Entry posted by Jean Valjean
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When I was a young kid, the question on whether what I saw was real was sometimes on my mind. There were several theories that I invented. One of them was that each and every moment I live my memory is being wiped out and replaced with a new one. Another was that I was some sort of being that was having a very long, very convincing dream. There was the possibility that I was the only person who existed. There was the chance that every individual was part of one master mind, just representing different trains of thought. The most mind boggling idea was that consciousness itself was an illusion.
Looking at Plato's Cave Theory, I am reminded of those childhood thoughts. The fundamental question is, "how can we be sure that what we perceive exists?" It starts off as an analogy where people live in a cave all their lives, chained in such a way that they cannot move or turn their heads. The only thing they ever knew were the shadows cast against the wall by a light source coming behind them. Their world is only the several feet between the tip of their nose and the rocky wall. It's all that was ever real. If introduced to the real world, they would reject it. The sun would hurt their eyes, and it would be too much for them. They would turn back to their world of shadows.
We come up with perceptions of reality. Perhaps someone's perception can be completely different from another's, and not just in terms of opinions. What can be yellow to one may be green to another. How am I to know how another perceives the colors I see? There are more extreme cases. Someone might imagine people who aren't there. Are these people insane? How can we be sure that what we think we are experiencing is actually happening? Are we dreaming or hooked up to a virtual reality program? What's real and what's illusion?
What we believe is based off of facts that we gather. The problem is, we can have all the facts to support something, in this case the perception of the world we live in, but there is the factor of uncertainty. What if there is something we can't see or one of the "facts" that we were presented with is faulty? There's no way of telling. All we can to is acknowledge a little doubt.
What I can say is that I believe we aren't all living in fantasy worlds created by deluded minds and talking to people who aren't there. My logic won't dismiss the possibility that we are human batteries being harvested by intelligent robots, though. One of the things that the ancient Greek philosophers all believed was that the universe has order and sense. The mind of the human being serves logical functions, and what sort of logical function is it to make up false perceptions of the world around us, denying the purpose of the five senses fed to the brain? Why would the brain do something like that to itself, unless it had a disorder? It's counter-intuitive. It hinders the mind from making proper and healthy judgments. Therefore, I somehow doubt that we are all in false realities due to mental conditions that come naturally to us.
Then one could argue that perhaps we were turned away from reality from the beginning of our lives and have adjusted to our false worlds because we can't adapt to reality, so there's still doubt.
Can we ever be sure of what we perceive to be reality? No, we sure can't. In the meantime, what would we do about it anyways? Neo could have never known that he was living inside the Matrix if he wasn't informed. He couldn't have found himself out of it himself, either.
Unless we know for sure that we live in Plato's Cave, why bother thinking about it? My logic tells me to go with the conclusion that is supported by more evidence, so so far my life as I know it has had all the evidence in the world as opposed to the possibility of it being an illusion, which has none.
This is a one-page essay I wrote for a class of mine. Chances are, I'll be rambling off something different by tomorrow. 
Since I'm on the subject, I sort of let slip to the teacher yesterday that I had a blog. He took a sticky note pad off his desk and threw it to me. "Write the address down."
The image of him reading this blog is very awkward.
Your Honor,
Emperor Kraggh
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