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The allegory of the cave by plato summary
The allegory of the cave by plato summary
Discuss Plato's allegory of the cave
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Freedom is a concept that is held in high regard and cherished amongst a lot of people. The idea of “freedom” is to make choices based on your own decision with no external influences. But are you making the decision for yourself? The possibility that machines will be able to simulate the human brain is all over the news now a days. President Barrack Obama’s Brain Initiative program dedicates 100 million dollars to fund research for “how we think”. And in Europe the Blue Brain Project is attempting to recreate the human brain in all its minute details thusly engineering an artificial mind. The idea behind the Blue Brain Project is that if brains sustain thought then if we can deconstruct a brain and then put it back together inside a computer we could engineer and artificial intelligence with a conscience.
Considering that the brain integrates external stimuli to present our consciousness withe the experience of reality, would simulated brains therefore be able to create their own sense of reality? And if so, could we then all be fooled by a simulation, unable to differentiate between reality and fantasy?
In his dialogue ‘The Republic” Plato offered the “Allegory of the cave” one of the first meditations on nature and reality. In his allegory Plato imagined a group of slaves who from birth have been changed up and can only face forward, towards a rocky wall. To the slaves, their entire world was that wall and all of the shapes and shadows on it. Oblivious to the slaves was that behind them there was a simulator projecting shadows and shapes onto the wall. The images and shapes that the slaves were seeing was their whole reality, and thusly their reality was merely a projection of the images and shapes on the simulator. Platos po...
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...on due to the sheer complexity of the virtual world, does it really make a difference? Does freedom only matter when we are aware that we don’t have it?
Going back to Platos meditation, he goes on to suggest that if one man had been freed from his chains he would come running back to the chains, terrified and face the wall again. Plato suggests that only with knowledge, can man truly ascend into freedom.
To be totally free is an illusion. It can only be taken as far as the person is willing to take it. Everyone is bound by rules, whether they be of the land, or of personal belief. Every person illustrates what their own ideal freedoms are and as long as your need air, water and food, there can be no realistic perception of absolute freedom. Freedom to mosts people means the absence of fetters or bondage. But the true notion of freedom is an absence of dependency.
The influence of Plato’s “Allegory of the cave” is very evident in the “Letter from Birmingham Jail”. The allegory illustrates are inability to look beyond our immediate reality; to look beyond ou...
There are many definitions of the term "freedom." Some will say that to be free one must be allowed to do as one pleases in terms of one's physical body, while others will say that one must only be able to think to be truly free. Yet another group will argue that both aspects must be present for true freedom to exist.
This can mean many things to different people depending on how it is interpreted. However, I interpret being free as being able to do whatever one desires with no worries at all. This only comes when a person has a great mind to believe that something greater is waiting for them after the hard battle they are dealing with is over. The determined minds that believe anything is possible if work is put in and there is no giving up. These are the people that will prosper and become “free”. Everyone is capable of doing this, it is just putting your mind to work. In today’s society, people are not as mentally tough as they were before. Their minds are too distracted by phones, computers, the internet, drama, and all they stressful and unnecessary things that are believe to be necessary. They are too caught up with these things that time is wasted and that time could have been used to work and plan something increible. Time is something that cannot be bought, it just goes and does not stop. The average person needs to be able to recognize this and then devise a plan to be able to do more than just be
In “Plato’s Republic” he tells a story of a cave with people being shackled and kept in the shadows. These people can only see shadows of objects on the cave wall and believe that this is reality. Plato writes as Socrates and says, “Imagine human beings as if they were in a cave-like dwelling underground, with a broad opening to the daylight across the whole width of the cave. They have been there since childhood, chained not just by their legs but by their necks, so that they can’t move and can only look ahead of them…Light reaches them from a fire that burns way above and behind them…there is a path across the cave, beside which you need to imagine a little wall, built like those screens puppeteers have in front of their audience so they can show their puppets above them.” (Republic, 239-240). This is illustrating the lie that is being pandered to the people and that this lie then puts the people into bondage. These lies that we live makes us absolutely miserable, but because this is what we have accepted as true since childhood we do not question what is familiar to us. The people in the cave cannot move at all and must just look at the
How can the brain be a mind, a conscious person? Recently, some philosophers have argued that human consciousness and cognitive activity, including even our moral cognition and behavior, can best be explained using a connectionist or neural network model of the brain (see Churchland 1995; Dennett 1991 and 1996). (1) Is this right? Can a mass of networked neurons produce moral human agents? I shall argue that it can; a brain can be morally excellent. A connectionist account of how the brain works can explain how a person might be morally excellent in Aristotle's sense of that term.
