Is Reality Real? - From Plato's Cave to The Matrix

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A philosopher walks into a cinema that is showing a very old soft porn movie.

“This is not reality!” he shouts, pointing at the screen.

Then he casts his fiery glance around the audience with their eyes fixed on the screen.

“You’re just sitting in the dark watching the shadows of dead people pretending to fuck,” he points out.

He starts trying to tell them about the world outside the cinema and what sunshine is like.

The audience members tell him to shut up so they can hear the movie.

He grabs one of them and tries to drag him out of the cinema. The patron puts up a hell of a fight.

Eventually the usher arrives and throws the philosopher out into the street.

This is the essence of Plato’s famous cave analogy from his dialogue The Republic. Since they didn’t have cinemas in 380 BC when Plato was writing he had to resort to talking about people being tied down in a cave while watching the shadows cast on a wall by clay figures being moved back and forth in front of a fire.

What did Plato mean by saying that what we think of as reality is not reality?

Plato believed in a world of ideal forms of which the details of the world we can perceive with our senses are a poor copy. Numbers and geometrical shapes are examples of ideal forms. And he also believed in an ethical ideal which he referred to as the Form of the Good.

So the cave analogy seems to be saying that what we take to be real blinds us to what is ideal.

We could see the cave analogy as a bit of a confidence trick. If the ideal forms exist only in the imagination, maybe we are really outside the cinema living in the real world and he is trying to persuade us to go into the cinema to watch a movie called Ideal Forms (not a bad title for a soft porn flick.)

Sometimes a symbol is so powerful that it transcends the ideology of the person who gives expression to it. I think this is true of the cave analogy.

Plato’s cave helped to inspire the 1999 science fiction film The Matrix. Here it turns out that humans are living in a simulated reality while actually being used as bioenergy batteries by parasitic machines. The hero Neo is given an choice to swallow a red pill which will enable him to see reality or a blue one which will allow him to go back to the illusory world.

Laurence Fishburne from The Matrix

This has provided a powerful metaphor to conspiracy theorists, libertarians, anarchists, and other critics of “the dominant paradigm.” The world is full of red pill pushers.

Is there a sense in which the world we take to be real is not real? Is there a reason such ideas resonate with us?

I think it may be helpful to turn Plato on his head. What keeps us from seeing reality is that we are blinded by abstract forms.

Here is an example. I love the sight of a beautiful woman. Am I really seeing the woman? She is a living organism performing a vast variety of functions. She is an ecosystem within which live a multitude of other living things. She is a conscious entity alive with emotions, memories, thoughts and desires. She was once an egg and a sperm. One day she will be dust. Her beauty blinds me to much of this. Only as I become desensitised to it somewhat do I see more. What am I seeing when I see her beauty? What we call beautiful in a woman is generally that which gives a youthful appearance. When we were young we were free of the bitterness or egotism which blocks love. So beauty is a symbol for love. So I’m blinded to the reality by an idea - the idea of love.

All the time we project and we filter. The world we see around us is a world distorted by our needs. We will see those things which serve to boost our insecure ego and we will block out those which might threaten it.

This is particularly true if we are believers in a dogma. We maintain our belief by concentrating on that which appears to support it and evading that which contradicts it. This is known as confirmation bias.

So how can we leave the cinema and live in the real world?

We need to have a secure ego. The ego is the conscious thinking self. We put down “ego” because our ego is usually insecure and thus embattled and thus a barrier to love and truth. But our conscious thinking self can become secure enough to go wide-eyed and naked in the world.

If we don’t become secure then we may take someone’s red pill only to find that they have led us from one Matrix into another. We may be woken up to how we have been a slave of capitalism only to find ourselves a slave of socialism. We are in the cinema because it makes us feel secure. Unless we learn to provide our own security, the best we will be able to do is to go from a cinema showing one kind of a movie to one showing another.

We cultivate our own security of ego by practicing unconditional self-acceptance. Our insecurity comes from being at war with our self, feeling we need to try to control our thoughts or our emotions. We don’t need to think the right thoughts or feel the right feelings. All of us are a mess of contradictions, but when we allow ourselves to be such without judgement, a deeper and truer integrity gradually forms.

The sunshine which lights the world outside the cinema is love. Love is really being with others, not just with the forms our embattled ego needed to project onto them.

