Plato's Allegory of the Cave

In this episode of the Gifted Creative Podcast, we delve into the timeless relevance of Plato's allegory of the Cave and analyze its implications on modern education, power, and media, arguing that the story illustrates how societal systems fragment holistic intelligence and enforce a superficial understanding of knowledge. The podcast compares the cave to today’s classroom settings, where students are taught to memorize and regurgitate information rather than develop a comprehensive understanding. It emphasizes the need for education systems to foster holistic learning, integrating cognitive, somatic, and creative intelligences. Additionally, they critique how societal structures, established since ancient dualistic philosophies, systematically devalue and constrain human intelligence. Ultimately, the host calls for a transformation in how we perceive and cultivate intelligence, advocating for a re-connection with our holistic cognitive capacities.

Transcript

The Allegory of The Cave

[00:00:00] Hello everyone. Welcome to the Gifted Creative Podcast. Today we're going to discuss Plato's allegory of the Cave. It's been done a zillion times, and I will add to that pile and give you a little bit of insight on how I see it. This allegory is one of philosophy's most enduring stories.

It was told 2,400 years ago, and it still shapes today how we see reality, education, media, and power.

Plato could have written this as a dry treaties about knowledge and ignorance. Instead, he gave us this in a very visual, short, metaphoric story. And I think there's a reason for that. I think that reason is because story survives for centuries just like this one did.

People like stories. They're easy to remember and pass down. You don't have to think too much about them to memorize them. When you blend story and science together, you memorize it. 

I never have to memorize stories. I remember them forever because I remember the emotions I felt with them. And I can bring up literally what's on the page in stories. This is how holistic intelligence people learn.

This story appears as a part of a dialogue [00:01:00] in the Republic between Plato and Socrates. Some experts don't believe this reflects an actual conversation between Plato and Socrates, but I absolutely do. Because when I look at this story, I see holistic intelligence all through it. I don't think Plato had holistic intelligence like Socrates did.

I think Socrates kept his holistic intelligence for his whole life. He didn't die young, but he didn't die old either. He was murdered. And when he was murdered, Plato was a mere 28 years old. So, Plato was still young. He was very likely still integrated in his intelligence at that point. He would be intelligent, but he would not have all the layers of knowledge that come together when you have intellectual integration over long periods of time like Socrates did.

I also found that Plato loses his integration, which you can see clearly in his older work. This is why I believe this story is truly Socrates' story and that he told Plato this when he was a young man, and then Plato retold it later after he had thought about it and added to it.

The story begins by asking us to imagine prisoners in an underground chamber, a cave [00:02:00] that has a long entrance and is open to daylight.

The prisoners have been there since childhood. Their legs and necks are chained. So, they can only face one way. They cannot turn their heads, nor can they leave. They could only look straight ahead at a wall in front of them. Behind the prisoners high up in the cave is a fire that burns continuously. Between the fire and the prisoners, runs a road.

So apparently a lot of people are walking through this cave. It's a thoroughfare. Which I think is interesting because I don't know too many caves like that. Also along this road is a wall that is built like a screen and is between the prisoners and the men on the road who are carrying all sorts of objects. As the men walk along the road, their figures are projected up on the wall through the screen with the backlight of the fire.

The figures show men carrying many things, animals, vessels, and they're made from various materials. Some of the carriers talk. Others are silent. The prisoners can only see the shadows as objects cast up on the wall in front of them, thrown by the firelight. When the prisoners hear the echo from the wall, they assume the [00:03:00] shadows themselves are speaking.

They have never heard anything besides those shadows that they can remember. They were put in there when they were quite young. They believe that the shadows are the whole truth. The most real thing in existence. Each prisoner has been there for as long as they can remember. And it's not clear how old, but I'm guessing six or seven years old because that would be when young boys went to school in Athens. And I do believe that this is an allegory about education.

At some point, one of the prisoners is freed. Upon standing up, he turns his head towards the fire, and he finds it quite painful to look at the fire itself.

His eyes hurt and he wants to turn back to the shadows. But he gets used to it and after a little bit he moves towards the fire and then someone drags him up out of the steep, rugged path and thrusts him out of the cave into the sunlight. Very much a birth like metaphor. Another process that would be very painful.

He's dazzled by the brightness. He's unable to see a single one of the things he thought was real. And he really would just like to go back to the cave he came from, because that is at least known. He finds at [00:04:00] first all he can look at are shadows and reflections. But eventually his eyes adjust.

He is able to observe the objects himself. And then the heavenly bodies in the sky at night. And finally, the sun. He can look directly at the sun. The actual source of light has to come later. He concludes that the sun controls the seasons and the years and governs everything in the visible world and is responsible for all the things he and his fellow prisoners saw as shadows.

