Plato's Cave & Visual Perception

The Solution: The Outside World is Inside Your Head!

There is only one satisfactory solution to this quandary, and that is to say that the entire perceptual world is indeed inside your head, and that the reason it appears to be outside your head is that the head in question is itself a percept, a miniature internal copy of your true head, and as such, it exists at the center of your perceptual world. In other words, the true situation is something like the illustration in Figure 1 (B)

Figure 1 (B)

where your head contains a percept of the room around you, at the center of which is a percept of your head within that room. The room within your head therefore is not an abstract impoverished representation, but is the very solid and real looking room that you see around you now. Nevertheless, for all its solidity and seeming reality, it is, like the shadows in Plato's cave, just a reflection of a greater and still more real outside world.

Now this statement is somewhat ambiguous as it can be visualized in two ways. When you attempt to visualize this concept as you sit now, it is most natural to imagine the world you see around you copied in miniature within the head that you know as your own. This is not the point I am making, as it leads again to a mental image like [Figure 1 (A)] because introspective examination of your head does not show it to contain a complex perceptual world, but only an abstract impoverished one. I propose instead a mental image as in Figure 1 (B), where you picture yourself and the world that you see around you now, all surrounded by your real physical head which in turn is surrounded by the real external world. The head that you know as your own therefore is the small one in the center of Figure 1 (B), and the world you see around you now is the small world surrounding that small head.

Stated the other way around, I would like you to look outwards at the world around you, including the room, and the world outside the window, and to picture that out beyond the most distant things that you can perceive is located the inner surface of your true physical skull encompassing your familiar world in all directions; and beyond that physical skull is a physical world that you will never see, and could not in principle ever comprehend. This, I claim, is the correct mental image of the message behind the parable of Plato's cave.

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