Copyright: lzflzf / 123RF Stock Photo

Thoughts on Jeremy Griffith's "Freedom : The End of the Human Condition" - Part 8

Idealism vs. The Erotic

Griffith believes that the reason we like sex is that it is a way that we can attack “innocence”. He believes that we began using it that way back in the time of Homo Erectus when men invented rape as a way of getting revenge for women’s lack of understanding of their departure from ideality.

When he finally does get around to addressing the concept that Eve tempted Adam to eat the apple, he asks why, if sex only became a way of attacking innocence after the beginning of the human condition, why does Moses (Griffith takes it as read that Moses actually wrote the book of Genesis) put this apparent reference to lust into the story of the origin of that condition.

“The answer can only be that an account of the emergence of the human condition, which is what is being provided by Moses, should include reference to the immense role sex has played in the life of upset humans…”

I don’t look at it that way.

The erotic is innocent. The erotic is the desire for physical pleasure which is natural to the human organism. And erotic love is the sharing of physical pleasure. It has little to do with any genetic drive to perpetuate our genes. We want it because it feels good. That’s why we masturbate and why many other animals masturbate. Why would it be essentially corrupting to enjoy the feel of erogenous zones being stroked any more than it is corrupting to enjoy the feel of the sun on our skin or the wind in our hair?

That is not to deny that our sexual behaviour can take dark forms.

Sex is like language. It is a way of communicating something. We can use words to tell someone how much we love them, or we can use words to express hatred. Sex is the same. It’s not the medium which is at fault, it’s the message.

Griffith himself uses the bonobos as an example of what our proto-human ancestors may have been like, yet he evades the erotic nature of their behaviour. They spend a lot of their time rubbing genitals with other members of the troop, irrespective of gender, age or, in most cases, relatedness. To me this suggests that the erotic played a major part in our ancestor’s lives and may have been inseparable from their social integrativeness. The pleasure principle is at the root of our behaviour. Why would we not live lovingly and cooperatively in a society which, in return, delivered a steady diet of sexual pleasure?

So what changed things? I’ve already talked about the origin of idealism and how it opened a psychological divide between men and women.

Women would initially have tried to use sex, which had always been a binding force in the group, to pacify and re-socialise the increasingly aggressive men. But eventually, as the men became more competitive and egotistical in response to the newly growing idealism’s criticism of them, the sexual favours of the women would have been a source of conflict. To keep the peace, pair-bonding was initiated, and thus began the need for sexual repression.

This process increased as societies tended to become more and more patriarchal and hierarchical. The most armoured men, thus those most addicted to controlling others, rose to the top of the hierarchies. These individuals would often make sure their own sexual desires were satisfied, but they recognised that, without sexual repression (and particularly the repression of female sexuality), their hierarchical power structures could be undermined. The erotic is anarchic.

Lust is the increase in sexual desire which occurs because of repression. So the argument that repression is needed to combat lust just doesn't add up.

What is “fucked” during sex? If we are angry, what are we angry at? It isn’t “innocence” as Griffith claims. It is the ideology of repression. We’ve been told that sex is inherently “sinful”. It is that against which we rebel.

It’s important to consider cultural context when sorting out the wheat from the chaff of philosophical texts. Plato and the writers of the Old Testament were members of patriarchal hierarchical societies. Ancient Greece was less sexually repressed than the culture which gave rise to the Blble, which may be related to the fact that it was such a rich artistic and intellectual society. You can’t repress sexuality without impeding your ability to think and imagine freely. But Plato and the authors of The Old Testament were also idealists. They were virulent purveyors of that disease.

As Wilhelm Reich pointed out, character armour blocks and perverts the natural health-giving erotic impulses, and the armoured individual is afraid of those impulses which threaten to undermine that protective armour. Of course, sex can be used against someone else - rape and sexual exploitation - but these are not expressions of the erotic. Neither is the sex object armour an expression of the erotic. Like non-sexual forms of love, the erotic is something we can surrender to when we feel safe enough to put aside our armour.

Read Part 9

Thoughts on Jeremy Griffith's "Freedom : The End of the Human Condition" - Part 4

Plato’s Cave Analogy

Griffth places a lot of emphasis on a passage in Plato’s famous dialogue The Republic where Socrates compares the human condition to life in a cave. Socrates says that what we take for the real world is not the real world. We are bound underground in a cave and what we take for reality is but the projection of shapes cast on the cave wall. There are fires behind us and objects are moved in front of the fires to produce the shadow images we believe to be reality. The role of the philosopher is to leave the cave and discover the truth in the form of the bright sunlight. He then goes back into the cave and tries to tell the rest of us about it. But, having known nothing but the cave existence, we will say that he is crazy and will resist being led out of the cave.

