fall into mental loops that they find it hard to extricate themselves from.

Uremawife Nowdave So you are saying it makes you "more aware" which if was true, would mean everyone should have shared hallucinations, not just similar themes. It's fine, not saying it's bad, but it's also not "reality"

we need philosophers to replace politicians for sure

+1

+1

that's hologram theory for you

+1 So to add a take on it. The people we see aren't the people we know exist. There are people (their outward appearance) And then there are People (each individual's thoughts, their soul, etc.) So then what's beyond the soul itself?

+Zellig Wear the blue ring? Or the red ring?

So the I AM ERROR guy is Morpheus?

Error @Boss ⊙

it's all the same, and they're all paradoxical

You are full of shit.

+KreativeKill We've built our human ideals on Plato. Our understanding of what it is to simply ''be'' is a historical progress.

Morten Pedersen he's a bit narcissistic. I wonder if we'll ever talk about that and not just the good things we learned from him. No one is infallible. Its important to note that.

KreativeKill Well Plato did say that we humans are special in our way of logos. That's how our world is built. We are above everything else. We even talk about killing animals humanely and something being human. It's going to be awkard when we meet aliens.

+KreativeKill Yeah but judging a philosophy based on who a person was doesn't seem that productive. Why does it matter if he was a narcissistic? Should we disregard the work of Einstein because he was a selfish asshole? I don't think anyone claimed plato was infallible. Admiring the work of a person isn't the same as deifying them..

DriscolDevil holy fuck mate. seriously fuckin fuck dude. i dont no, what do you want to me to say? You win? alright fine, you win! CONGRATZ!

In the original story, Plato describes how when the prisoner leaves the cave, his eyes will hurt because he's so used to the darkness (it's a metaphor for how confusing and difficult philosophy is, and how you really have to think out of the box). In the Matrix, after Neo has been pulled out and he's in the Nebuchadnezzar (I think, he might be in Zion) he asks Morpheus why his eyes hurt, to which Morpheus replies "it's because you've never had to use them before," which is totally a reference to this. So yeah, the Matrix (the first one mainly; the second and third, not so much; the pulled it back with Animatrix though, and the Animatrix had loads of awesome scifi elements to it too) is a two-hour explanation of Plato's philosophy, with a few other ideas thrown in, like predestination/determinism vs free will, belief in a saviour or a god, and other stuff like that. Goddamn it's such a great film.

Daniel Fair INDEED! PLEASE MAKE MORE RECOMMENDATIONS! Those of us were baffled by it are seeking more!!

No, the Matrix is basically like this.

gendalfff don,t for get dark city and inception

And yet "All [*Western*] philosophy is a footnote to Plato"-Alfred North Whitehead.Can you think of any Western philosophers who got to thinking that point early on? b/c outside of Eastern philosophy and most religions on the whole,Western philosophy imo has always had a tendency to overly nit-picky about how it's possible that reality is a combination of material and immaterial.

No, the ultimate material was perfect: the ultimate, base forms that all imperfect objects are made to represent.

That's Laplace's demon.

I like your thinking :) Einstein said something like "the only reason for time is so everything doesn't happen at once". He figured out, mathematically, that time is a dimension just like length, width and height. It is bendable. And he says the same thing as you (in different words/language): there is a "long view" where one could theoretically "see" time stretching itself out from start to finish, because that's what it physically does. The thing is, light and all matter are subject to the same physics, so one could never "perceive" or "see" the long view. There is no conscious entity that could possibly see the painting you describe - reality just isn't structured that way. But maybe there are other ways of perceiving/existing that my brain is not structured to conceive or understand.... ...interesting stuff, anway

That's just like in Slaughterhouse-five.. how the tralfamadorians see everything

If I remember right the tralfamadorians couldn't see Billy and Who? (Moutana Wildhack) when about to make love in the transparent Bucky ball. As far as we know Lol Cyvro

Evil Paragon 2 The 4th Dimension is time .

Wolfphototech_Gaming_News My comment isn't about that. My comment is simply about visualising. Also 4D being time still fits there. Imagine a 3D photo of the universe. Then in the smallest possible increment of time, another photo. Put them one planck length away from each other. I also mean like drawing two circles and the left is 1cm from the other left, not like two circles separated. That is a small cut of the 4th dimension. The 4th Dimension is every frame of the 3D universe all put together like that. Now think again, if an object in the 4th Dimension showed up in our universe, we probably could only see its shadow, which would be a 3D object.... probably.

4th dimension is time yes but a 3d object is a shadow of a 4d object, we live with time but do not see time. A tessaract is a 4th dimension cube which we can only draw in a 3d shadow in our 3 dimensional world. A 4th dimensional being would look something like a snail and could see its past and future but not change his past or future, in order to change ones past or future you need to be in at least the 6th dimension.

4D is time. 5D is branching time. You can travel along the 4 dimensional path of a 5 dimensional tree so to speak, and then simply find the crossroads and go up the other path. 6D is... I forget. I should rewatch the theory. 7D however is universe. Every event, future, past and alternate happens within.

