Shadows on the wall

The best discussion of that situation I have ever read is over 2000 years old. It's Plato's Allegory of the Cave, and it's one of my favorite passages in classical literature.The allegory is presented as an imaginary dialogue between Socrates and Plato's brother Glaucon, but it's really Plato speaking. Imagine, he says, a group of people who are born and live all their lives in a cave. They are forced to sit in chairs facing the back wall of the cave, restrained so that they cannot look anywhere else. Behind them, at the mouth of the cave, is a large fire, and between them and the fire is a walkway along which people carrying things, including replicas of animals, pass continuously. All the people of the cave can ever see are the shadows cast on the wall in front of them by those passing behind. All they can hear are the echoes in the cave produced by the movements they never see. Would they not, Plato asks, come to believe that those shadows and echoes are reality? Would they not assume that the entire world consists of the cave and the shadows on the wall? Wouldn't they praise as clever whoever could best guess which shadow would come next as someone who understood the nature of the world? And wouldn't the whole of their society come to depend on the shadows on the wall?It's a powerful image, but Plato takes it further. Now let us suppose, he says, that one of the people of the cave is freed from his chair and allowed to face the outside. Would he not first be blinded by the fire? And then, as his eyes adapted and he saw the people passing by on the walkway, would he not distrust the things he saw, believing that his eyes deceived him, because what they showed him contradicted what he knew reality had to be?Then Plato goes still one step more. Let us now imagine that our freed cave dweller eventually acclimates to the world outside the cave, and recognizes that as reality. 'Wouldn't he then remember his first home, what passed for wisdom there, and his fellow pris