New News Philosophy #4

The Nature of Reality

Plato’s book “The Republic” explores the nature of reality

Plato’s Myth of the Cave

He proposed this thought experiment to prove his point that we might be living in a false world, like in the Matrix.

Inside the cave, there was a prisoner who had been chained there since birth, and had seen only shadowy projections of the real world on the cave wall. But he didn’t know that, and so he believed what he saw was reality.

One day, the prisoner escapes the cave, and sees the “realness” of the world, which occupied three dimensions.

The conclusion was that how could we be sure we were not falsely perceiving the world, thinking that material things are the most real things.