Blog Prompt 4: Is there a parallel between the status of the prisoners in Plato’s cave and the spectators in a cinema? In other words, how are we deceived by movies and other media? Do we mistake fiction for reality? Is it possible that this physical world isn’t reality?

Plato’s analogy of the imprisoned cavemen and the outside world is meant to reflect how as human’s we can be so easily influenced by what we see, and sometimes reluctant to broaden our scope of vision. The cavemen all their life have been restrained from all physical capacity, forced only to look ahead of them at the passing shadows of the outside world. The men hold no knowledge of the walls independent of them, and can only assume that the black figures they see are nothing more than black solid figures. Plato’s analogy can be compared to spectators in a cinema in the sense that we human’s can be so entranced by the images we see on film we start to lose our sense of reality.

One of the cavemen escape only to witness the world far beyond his imagination, and falls in utter disbelief that it is reality. However, he soon discovers the sun as what propels life and finds that the world he thought he knew before was absolutely bullsh**. When he returns to the cave to announce this news to his fellow mates they have no interest in believing his words, when how can they when all their life they’ve only known what they’ve seen?

It can be inferred then that people base knowledge not off logic and evidence, but shortsightedness. And perhaps spectators in a cinema may believe the real world to be as what they see and hear.

Plato states “Then, if this is true, our views of these matters must be this, that education is not in reality what some people proclaim it to be in their professions. What they aver is that they can put true knowledge into a soul that does not possess it, as if they were inserting vision into blind eyes.” Plato implies that people cannot merely be taught to believe in something unless they are willing to.

Plato’s analogy holds true to a certain extent. There is truth in that people will never acquire knowledge, and what is realistic versus not, if they don’t search for it. But, in terms of how movies can alter our state of reality, I believe the majority of people are able to watch a movie without necessarily viewing it as real life. Unless, like the cavemen, if parents tell their children from a young age that everything they see on film is real, then, the reality is that we’ve been taught the difference between fiction and non-fiction.

If the physical world we are living in right now is not reality then someone’s going to have to find evidence for that.

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