Episode 5 - Plato and the Cave
Awakening from the Meaning Crisis
Ep. 5 - Awakening from the Meaning Crisis - Plato and the Cave
The last episode focused on the birth of the axial revolution in Greece. Specifically, we discussed the life and death of Socrates. His contribution was to conceptualise a wise person as someone whose truth-finding machinery was coupled to the machinery for determining relevance. He often likened himself to a midwife, where he used his Socratic method to give birth to wisdom within other people. To him, a life beset by self-deception was not a life worth living.
The man, the lion and the monster
Socrates provided a series of practices to grow wisdom. But didn’t offer a scientific account of exactly how people deceive themselves. Plato was deeply traumatised by Socrates’ execution. He wanted to reconcile how it was possible for his beloved Athens to kill his beloved teacher. His contribution to the axial revolution was to provide a scientific account of how humans engage in self-deception, and what allows them to rise up out of it.
Humans are beset by some level of inner conflict. John Vervaeke uses dieting as a particularly ubiquitous example. Most people know that they should eat their vegetables, should consume food in moderation and exercise regularly. And yet, they’ll inhale a slice of delicious chocolate cake if you put it in front of them. Especially if they’re really hungry.
Plato’s insight was that there is a deep connection between inner conflict and self-deception.
His model conceptualises the psyche as having three different centres. Each has a different responsibility and motivates us differently. Psychology has evolved substantially in the last two thousand years. However, the idea that the psyche is composed of different centres with different responsibilities continues to be relevant today.
First, there’s a man in our heads whose goal is to understand what’s true. The man deals with long-term goals, abstraction and logic. Living in opposition to the man is the monster. The monster represents our drive for immediate gratification. It doesn’t work in terms of what’s true or false. Rather, it works in terms of pleasure and pain. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The monster’s machinery is actually evolutionarily adaptive. If you’re confronted by a sabertooth tiger, it’d be inappropriate to sit down and logically contemplate the inner workings of the tiger. Your adaptive instinct would be for fight or flight.
The man represents our machinery to ascertain what’s true and to understand the world. The monster represents our machinery to generate a map of what’s immediately relevant in our environment. As Socrates observed, we all face a dilemma where the monster is often racing ahead of the man. For example, think about how hard it is to lose weight.
Losing weight or fending off procrastination is often a lot easier (or a lot harder), depending on one’s social group. We’re social primates, so this shouldn’t be surprising. These socio-cultural motivations are deeply evolutionarily adaptive. Our ability to coordinate our problem solving abilities has allowed us to build civilizations and tame our environments. Plato’s model represents these social drives via the lion. It works in terms of honour and shame. It models our capacity to regulate our behaviour based on social participation.
Inner conflict emerges when the man, the lion and the monster work at odds with each other. When this happens, understanding, social motivations and salience all fall out of sync with each other.
But why is the monster often so much stronger than the man? It turns out that this is somewhat of a feature, not a bug. The machinery underlying the monster is essentially hyperbolic discounting and is universal across most macroscopic animal life.
Essentially, the further away a certain event is, the less relevant we tend to find it. There’s an easy thought experiment that explains why this may be the case.
Consider this decision tree of whether a person should smoke or not. At every node in this tree, the smoker needs to make a decision of whether they’ll take a puff. Suppose that this tree spans across time, and some leaf nodes represent dying of lung cancer in some specific location and time. If you consider any given leaf node in isolation, its probability feels extremely small. So we’re less likely to pay attention to this outcome. Perhaps this is actually adaptive. Our attention is finite, so perhaps it makes sense to pay attention to concerns proportionate to their perceived probability.
However, there’s a danger for all animals that parse their environment only in terms of such a decision tree. Often, our goal isn’t restricted to avoiding death in a specific situation at a specific time. It’s to avoid death in the abstract. Hyperbolic discounting blinds the smoker to each extremely improbable event. It also blinds the smoker to what all of those deaths have in common, which is a premature death in the abstract.
Paying attention to things in proportional to their perceived probability is adaptive. But that’s exactly what makes us prone to self-deception. You can’t get rid of this machinery. If you do, you get eaten by the tiger or become a chain smoker and die prematurely. Or perhaps you collapse in a fit of anxiety the moment you get out of bed, because your finite attention can’t process the combinatorial explosion of concerns in your head. On some level, wisdom is the act of grappling with the realisation that self-deception is baked into us in this way.
