Plato Stands Alone

It was great to see all the postings yesterday on the Blog. Remember that if you missed yesterday please try and make it up as missed posts count against your final average.

Anyhow, back to Plato who was is the topic of discussion today. The great thing about philosophical debate is that it never really ends unless science is somehow able to decide the debate in a final way. While Plato uses the Allegory of the Cave to explain the movement from ignorance to knowledge, and from knowledge to ultimate truth; we are merely concerned with a smaller part of that argument here.

I think most of us could agree that the prisoners in Plato's cave had some kind of knowledge of the world whether it was flawed or not considering that even the shadow representations they were shown had origins in a "real" world. This illustrates two important points:

1. Knowledge is imperfect. We all know what a Zebra is and what it looks like and could probably draw an accurate picture of one if we had the artistic talent. But how many of us have actually seen a "real" Zebra? I would bet that in our class it is around 1% or less. Does that mean I have no real knowledge of a Zebra? No, on the contrary we have knowledge similar to the prisoners in Plato's Cave. We are witness to shadows of reality constantly in out society. Much of what we "know" is second, third, fourth, fifth, or sixth, hand removed from the source. This separates us from the "truth" that Plato would have us believe is attainable and is a fact of living in an information society where the amount of information available is greater than the potential experiences we might have in a lifetime. If we lived cloistered, sheltered lives that people did 5,000 years ago it far more likely that we could experience more in our lifetime than we might read or obtain from outside sources. This is not to make you feel helpless in the face of an unknowable reality, only to point out that a fact of existence is reliance upon thoughts and information to construct "reality". This leads to my second point:

2. "Reality" is subjective. If we are creating a reality based on imperfect knowledge it only makes sense that no one perspective is "right" on every subject, since no one can have an experience of the truth of everything. As i touched on in my introduction yesterday, everyone lives in a slightly different version of reality, which are all equally "real". Plato's prisoners believed their reality was true until they had a new experience which altered their perspective. A paranoid schizophrenic may have hallucinations which are "real" enough to make them take action and put themselves and others into harms way. Given this it is a small step to propose that many of today's video games, as massive as they are, can be considered alternate realities.

This is what i would like to explore the first week of the course. Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) exist. How "real" are they?

For tomorrow please take a look at this article on New Empiricism and this article on video games and the brain. My goal is not to judge the validity of these claims just yet, only to entertain them as possibilities until we have had our own experience to reflect on.