If Socrates had lived today he would have simply said that what we take to be reality is really just a movie. We are sitting in a dark movie theatre watching the flickering shadows on the screen and taking it for reality. No need for us to be bound. If the movie, to us, is reality, where else would we go?

The Matrix essentially turned Socrates’ cave analogy into a blockbuster science fiction movie.

But, if we are not in a Matrix, then what we experience with our five senses is real. There is ground underneath our feet. The sun we see in the sky is the real sun. So what was Socrate’s talking about?

He was talking about psychological realities. Or rather the psychological distortion of reality.

It is interesting that he used the concept of projecting, because it fits well with the concept of projection that we find in Jungian psychology - that what we see in the world around is a projection of aspects of our own psyche.

But perhaps filtering is a better term than projection. Projection suggests that we are seeing things which have no external reality at all. On the contrary, the content of what we see is, more often than not, something which really exists. What is illusory is the shape it takes for us, because our mind exaggerates those aspects which reinforce our armour and blocks out those aspects which might threaten it.

This is why, to see naked reality, we need be unconditionally self-accepting. Then we can acknowledge all aspects of the world around us without fearing that any of them will threaten our self-image.

It is true that if someone told us that we were blind to reality and cut off from life, we would probably say that they were insane. They would be accusing us of being insane, after all, and since they are one and we are many, it would be natural for us to assume that the problem lay with them.

And if we tried to forcefully break open someone’s character armour (how else to drag them from the cave into the sunlight?) they would, indeed, forcefully resist. The purpose of the armour is self-protection. If we feel safe we may take our armour off voluntarily, but any attempt at force will only increase our need for the protection with which we feel it provides us.

Don Quixote

Griffith finds great significance in the fact that Miguel de Cervantes’ novel Don Quixote was voted “The Greatest Book of All Time” by a group of acclaimed writers. He sees in the title character a depiction of the heroism of our species in the face of the human condition - feeble but undaunted in a serious of hopeless battles.

I haven’t read the novel, so I can’t speak about it in any detail, but note that it is a comic novel poking fun at the absurdity of an elderly man giving himself a glorious title, donning a suit of armour, riding a skinny old horse and battling windmills that he mistakes for giants. Is he not like us when our self-acceptance becomes eroded? We lack the healthy psychological underpinning (horse) for our endeavours. We try to compensate for our insecurities by giving ourselves egotistical airs (bogus nobility). We don our character armour. And we go into battle against a projection in the outside world of the denied aspect of our own psyche.

Adam Stork

Central to Griffith’s theory about the origin of the human condition is the story of Adam Stork.

He believes that we have a genetic orientation to unconditional selflessness. This came about through a positive feedback loop overriding the principle of the “selfish gene”. The food-rich environment of the Rift Valley in Africa enabled the nurturing period of our proto-human ancestors to lengthen. The mothers were nurturing their children for genetically “selfish” reasons - because those children would carry on their own genes. But the children didn’t know that. To them their mothers seemed to be acting selflessly, so they grew up believing that loving cooperation and selflessness were the meaning of existence. What was learned by the mind and practiced by the body over many generations came to be encoded in the genes as an instinct.

Unlike Griffith, I’m not a biologist. My understanding of genes and the manner in which instincts are encoded in them, and how instincts interact with the rest of the mind in its relationship with its environment, is negligible. So forgive me if I make some false assumptions in my attempt to make sense of this all.

How could we test Griffith’s hypothesis? I can understand how we could identify a gene for a particular disease by looking at the DNA of people who have that disease and at the DNA of a sample of people who don’t and looking for what the first group have in common that is absent in the other. But how would we find empirical evidence for a particular instinct which we are expecting to be universal to the human species?

Griffith feels that this genetic orientation, acquired through the nurturing process, is the source of our “moral conscience”. But doesn’t morality vary from culture to culture? And don’t different individuals feel guilty about different things?

Griffith narrows down the “morality” of this instinctive orientation to cooperation, love and selflessness. He sees these as the central ideals of the great philosophies and religions.