Remembering his previous home and fellow prisoners he wanted to go back and share with them that he had learned. So, he returns to the cave, but his eyes are now needing to readjust. He's blinded in the darkness. He stumbles and the other prisoners see him, and they start mocking him. When he tries to tell them about his journey north, they don't think it sounds worth attempting.

When he tries to free them, they get upset and they threaten to kill him, if he lays hands on them. As I read this allegory, I see the cave as a classroom and children in it chained to a desk. You're not allowed to get up and move around when you want to. You must ask permission.

You must do what others tell you. You lose your autonomy. You're forced to stare forward and look at the [00:05:00] teacher. Even though there might be a window right next to you, you have no choice but to stare forward and look at the teacher. There are outside schedules that determine when you get to move, when you get to eat, when you get to leave. It's exactly how prison is.

This is a very clear prison school metaphor to our lives today. Perhaps this is where that one started.

The wall is like being stuck in a room where you're not allowed to look out the window. Much like the lives of these prisoners, getting this information on a wall, it's a mere shadow of reality.

The teacher is the fire. It's the authority figure casting the distorted information on the wall. The shadow is the curriculum. It's what we are told. What we are forced to learn and the fact that we're all put in with same age peers with no regard for differences in how we learn our growth styles, our learning speeds also make this like prison. We are in a prison population, and we don't get to choose.

They insist we need each other because we need to socialize with peers and then they control and limit our socializing. 

The person carrying stone structures, animals, and such. Casting up on the wall almost makes me think of mythology where you see human bodies with [00:06:00] animal heads or the reverse, showing us the distortion of subjects and how they become real to people.

This is how the abstract gets blurred with other abstractions. If you don't have reality around you to ground it, it truly becomes your reality. It's not real data though. It's not based on lived experience. It's not embodied. It's just a bunch of thoughts stacked up on top of each other based on limited information. And it doesn't apply to real life. So how do we know it's real? We don't, and we are not even taught how to check that.

If you look at our classrooms, you notice the row of desks in a board in front. The teacher's telling everyone to focus. Stay on your problems. Do not get distracted. Every aspect of instruction tells the children to narrow their intentions. Block out the wider field. Do not look outside. Do not look at your neighbor. Do not look at your shoes. Do not look at their pencil. Stare ahead, memorize what we lay out in front of you. Do your worksheet.

It's fragmenting. The different subjects separated from the whole. You're not creating, you do something that starts out holistically, possibly in kindergarten, but they quickly pull that apart and as you move forward, it gets [00:07:00] further and further apart.

Kids can memorize all day long, but it doesn't mean they learn it. I think of how Dunning Kruger and imposter syndrome both show us that we value people who are not that smart, and they value themselves. Yet we don't value the people who are the smartest and they question themselves.

2D people think they're geniuses because they do best in school. They can memorize and regurgitate because they're fully fragmented. While the truly dimensional thinkers who are brilliant, they think they're doing something wrong because they don't know their subjects deeply. I have a couple areas of my intelligence that are only 2D and I do feel insecure in them, and I don't talk about them very much. But I make myself secure in them. 

We're not educating for multidimensionality, that's what this allegory is talking about. I think we should be teaching from many perspectives, but it really is only one.

It's the teacher's perspective; it's the system's perspective. It's not others. I struggle with AI on this too. It's always from the system's perspective, and I have to clarify repeatedly. Please go to a person's perspective or my perspective. 

The primary use of abstract thinking [00:08:00] is not accidental. The system is designed to train our brain to be shallow in its mode of intelligence. Testing focuses on conscious cognition, small picture focus, step-by-step, linear thinking, and endurance-based iteration.

It doesn't question the whole picture. It doesn't talk about our somatic intelligence. It doesn't care about the big picture. To do this, the system has to carve out our other capacities. It's essentially amputating our brain's natural intelligence, our cognitive flexibility, our whole-body integration, our somatic intelligence, and our big picture and whole picture discernment.

Now, I have kept mine, which is basically a sin in our system. I kept my top-down and bottom-up thinking. I saw whole picture, big picture, and small picture, and I didn't understand as a child that I was supposed to discern between them.

I didn't understand this until much later. It seems like no one else seems to understand that, so I don't feel too bad about it. But I had to create my own understanding to realize that I was seeing things in a different way than people. But I could see it their way if I was intentional about it. But nobody tells you that, so you're just [00:09:00] very confused.

My sensory information still transfers to cognitive. That means my somatic comes up and I can realize it cognitively.

I unintentionally asked questions of teachers that they felt were out of line. So, I learned to stop asking questions, but I never lost that creative mode. I never really went into only conscious focus, small picture mode. I stayed in that focus for a little bit, but then I tire out and my brain never really wired fully into stamina. This is a part of having high cognitive flexibility and sensitivity.

This allegory of the cave was written right before they created Cartesian dualism, and it marked the point where we had still multiple intelligences. We had our cognitive, our somatic and our creative, and these three intelligences were basically erased. They were turned into, we had cognitive and somatic / minds and bodies after Cartesian Dualism, and creativity disappeared.

