Global Weirding in Plato's Cave

Mario Veen

Originally published on Substack, 4 March 2025.

In 2021, I interviewed Professor of Theoretical Astronomy Vincent Icke about physics for my podcast Life From Plato's Cave. He said something that got me thinking. I started a question saying that quantum physics is weird. He replied, "Yes, but not just simply quantum mechanics. All of physics is weird."

At the time I was concerned with the question of why our reality is the way it is. The answer to that question can be made very complex, but also quite simply be answered as: our reality is the way it is because we grew up in it.

In Plato's famous allegory of the cave, Plato makes this very point. There is a group of prisoners who have been confined to a cave from birth. They are chained and their gaze is fixed on the cave wall opposite them. Shadows are projected onto this cave wall by objects carried behind them in front of a fire. The prisoners believe that the shadows are reality. Why? Because that is the reality they have grown up in. They have never experienced anything else and cannot imagine anything else. Their entire society, their language, their senses are geared to the perception of these shadows. Thus, success in their society is determined by who can best predict which shadows will follow which shadows.

This allegory is so powerful because you can start recognizing it on a superficial level in your own life, and then delve deeper into it. For example, you can relate the allegory to your work culture: you are used to a certain culture within the company where you work. Answering an email on a Saturday? 'You just do that'. Only when you start working at a new company, or end up in a burnout because you can never really get away from your work, you are available day and night, on weekends and holidays, do you discover that things 'ain't necessarily so'.

You can extend this to the culture you grow up in. I grew up in the Netherlands. When I was ten years old, I travelled outside Europe for the first time. My mother took me to Malaysia to visit a friend of hers, and I had an experience that initiated my interest in philosophy.

From the moment we stepped out of the plane, everything was different. But I had expected that. The warm blanket of humid air, the smells, the sounds, the people who almost all had brown skin and black hair, the language that I could not understand — I had never experienced it in my life, but it is what I had imagined a tropical country to be. Everything will be different, I had prepared myself for that. My mother's friend drove us to their house and I looked at the, as expected, palm trees and colorful houses.

But my biggest culture shock came when we entered their house. There was no coat rack in the hallway. No coat rack? Every house I had entered since I was born had a coat rack as soon as I entered. The coat racks were hanging on the wall or standing, were made of wood or metal, but there was always a coat rack.

Of course, there was no coat rack in the house of our acquaintances in Malaysia. The temperature never drops below twenty degrees, so people don't wear coats. And if you don't wear a coat, you don't need a coat rack. I could reason it all out logically. But the shock that something that was known, that I took for a universal fact, namely that you open the front door and there is a coat rack, was greater than all the unknown.

When you change jobs, when you travel and immerse yourself in other cultures, when you read about other times, you find that a lot of what you took for granted as universal and necessary doesn't have to be that way. You're kind of dragged out of a cave. For me, it wasn't specifically about the coat rack, but it led me to a question: if something that was so obvious to me turned out not to be so, if something so practical and mundane was like that, what else would be different?

The history of science regularly shows that a certain assumption about reality was not necessary and universal. And on the other hand, we quickly forget that what we subsequently discover was not always known. For example, during my research for a study about the role of technology in healthcare, I found out that handwashing for hygiene is a recent phenomenon. Not so long ago, handwashing was mainly a ritual act. In 1840, doctors went straight from dissecting corpses to performing deliveries and operations. In 1847, the Hungarian doctor Semmelweis suggested that it might be a good idea for doctors to wash their hands before giving birth. The number of mothers who died in childbirth from a postpartum infection dropped from 18% to 2%. Something as simple as washing your hands, which played a major role during the corona pandemic and has saved countless lives worldwide, would not have even occurred to us before then. In the United States, hand washing regulations only came into effect in the 1980s.

This is the first level at which one can understand Plato's allegory, and it is a level that is important and can provide beautiful insights for your daily life. But it still concerns human habits, how we live together. And when we talk about a subject like climate change, we often get stuck at this level. For example, we talk about whether or not to eat meat, and whether eating meat is 'natural' or not. Or we talk about behavioural change, and whether people are prepared to make different choices than they are used to. Are fossil fuels necessary for our society? How quickly is it realistic to phase them out? Or are we living in a fossil cave and are the objections to phasing out fossil fuels as quickly as possible the logic of an addict? In the context of the ecological crisis as a state of emergency, these are important questions. Because what is 'realistic' and what is 'as quickly as possible'? But these kinds of questions only scratch the surface of Plato's allegory of the cave.

This does not mean that this level is unimportant. In daily life, which concerns your family, your job, your way of life, it is the most important. And it is also important in our worldwide situation. The 'shifting baseline syndrome' describes this exactly. An example that people of my generation often give is that when they went on holiday in their childhood, the windscreen was full of dead insects after the car ride. That is no longer the case. I can notice something like that, but my daughter cannot. For her, the current situation of climate and biodiversity has become the status quo, her 'baseline' that she has been born into and against which she measures change. Our window of observation is different, and we only notice changes as they occur within this window. Plato gives us a beautiful image of how a window of observation works: being fixated on shadows on a cave wall your entire life. But Plato's allegory is not just about the window through which we look at the world. It is also about the eyes that look through that window.

Plato specifically emphasizes the role of the senses in the cave. It is not only the culture of the prisoners that shapes their reality in the cave, that is, what they are used to and what they experience as real or not real. It is also simply that their senses are attuned to life in the cave. This becomes clear when one of the prisoners is unchained and dragged out of the cave. Plato describes this freed prisoner being blinded, first by the light of the fire and later by the sunlight on the surface. This is painful and makes the freed prisoner unable to see anything except a blinding light, and only wants to flee back to what is more real in their experience.

