What is Plato’s Cave?
This is a thought problem that Plato set up. So you have people — he called them prisoners — prisoners that were lined up into a cave, and they’re sitting in a groove in the cave. Behind them, there are puppeteers and behind the puppeteers there’s a fire. So what happens is, whatever shadows the puppeteers behind them make, the shadow is cast on the wall. And the other part of this allegory is [that] the prisoners cannot turn their heads; they can never see the puppeteers, so they don’t know they are there. So what the prisoners then see is shadows, which they take to be reality. They have no other way of accessing what is reality than their senses. Plato was making an epistemological argument. In other words, an argument of how we know what we know. And he did not trust empirical knowledge — what came in through human senses. My discussion about the digital natives is that they have spent an enormous amount of time watching digital shadows at 60 hertz on the screens. In other words, w