+KoolDawg99e Most religious people are actuallly pretty tolerant, its jsut the media likes to show the crazies

+Greg Chung you shouldn't judge too rashly

+KoolDawg99 .. U forgot that STALIN AND MAO WHO WERE ATHEIST COMMUNISTS KILLED 25 AND 40 MILLION PEOPLE... Lol if anything the proof is in the pudding..

+TheGaurdianHuman And Hitler was religious. Your point being?

KoolDawg99 ,, Why did Mao kill 40 Million people? To impose his atheistic Communism in china Obviously. So your specific generalization of religious people being close minded is wrong.. as we have examples of atheists who have caused greater terror in this world.. due to their own skewed and narrow minded beliefs. Lol when did hitler become religious?!?! Also if anything, his reasons for waging war were not religious.. but actually Nationalistic.

it's a nightmare

+Artemisio Romero Y Carver buddum tshhhhh.....

Iorveth Well, the basic "axiom" of science is that our perception of the world, although incorrect (optical illusions) is at least an approximation of reality. Then, the scientific method (& mathematical modeling, ...) is a way to look for a better approximation (Newtonian/Lagrangian mechanics, general relativity, ..., every iteration better than the last) than what our brain, wired for _romance_, can produce from _common sense_. The objective of science, thus, is to _remove_ the human constant from our interpretation or reality, as long as the basic axiom of science holds, which we cannot ever be sure of, but assume anyway. So, one could say that the world that we perceive is _just our perception_. It is not reality, but at most an approximation of reality, generated by receptors all over our body and by chemical reactions in our brain.

Jessy Pelletier-Lemire Is my brain wired for romance?

Jessy Pelletier-Lemire So, in a way the, objectivity does not exist. By that logic, everything objective is truly only subjective.

Iorveth Well, by _romantic_ I mean that our first reflex to explain things is to create legends, e.g. mushroom circles thought to be the work of fairies. djf2564​ The way I see it is: humans cannot be completely objective. This is why we need the scientific method; it's a way to take human bias out of the quest for knowledge. Objectivity _is_ a thing, facts exist; the problem is humans.

Jessy Pelletier-Lemire There's a dilemma with our use of the scientific method and our tests of objectivity with it. The purpose of the method is, fundamentally, to either confirm or refute our hypotheses about reality. But, through the process of answer one of these hypotheses, many more hypotheses arise from one question. Answer that hypothesis, and you are left with more questions. More hypotheses. The scientific method is creating more questions about the universe than it is answering them. We use it as a tool of induction, then deduce the real bulk of what we were wondering about in the first place. Those deductions need confirmation by the scientific method and induction, thereby requiring more deduction. With multiple hypotheses being tested and arriving at the same amount of reliability, say the kind of duality arising from general relativity or Euclidean Geometry vs. Non-Euclidean Geometry, the scientific method does indeed help technology and society advance, but because of convenience, not objective reality.

What an ironic statement. Without science you couldn't even begin to describe what we DO know about, and yet you say science won't allow us to describe what we don't know about because there is something "other" that science hasn't found yet. You say this with no evidence, just a hunch. Maybe the reality is you don't know how science actually works?

Ok... what do you consider "more to the story"? I mean, scientists KNOW there's more to the story, that's why they keep searching for more answers and never settle. We don't have all the answers yet. But why assume there is something that exists that science can't find? If we can't find it, does it even matter that it exists? Does it affect us in any way?

klwroten "what an ironic statement, without science...." Such is the paradox of knowing hehehe

My makeup and hat say differently.

alice x. The only good thing about philosophy is that it kinda gave birth to logic. Everything else is a one big hypothetical scernario to do some thinking exercises that seem significant but mean nothing at all. What I'm trying to say is that I understand the point Plato tried to make, but not only the example contains a major error it also aserts that most people wont agree with you. And yes to a degree he was right, but when talking about reality we didn't find anything and if we will there are scientist that will mesure it. It's no longer ancient greek. Now for the error. Ok. There is light behind you. You see a shadow. What do you notice when you move? OMG the shadow also moves. So for your limited knowlage shadow is some sort of "reflection" of yourself and your friends. So when a new shadow apears, what is the logical conclusion? There mast be something new in the room that wall is "reflecting". Everyone would know that.

alice x. I don't need chemistry to feel better about myself and my life. Nor do I need superstitions or spirituality. What exacly is this "modern cultural dogma"? Following logic? If anyone needs to "evolve" (which is such a abhorrent use of the word) is you. Into a logical beaing that invented so many things that together formed everything you are using today. Including and emphasising, the computer.