If you have been raised in a cave all your life with only a little light from a fire far behind you, then the little ray of sunlight must be unimaginably painful and feel like a nightmare rather than a liberation. And Plato describes that once the freed prisoner is on the surface, it takes a long time for him to get used to the light. At first they can only see the light of the stars at night, then the reflections of things in the water during the day, then the objects as we can perceive them, and at the height of the allegory they can even look straight into the sun. So the senses of the freed prisoner get used to the new situation. And because they can then perceive their new situation, they gain new insights.

In other words, for Plato the change in environment comes first — in the allegory mainly the lighting conditions. Then it takes time for the senses to get used to these new conditions enough that one can perceive, that is, can distinguish something. And through that capacity for distinction, the freed prisoner can also gain mental and emotional insights: in the allegory, they realize that the sun is the source of everything, including the cave where they spent their entire life up to that point.

Now that the freed prisoner has this insight, they feel happy for the first time since their 'liberation'. Up until this moment they had been struggling to escape the force that was dragging them out of the cave and would have returned to 'reality', namely their seat in the cave, as soon as they had the chance. It is therefore possible within the allegory that even if the prisoner had been dragged completely out of the cave, but not yet accustomed to the sunlight, they would have fled back if they had managed to struggle free and dismissed the whole experience as a bad dream.

But after the insight and their own happiness comes the emotional connection for the freed prisoner, namely that their ex-colleagues are still stuck in what now appear to be pitiful circumstances: a dark, damp cave in which you are under the illusion that the shadows on the wall are reality. The freed prisoner returns, but only now does it become clear how fundamental the senses are in Plato's allegory. That the returning prisoner fails to convince the others is a reference to his teacher Socrates who was sentenced to death while trying to drag people out of the cave. But the reason that this project fails leads back to our senses and what is familiar to us.

The returning prisoner is no longer accustomed to the twilight of the cave. Plato describes how it takes a long time for their eyes to get used to the darkness again and in the meantime they cannot see anything. For the prisoners, the shadows in the cave are the most common thing in the world and they have no trouble seeing them. The one who claims that they are in an illusion is making a fool of themselves because they keep losing at the shadow games.

In my interview with Vincent Icke, we discussed quantum physics, and I was particularly interested in how we can get used to the quantum world that is initially weird to us, and feel at home in its logic. But Professor Icke pointed out something that I, like the coat racks in Malaysia, had missed. "Yes, but all of physics is weird." As Icke put it, "Go and lie on your back in a meadow and see the clouds passing overhead. The way you see those clouds move is familiar to you. But if you take your distance from that familiarity you will have to conclude that what you see is really weird, is really strange, is really odd."

Clouds look normal to us, but that is only because we are used to them. Our intuition — which actually means our entire perception — is attuned to them. It is perfectly normal for us that objects fall down when we let go of them. And there are so many phenomena that we call mundane, that we do not even notice, that are in reality only fickle shadows in Plato's cave.

So this is the second level at which we can read the first phase of Plato's cave: the way our intuition is attuned to what we are familiar with. But our experience of life on Earth is not just shaped by our eyes and other senses. At a deeper level, it is also shaped by our relationship to fundamental concepts such as space, change, and time. We have a certain experience of time, our lives are lived within a certain sense of time, simply because we are used to it. And just as the prisoners cannot imagine life outside the cave, we cannot imagine what our world will be like if we stretch our sense of time: not just the realization that the shadows on the cave wall could just as well be in other patterns, not just the realization that these shadows are projected by objects carried in front of a fire, and not even the realization that these objects are in turn images of objects on the surface of the Earth. For the ultimate realization of the freed prisoner in Plato's cave arrives when they realize that the sun is the source of everything — everything on the surface, but also of the fire, the images, and the cave itself.

The core insight I gained in my conversation with Icke was that in a very concrete, physical, practical way, our human intuition has been attuned to life on earth in the past years, decades, centuries and even millennia. I connected this to earlier insights from philosophers such as Heidegger, Bergson and Stiegler who were concerned with even more fundamental categories. For example, Kant shows that we humans only count something as part of our reality, can only perceive and imagine something, within a certain conception of space and time. But the fact that we humans perceive this in this way, that our thoughts, our brains, our senses distinguish between phenomena in these ways, does not mean that the world is actually like this. And this is where Plato's allegory and the ideas of Kant, for example, become very concrete: because our intuition is not a fixed thing, it can change. Only if the circumstances do not change and if there is no need to change, then it seems as if it concerns fixed categories. And when those categories are tampered with, as is happening now in the age of climate madness, it provokes as much resistance as the freed prisoner being dragged out of Plato's cave.

For example, instead of expanding our concept of 'intelligence' to include the intelligence of animals, fungi, trees, forests and the earth itself, we created an artificial reflection of our limited concept of intelligence and call it "Artificial Intelligence". Instead of expanding our concept of justice to expand from cisgender heterosexual male citizens to include enslaved people, women, the rainbow community, children and animals, and even the rights of nature, we also see a countermovement to limit justice to 'two genders', and we see gay rights, women's rights and children's rights under pressure worldwide. This is the resistance to keep everything 'normal', where 'normal' means the world you grew up in: the familiar world of your youth in the 70s, 80s and 90s.

Instead, let us get used to a new world, a new reality, so that we can explore how beautiful this new world can be. And in this new time, a new relationship with time is needed.