What humans needed was the ability to project abstractions into the future, and to form groups of events in this decision tree. That’s what the man in Plato’s model does. But the man is weak relative to the monster, and that makes sense. We don’t actually want to turn off this machinery. However, it needs to be constrained or tamed in some way.
Plato suggested that unlike the other two, the man can learn. The man can form abstract representations to construct theories of the world. It can make determinations on what’s likely true or false. The lion can’t learn in the same way, but it can be trained. This is essentially what Socrates did. He took reason into the social arena, and engaged with people using his method. He integrated his social behaviour with reason. Using the socratic method or other similar psychotechnologies, the man can train the lion. And together, they can tame the monster.
Plato’s cave
The integration of the man, the lion and the monster minimises one’s inner conflict. According to Plato, wisdom involves reaching the right coordination of the three so that they can live as much as possible, without putting the other two in danger. To him, reaching this inner harmony is the same as experiencing the fullness of life.
As inner conflict is reduced, people become less egocentric. Their attention is freed up to become more in touch with reality. That is, their attention is freed up to notice more real patterns in the world.
Notice that these two operate in a feedback cycle. As we improve our inner conflict, we get better at finding real patterns in the world. As we get better at finding real patterns in the world, we can apply that skill to ourselves. As we get better knowledge of ourselves, we can better teach the man. This allows us to better train the lion and further tame the monster, reducing our inner conflict.
This sort of knowledge is deeply participatory in nature. It’s not the same type of knowledge as holding facts in our head. We have to change how we participate in the world. That in turn changes how the world responds back to us. This puts a further demand on us to change. These two systems spin in a feedback loop.
Plato has a famous myth that captures the feedback loop we’ve just discussed. Imagine that there’s a cave with a number of people chained at the bottom of the cave. They’ve never been outside the cave, and have no direct access to the “real world”. They only see shadows of puppets representing objects from outside the cave, accompanied by any relevant sound effects. They believe that the shadows are the real thing. Why wouldn’t they? That's all they’ve ever seen. At some point, one of the prisoners breaks free from his chains and manages to reach the other side of the cave. He’s jolted awake by the realisation that the shadows, which until then were the basis of his reality, are not real. He notices a light in the distance. His curiosity and desire to be in touch with what’s true pulls him to it. He walks towards the light, slowly and carefully. He’s actually forced to walk carefully, because his eyes are not used to the increasingly bright. He needs to engage in an iterative process where he takes a few steps forward, adjusts his eyes and takes another few steps forward.
Eventually, he escapes the cave altogether and realises that the world is richer than his wildest dreams. The puppets seem laughable compared to what he can now perceive. Off in the distance in the sky, he notices the source of all this light. But his eyes are completely unprepared to gaze directly at it.
Thrilled by his new discovery, he runs down to the bottom of the cave where the others are still imprisoned. He tries to free them, and to share what he’s learned with them. But his eyes are no longer adjusted to the darkness of the cave. He stumbles and his speech seems babbled to the others. Moreover, his pronouncements seem so fantastical in comparison to what the prisoners are certain is true that they ridicule him. Eventually, when he refuses to stop talking about his discoveries, they kill him. Of course, this last bit is an allusion to the fate of Socrates.
Anagoge
Despite what most people think, enlightenment isn’t a purely Eastern idea. Plato’s cave is a myth of enlightenment and cultivating wisdom. The man is literally making an ascent into the light. It’s a myth of self-transcendence and self-transformation. The greek word for this iterative ascent is called anagoge. It’ll come up often in the rest of this lecture series. Previously, we discussed how the ancient Israelites took the axial myth and articulated it in terms of a historical narrative. That is, the present moment is the illusory world beset by violence, greed, suffering and self-deception. The promised land is an ideal world set in the future. Plato instead takes this axial structure and turns it into a myth of how one can live a more meaningful life by living rationally. That is, one can become more alive and at peace with oneself, as one engages more deeply with reality. This is what Plato calls wisdom. In Plato’s model, reason and spirituality are not in opposition to each other. Rather, they’re tightly bound together.
This myth is so pervasive that countless books, poems and movies over the last few thousand years have instantiated it. The Matrix is a contemporary example. A protagonist named Neo (i.e. new man) breaks free from his illusions to discover the real world. He then embarks on a quest to free everyone else that’s trapped in an illusion.