The Allegory of the Cave is a parable that demonstrates how humans are afraid of change and what they do not know. In this work, Plato suggests a situation in which men are living in an underground cave. The one entrance is located near the top and there, a burning fire casts shadow. The men of the cave are chained so that they can only see the wall and cannot turn around. When objects pass by it creates a shadow on the wall. The shadows are the only thing they can see and therefore is the only thing they know to exist (747). Somehow one of them gets loose and wanders outside the cave (748). When he gets out, he is astonished at what he finds. He comes back in to tell the others about what he saw. The other men think he is mad and plot to kill him (749). This illustrates how fear, inherent in the primitive nature of man, only serves to promote his ignorance.
Humans have the ability to think, reason and imagine. In fact, we are proud of ourselves being the one who is the only ‘intelligent’ creature on Earth. The term intelligence is made by us humans, thus its definition can only, and inevitably derive from human actions. We normally perceive intelligence as humans’ ability differing us from other non-human beings like ‘animals’. However, it is hard to find universal definition that doesn’t clash between science and philosophy, thus there are so many different measures to test the intelligence. Likewise, we do not know what ‘consciousness’ is. We do not know how exactly human brain works. Modern science made it possible to travel through the universe, treat cancer, ‘FaceTime’ in the middle of a street but couldn’t discover how our minds work. If we cannot define ‘intelligence’ and ‘consciousness’ which are essential traits lying deep down in our human brains, how can we make machines imitate us? How can we possibly measure how much machines resemble and act like
In Book VII of The Republic, Plato tells a story entitled "The Allegory Of The Cave." He begins the story by describing a dark underground cave where a group of people are sitting in one long row with their backs to the cave's entrance. Chained to their chairs from an early age, all the humans can see is the distant cave wall in from of them. Their view of reality is soley based upon this limited view of the cave which but is a poor copy of the real world.
Clark and Chalmers begin with a case to illustrate why the mind is extended whereby a person has the option to use their mind (a), use a physical computational aid (b), or a futuristic neural computational brain implant (c) to solve a problem. They argue that all three options are more similar than most people believe with the following reasoning. I have included the example of a heart, a defibrillator and pacemaker for the sake of clarity.
Throughout Plato 's story "The Allegory of the cave" men are stuck in this cave with their backs turned away from the light, until one day a man turns towards the light and learns for himself what the light is about. The man than explores and begins to educate himself on everything and anything, he then tries to take everything he has learned back down to the cave to get his fellow cave members to step out and learn what the light is all about. The metaphor that Plato 's places in this story is how the cave is represents the human mind and the light represents the understanding of life
As people, we tend to believe everything we see. Do we ever take the time to stop and think about what is around us? Is it reality, or are we being deceived? Reality is not necessarily what is in front of us, or what is presented to us. The environment that we are placed or brought up has a great impact on what we perceive to be the truth or perceive to be reality. Plato’s Allegory of the Cave is one of the most significant attempts to explain the nature of reality. The cave represents the prisoners, also known as the people. They are trapped inside of a cave. They are presented with shadows of figures, and they perceive that to be reality. The cave can be used as a
To begin, Plato’s Allegory of the cave is a dialogue between Socrates and Glaucon and its main purpose, as Plato states is to, “show in a figure how far our nature is enlightened or unenlightened.”(Plato) The dialogue includes a group of prisoners who are captive in a cave and chained down, only with the ability to stare straight at a wall. This wall, with the help of a fire, walkway, and people carrying different artifacts and making sounds, create a shadow and false perception of what is real. This concept here is one of the fundamental issues that Plato brings up in the reading. “To them, I said, the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images.” (Plato). These prisoners, being stuck in this cave their entire life have no other option but to believe what they see on the wall to be true. If they were to experience a real representation of the outside world they would find it implausible and hard to understand. “When any of them is liberated and compelled suddenly to stand up a...
Plato's Allegory of the Cave is a representation of the normal human behavior as well as the circumstances we presently encounter on a day-to-day basis. The Allegory of the Cave symbolically describes our circumstances as human beings in today’s world. Plato uses a number of key elements to depict the image of the human condition. Plato's images contain relatable ideas in regards to society that are related to my everyday life. By reading Plato I have personally begun to expand my though process and have learned not to rely solely on my senses. Plato’s Allegory of the Cave brings philosophy’s teachings to the forefront and makes it easy for us readers to understand what philosophy is trying to teach us.
We believe that we stay in a country which is a free country. Freedom to live the way we want, freedom to practice anything the way we choose to and freedom to rationalize our thoughts and be a free person. But the question that frequently we come across is whether this freedom is just on paper as what was originally drafted or the meaning of freedom is really free. Though freedom is what is professed by the constitution, in reality no one is free. This has suffocated one’s existence.
Plato, a student of Socrates, in his book “The Republic” wrote an allegory known as “Plato's Cave”. In Plato's allegory humans are trapped within a dark cave where they can only catch glimpses of the world above through shadows on the wall.2 Plato is describing how the typical human is. They have little knowledge and what they think they know has very little basis in fact. He describes these people as prisoners, in his allegory, and they are only free when they gain knowledge of the world above the cave.