Allegory of the cave analysis11/13/2022 Even if we assume a benevolent world in which no one is out there to trick on the poor prisoners, any moment a small random adjustment of the angle that a three-dimensional figure shows up would cause a big difference on its projection on the wall, surely leading to a sizable havoc among the prisoner theorists. If only they could turn faces, they would find out some of their favorite shadow theories were based on some bad jokes by some tricksters right behind them, who might stop playing at any moment, extinguishing some of the best models from the prisoner team. They speculate and conjure up the most elaborate theories to explain the shadows’ behaviors yet sadly they are still in ignorance as to the true nature of the shadows. Their curious minds will try develop stories or histories for those phantoms - how they tend to interact with each other, when some shadows tend to show up together, whether one peculiar shadow causes another to appear, etc. Symbolically speaking, the shadows on the wall represent the superficial truth - a ‘virtual’ reality that is perceived via our senses only, as against the ultimate ‘real’ reality, which, according to the Platonism, is made up of Forms (ideas) that can never be known by us mortals through sensation.įurther, the two-dimensional projections on the wall constitute the whole world for the poor prisoners. Behind the prisoners, there is a great fire burning, thus projecting what happens behind the people as all shapes of shadows onto the wall that the prisoners are facing.Īs the people are never able to turn their faces a bit throughout their lives, they grow up and die watching the shadows on the wall, which constitute all the known reality to them. The people are chained, facing a tall wall, unable to turn their faces or break the chains. Simply put, Socrates tells Glaucon to imagine people living in a vast subterranean cave, open to the outside world via only one strenuous and steep tunnel. The allegory is elucidated from a conversation between Socrates and Glaucon, his disciple. Oddly enough, the state-of-the-art field of machine learning, as it turns out, still fits more or less into this mold of more than 2000 years old. The allegory of the cave was presented by the Greek philosopher Plato in his work Republic, originally to compare “the effect of education and the lack of it on our nature”. New York: New American Library, 1986.How the current approach to machine learning fits in Plato’s famous allegory and whither we go from there. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1974. #Allegory of the cave analysis full#The scholar Rex Warner gives his insight into the Allegory of the Cave in his book, The Greek Philosophers, as such: “…He seeks to make the reader grasp the full significance of progressive philosophical enlightenment unless, he implies, we can progress in this direction, we remain in the Cave, the home of illusion and error, with, accordingly, no notion of the good life for ourselves and others, and thence no hope of bringing order into a distracted world.” References Plato uses the analogy of the Sun, which represents the form of the Good the analogy of the Divided Line, which illustrates the hierarchy of knowledge and the Allegory of the Cave to relate how humans recover the knowledge of the Forms and thus gain an understanding of the highest form of reality.
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