That's right, somebody left Epic alone with a philosophy textbook and a whole load of spare time on his hands!

UH-OH.



"REMEMBER KIDS, PHILOSOPHY IS GOOD FOR YOU!"
-Plato, on philosophy

So this is how it goes. Millions of minutes ago in Ancient Greece, there was this dude named Plato. He was a bit of a thinker. He was taught by Socrates, who was essentially the founder of philosophy.

Now this Socrates was a pretty cool guy. He questioned teh citizens and didn't afraid of anything.

One of his favourite pastimes was to go around being a devil's advocate in arguments with random citizens, using the method of argument named after him: "Socratic method."

Put simply, this is one of the common strategies in debates and arguments. Picking holes in your opponent's arguments by questioning them and prompting them to contradict themselves, to the point where their beliefs were utterly dissected.

Now, he would go around using his fancy method proving that everyone around him was wrong, and the high-ups started to dislike this, so they locked him up for crimes against religion and the state. In the end, they bumped him off for questioning the general beliefs of everyone.
You can't trust the system, man. o-o

Anyway, one of his star pupils was this dude called Plato, pictured above. He had a bunch of different theories and 'thought experiments,' which is a fancy word for when a philosopher daydreams about totally impractical stuff that would be pretty funny to mess with people.

One of his more famous theories is known as the 'Cave Analogy.' It is a rather well-thought out analogy of society at that time, and sadly, in modern times as well.

So picture this:

You've got a bunch of maybe ten or so prisoners. For their entire lives, they've been chained in a cave, in such a way that they can only face one wall. Behind them is a fire, and a bunch of really odd people spend their time making shadow-puppet displays on the wall in front of these prisoners.

Now, the prisoners have known nothing but this wall for their entire life, and they believe this wall to be the entire of reality. It is the truth, there is no other possibility.

It's possible that they may well make up a game in this scenario, where, by memorising previous patterns in the shadow-puppetry displays, they are able to guess fairly accurately what the next shape to come up will be.

So anyway, this really odd scenario continues on until they're all grown-up, and then one of them is released. They go outside, see the sun, the grass, the sky and the mountains and the people, and they suddenly realise how horribly misled they have been for their entire lives.
Everything they thought to be true is just a tiny puppet display in a small cave in the massive, wondrous world outside. Not only this, but his guessing-game of the shadow-puppets is completely useless in the long run. Everything skill that he had is now pointless, and every thing that he considered to be knowledge was just a lie.

Naturally, he feels incredibly sorry for his fellow prisoners, and rushes back to the cave to tell them how misinformed they are.

When he gets back, he tells them all about the colours and the creatures and the sights and sounds and smells that he experienced, and how do they react? They scoff at him, tell him he's a madman, completely bonkers, he's clearly not fit to hang around with the likes of THEM any more.

And so he goes off and enjoys life the best he can, but the others stay stubbornly in their cave, memorising and guessing at the shadow-display. As happy a life as the released prisoner may be, he will always feel sorry for the poor, wasted men locked up back in the cave.

Sucks to be him. He has discovered a monumental truth, and nobody believes him. Was it really worth discovering, or would it have been better if he'd just remained in ignorance of the horrible circumstances of his imprisonment?

So, Plato essentially reasoned with this analogy that everything we think we know is at mercy to our senses and our experiences. All we know is what we've seen and been told, and we are simply incapable of believing anything else. We are inherently limited by the fallible nature of our sensory inputs.


Now, flash forward to another, slightly more obscure theory of his.
His supposed 'proof' that each human has an immortal soul.

He reasoned that there are certain things that humans 'know' that they have no reason to know or understand. For example, you can look at someone and think that they are beautiful, but you have never seen an example of true, 100% beauty to compare them to. So how do you know they're beautiful?

Likewise, another example would be a shape such as a circle. No human has ever seen a true, perfect circle. Even if we got our best supercomputers onto building a picture of a circle with a monumental number of sides, it would still not be a perfect circle.

Yet we understand what a circle should be like. We can look at something and judge how circular it is. But how do we know what a circle looks like.

We now know, thanks to a more detailed understanding of the human brain and genes, that traits such as appreciation for beauty are all to do with upbringing and DNA, but they didn't know that kind of stuff back then.

So Plato came up with another, more abstract conclusion.

He reasoned that there must be two 'forms,' or 'realms,' through which the human soul passes in a cycle.

There is this realm, the one we all experience, which is the 'form of opinion.'
There is, he argued, a second realm, that comes prior to this one, which is the 'form of knowledge and truth.'

In this realm, our human souls are supposedly exposed to the absolute truth about varying concepts and ideas. We gain a perfect understanding of beauty, and of circles. When our souls pass through into the next realm of opinions, we are merely able to distantly recall what we saw in that place, and we use our prior knowledge of truth gained in that form to compare to things we see and experience in this one.

Of course, this is all a fairly odd concept. Were Plato to have had an understanding of the human brain and genes and stuff like that like the understanding we have now, he would likely have come to the same conclusion as most biologists: That such traits are either inherited or developed through experiences, and that we can simply understand concepts such as circles through intuition.

Now, this leads to a rather amusing coincidence.

Plato's first argument, the 'Cave Analogy,' deals with the idea that the conclusions we can make about reality are inherently limited by that which we know and understand.

Had Plato known what we do now, his conclusions as to the second example would likely have been radically different and far more accurate. It is, then, a rather sad and yet rather ironic piece of irony that he should fall victim to the very human flaw that he himself illustrated so vividly with his analogy.

In conclusion, it's really pretty funny when you think about it.