PLATO'S ALLEGORY OF THE CAVE

In Plato's allegory of the cave, there are prisoners chained in a cave and unable to move their heads. they can only see the wall in front of them. there is a fire that burns behind them, and between the fire and the prisoners puppeteers walk down and cast shadows on the wall which the prisoners think are the real object. they think this because its what they have seen all their lives and their brain has been trained to interpret the shadows as real objects. One prisoner breaks his chains and escapes. he is shocked, by what he is seeing, at first but later on wanders around with curiosity and joy. He, later on, feels the need to inform the other prisoners about all the other things they're missing and that the shadows are not the real objects, but the other prisoners " sentence him to death".

everyone believes what theyre taught to believe when growing up and belive that anything that goes against it is false. just like that, the prisoners did not accept what he was saying because all thier life, thier brains have been taught that the shadows are the real objects. Plato gives an example, if you were to pass a book in between the fire and the wall the prisoners might see the shadow and tell each other that it is a book but its not. they are looking at the shadow of a book but because thier brain has adjusted to the fact that what they are looking at is infact a book. another example is the illusion we saw in class. A group of lines are drawn straight but no matter how you look at it they appear to be bent, because our brain has been taught that anything that looks like that is bent. If we were to show the same picture to the Aborgines they would tell us that the lines are infact straight, because they havent been taught otherwise. therefore thier brain is open to accept that the illusion is straight.

It is true that Platos allegory does reveal something of human nature. We do tend to see the world in as few dimentions as possible. We have been taught several things over and over and if anyone tells us any different, we do not accept it. there are some people more open minded than others but i think that almost everyone in this world will not accept anything different from what they and thier brains have been taught.