It is undeniable that most of the great things which humans have achieved have been achieved through our capacity to cooperate. Love is the very essence of the ability to cooperate freely, rather than in the spirit of subservience. And if we take “selflessness” to mean the willingness to sacrifice oneself, if necessary, for the interests of the group, then that also is something which contributes to the success of the whole.

What we have in these values is something analogous to the functioning of cells in the body. A cell cannot exist long on its own, or if it goes against the functioning of the system of which it is a part. So it is in its best interest to perform its function well. If we were, with a little poetic license, to attribute conscious motivation and human-like feelings to the cell, we could say that the pleasure principle motivates it. It feels good doing its job cooperatively, enjoying the fellowship and support of the other cells, and it is avoiding the discomfort which would come from ceasing to do so. Would such a cell sacrifice itself? Of course, if the whole required it, because what is the alternative? Without the whole, it would have no existence anyway.

So this makes sense as a function of healthy living systems. But does it, in humans, require the guidance of an instinct beyond the instinct to seek pleasure and avoid suffering? It feels good to be a part of a healthy system. For humans that state of healthy functioning could certainly have been disturbed by the arrival of idealism, driving a wedge as it did between men and women and their respective roles and preventing us from simply doing what came naturally, taking us from a natural society to an artificially repressive one.

But Griffith sees it the other way around - that the ideals came first in the form of an instinctive orientation to selflessness, and that that instinctive orientation was a dictatorial and unforgiving one.

He compares this instinct to the instinctive flight path of a bird, whom he names Adam Stork. Adam Stork has an instinctive flightpath encoded in his genes. He follows that migratory route every year. But one day he miraculously grows a fully-conscious mind. His mind starts contemplating possible courses of action. Will he fly off course to check out an interesting island? Will he go pig out on some apples he sees growing on a tree? When he tries any of these things, his instincts tell him to fly back on course. They criticise him. But he has a conscious mind now. He has to experiment in self-management in order to develop the powers that it brings with it that the blind instincts don’t have. So he does fly off course and begin experimenting, but the constant whining of his instincts make him angry (at the criticism), egocentric (embattled against the criticism) and alienated (blocked off from aspects of reality which might remind him of the critical instincts). But the more angry, egocentric and alienated he becomes the further his behaviour departs from the expectations of his instincts. It’s a negative feedback loop.

This story does have appeal. Most of us can relate to being punished for being naughty. And the conscience can certainly be a “Sharp accuser, but a helpless friend!” (Alexander Pope)

But is the genetic conscience theory the most accountable one?

A conscience which is a function of the ego and arises from the social phenomenon of idealism - a kind of conceptual virus which has removed us from our natural loving selves - could be just as harsh. And some  manifestations of conscience do not pull us in the direction of cooperation or love, but away from it. Take the conscience of the extreme ascetic. He feels he must whip himself to appease his conscience, but his self-flagellation serves no integrative purpose. His conscience propels him towards self-obsession not selflessness or cooperation with others. The form of idealism which tells him that bodily pleasure is sinful is the complete opposite of the cooperativeness and love we see among the bonobos which is accompanied by almost constant sharing of such pleasure through genital-genital rubbing.

In the Adam Stork story the instinct for loving behaviour is dictatorial in nature. It tells us we must do things its way, and it will brook no argument.

Love is not dictatorial. It is the opposite. It is grounded in acceptance. An instinct for love,  learned in the process of being nurtured, can’t be comparable to a bird’s flight path. There is only one way to go for the bird. Migrating is a linear process. But think of a mother caring lovingly for her child. She can only do this effectively by responding spontaneously to the child’s ever-changing behaviour. There is no fixed course. Love is not dictatorial, it is improvisational. The unconditionally loving mother will accept her child’s behaviour unless she believes it is counter-productive for him.

How can a product of this forgiving process be unforgiving?

Griffith feels that all we have lacked is an ability to explain ourselves, but you can’t explain anything to genes. I suppose he feels that that is not a problem because we just have to explain ourselves to ourselves, then we can silence the complaints of our genes by conforming to their dictates, reconciled to our fate by the knowledge of why we have to do so.

For me this is too much like slavery. I think that, if we cultivate unconditional self-acceptance and dethrone idealism and replace it with pragmatism, we will naturally unleash the capacity for love and cooperation which has, for so long, been buried within us. We will become members of a healthy loving society because it fills us with bliss to cast off our armour and truly be together, not because we have surrendered to some jackboot-wearing genes.

Read Part 5