Plato's Cave: How To Read This Document

How To Read This Document

Starting at the outline, read each of the summary statements in sequence. If you either do not comprehend, or do not agree with a summary statement, click on its hyperlink, and that statement will be expanded into greater detail. Use the same procedure in a fractal self-similar manner through the expanded arguments, and at the end of each, click on "Return to argument" to continue where you left off at the higher level. The presentation therefore is essentially sequential through a series of main points, but with many optional diversions and diversions of diversions available interactively by way of hyper-links.

Occasional hyper-links are provided which do not return to the main sequence, but make cross-links to other parts of the discussion connected at a different part of the sequence. Such cross-links are identified by [square brackets] to warn you that they will break the linear sequence.

Other hyperlinks are bold, indicating that they are essential to the argument, so you are recommended to take these diversions.

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About This Document

This document is an experiment in information representation. Knowledge is essentially a tree-like structure, whereas written documents are usually arranged in a linear sequence. The task of the author is to transform the tree structure into a linear sequence in such a manner that the reader can reconstruct the tree structure in their own mind. The operation is only successful when the author guesses correctly the prior knowledge of the reader, and anticipates the readers objections to individual points. When successful, the document is appropriate only for its narrow target audience.

In a two-way discussion on the other hand, the presenter skims over points of common agreement, and responds to objections by delving deeper into the details, so that the focus of the discussion is expressly on the points of difference between the two people. This allows the discussion be tailored to the individual background of the audience.

This document is an attempt to reconstruct the interactive give-and-take of a two-way discussion by (hopefully) anticipating all possible questions and objections, and addressing them with arguments made available by an expanding tree of hyper-links.

The subject matter of this discussion is particularly pertinent to this format, because it represents a line of thought which is very different from the conventional view of perception, and although there is good solid evidence for this view, that evidence is scattered throughout a wide body of disparate fields of knowledge, with which any particular reader is almost certain to have only partial familiarity. This theory therefore represents a constellation of diverse but mutually consistent ideas which make contact with conventional knowledge only in widely separated specialties.

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