MadBunnyRabbit Plato's cave went right over your head. The light source doesn't need to be directly behind the observer. Their shadows do not have to be visible to them. In addition, how would they understand the shadows if they have never seen the light source or any other objects. "There mast be something new in the room that wall is "reflecting". Everyone would know that." Why would everyone know that? It's supposed to be an allegory for reality, and it is a very good one, considering all the objects we consider solid are actually made of energy waves. People saw lightning for millions of years before figuring out what it was. Humans watched the sun rise and set for millions of years before they figured out that we are on a spinning ball, revolving around other spinning balls. If you just look at the moon it seems quite obvious to us now, hell, it should be obvious, you can see the angles of light on it and know which way the sun is relative to it. Prior to having that knowledge though, it was a warrior in a chariot riding across the sky. Plato's cave went over your head because you presume too much.

alice x. The great thing about logic are semantics. Not only it allows me to see the differance betwen two notions, it also gives me the ablitity to better communicate. So when I see "or" in a sentance I understand the the writer thinks of two ideas separated by it as different. Two questions: Isn't coniously: doing something with awareness? So you are awarly aware? - just a logic thing. Secound: why is it so scary for you that we have no intrinsic purpouse in life? Morality comes from logic, not some spiritual nonsense, nor from god (sinc you started talking about the concept). I want to survive and anything someone will do to diminish my chances should therfore be punished. Here is your fundation of morality. Keep in mind that it was social progress that abolished slavery and did that by force, not some spiritual whatever. Don't do to others that you don't want to be done to you. It's as simple as that. We reached (well most of us at least) to that conclusion throught logic. And empathy and natural selection that favored "moral" people over the "immoral". And yet again, what people before today considered moral and natural and normal, we would be pretty shocked and disqusted by it. Yeah, that order is called evolution. If life as we know it wouldn't fallow those rules, we wouldn't be here right now. It's not some secret nonsense that existed from the begining of life, but a logical conclusion of natural selection. And what paradigms are they? You seem to know a lot about me without meeting me even once. Wisdom: The quality of having experience, knowledge, and good judgement That logic... made me so conquered. I see what good heuristics did for you. Assuming things about others. Using fallacies to support arguments. Evading questions. Missusing words. You know what? I preffer to stay conquered than being stupid. One final thing. "localized, relativistic abstraction". I realy have no idea what the hell you are trying to say here. Relativistc? Are you trying to create an adjective of relativism? Logic has nothing to do with relativism. Abstraction? Well logic is an abstract concept, so do math, and? Also how is it localised when I take into account hisotry, that's oposite of relativism. I'm so confused right now. Please go back to school or something and maybe then reply. Or just don't reply at all. I feel like you are making me stupid. Go away.

Christina Aguilera You know what? Now I feel bad about wasting my time to answer her. XD This is so much better responce than what I did and so much shorter XD

+ciervo42 Exactly my thought. Jack's arc was amazing, and represents some of the concepts from this video beautifully.

A+ Nuck Certified

Theoretically you can suck these nuts.

Original Taboo That comment just made my evening, thanks.

MrGenericGamerMK35 It really did

So, someone living outside gets caged, and suddenly the confinement of a smaller place becomes more real than freedom? You make no sense at all.

***** I don't think that's what that is.

Im asian, my philosophy is ( my parents philosophy is) BE DOCTOR OR DIE! its true, i haven`t gotten a B since i was born, Only A`s....

Aktosh then why do you drive so bad?

SquirrelFromGradLife They practice for the test by reading...not driving.

SquirrelFromGradLife i.imgur.com/LdgZDWp.jpg

Aktosh `_` Seriously though,would your parents happen to know anything about Confucianism,Buddhism,Daoism or even any Asian political philosophy from the past ~15o years,would they?

And ironically for you, thats what makes them great. They are not affected by the minds poor functions.

I'm confused by this comment honestly. Aren't scientists the ones that are actually thinking logically?

TheVeryWhiteGuy I think he means that all they can do is see the shadow on the wall of the cave. With pure science it's impossible for someone to know about the real object under those conditions. Just as it's impossible to know about plato's "true reality" if it existed under our current conditions. A chain would have to be broken first.

saiyaniam You're wrong there. In order to understand what they see, they have to process the information in their brain. The brain makes sense of it all -- that's neurology 101. Furthermore, they must then hypothesise on causes of phenomena, which requires them to analyse, using their minds, the data. At every step along the way, rationality is involved in the scientific method, right down to sourcing materials and deciding how to go about doing an experiment. So obviously, they have to use their minds. In fact, if they didn't use their minds they wouldn't be alive, but science pushes for the view that we are our brains and nothing more. Finally, Galileo used philosophy to prove that objects fall at the same rate. Also, science used to be called "Natural Philosophy", and biology was started by Aristotle, one of the most famous philosophers ever to walk the earth. I'm sorry, it's that your ignorance astounds me.

Daniel Fair Experimental evidence requires zero interpretation. You are wrong. Something can either be proved or not. You can replicate it or you can't, it's real or it's not. You can't interpret facts falsely.

+H8stupidppl See Søren Kierkegaard. He'll provide the ''god = life'' answer :)

+H8stupidppl It's much deeper than that. From this perspective, one could equate the "shadows" to the natural world, and witnessing "objects" to spirituality. Plato's philosophy stressed the nature of *perspective* and its significance.

That's Dr. Sweet's real voice.

Might serve you well to lose the pointless criticisms