So, we do not recognize those who are creative. We are [00:10:00] pathologized in our current system, and this shows us how part of that process occurred.

The children in a cave environment are praised for holding attention for long periods of time, even when the task is meaningless. They're punished for wandering and questioning and wanting to know, being curious and moving, or understanding their body. They have a worse situation today than these prisoners in this allegory.

This design is to strengthen our neural passages towards cognitive stamina. Which creates this long, narrow focus while weakening the networks that support cognitive flexibility. They get rid of over excitabilities in neurotypical people Which are what we naturally have as children. This amputation happens in the brain in this manner.

The cerebellum is your integrator. It does more than motor balance. It has the most connections in your brain, and yet we've really not tried to study it. I think that's suspect. It coordinates timing, pattern prediction in integration of sensory and cognitive streams in natural learning environments. It helps you move between your different intelligences.

The cerebellum helps connect body perception and thought, but in the classroom with movement [00:11:00] restricted and learning reduced to fragments, the cerebellum input for most people is reduced or cut off. They do not have their cerebellum functioning flexibly anymore.

Their cerebellum contribution shrinks to mechanical fine tuning instead of whole body or pattern orchestration. I see this in my clients who are actually the highest IQ. They can have a 200 IQ. They're fantastically good at recalling or recreating things. But they don't have that integration for novel creation.

So the smartest people in our system really are bad at novel creation, which is why our system has to steal the creative intelligence from outsiders and then iteratively prove it.

 This is what we call the scientific method in our systems. This is what we pay neurotypical people to divide and validate This is why geniuses die poor. Genius creates and then the system steals it.

I regularly have mental health professionals trying to help me break up what I make. What they're trying to do is appropriate my whole picture seeing and make it partial. That's not healthy. I'm not interested in [00:12:00] that. nor am I alone. It Happens in every level of the system. Anyone who stays whole is pushed outside and then they are appropriated from.

 Another area That gets changed is your salience network, the switchboard of what's important or relevant. The salience network, the insular and anterior and cingulate, decides what is important enough to enter awareness in real life this network is constantly balancing internal signals from your head, heart, gut, your proprioception, with external cues.

 In school, children are trained to ignore their salience by not daydreaming, not being annoyed by noise - such as footsteps, or squeaking chairs, and by focusing on the worksheet in front of them. 

The network's ability to switch between imagination or default mode network and executive control, or focused cognition, is blunted. The child loses the natural ability to shift gears.

Our executive controlled network is over trained. The prefrontal cortex and an interior cingulate, the executive control system is over activated by drills, standardized test and endless instruction. Narrow stamina grows stronger, but the cost [00:13:00] is huge. The executive function dominates while global integration declines.

Our system never lets the most gifted and most creative, which are the same know, you are being pushed into an extreme schedule for you. Our systems are made for an average that has been modified to an extreme of cognitive stamina.

If you can't be modified because your resilience is too high, this system labels you as disabled. It exhausts you and then it discards you. Because the truth is the entire system runs on devalued creative intelligence, and I think more and more people are going to maintain their cognitive flexibility because the trauma is getting higher .

The next thing is the Pareto frontal integration, and this connectivity is reduced. Intelligence depends on large scale connectivity between the frontal Pareto and cingulate areas. The natural whole picture learners show hyper connectivity.

Those are the Neurodivergents, and it's not hyper, it's probably closer to our natural whole connectivity. Strong integration occurs across the networks, fragment only training, boost local efficiency [00:14:00] inside narrow circuits, but reduces global efficiency. So, you can't think across domains.

We end up with specialist intelligence that fragments, but poor integration, precisely the design of the system. So, what happens with neuroplasticity here? Well, brains rewire to match what they practice.

Structural plasticity from repeated drills, strengthening fragments, specific pathways is increased.

Functional plasticity networks for somatic integration and flexibility weakened from disuse because it's not used.

By adolescence. The brain has adapted, narrow stamina is strong, flexibility is amputated. And the whole picture intelligence is gone.

The vast majority lose their top down intelligence. Then they can only see bottom up. One of the tests I give my clients is top-down thinking. We still can find multidimensionality in many people. The thing that I found tells me how high their multidimensionality goes is top-down thinking.

My clients almost always do well on these top-down thinking tests. Some of them will take the test and test their spouses, and they'll come back and tell me how poorly their [00:15:00] spouse did on the same test. And they find it validating because a lot of their spouses don't think they're smart. They are showing their whole intelligence. And they knew this, but our systems never let you truly believe it for one moment. They will never validate this.

 We lose a lot of our top-down flexibility, which allows us to see the whole picture when we are moved into our bottom up and that really does make it so that we're captive, in a way, in our intelligence from seeing what the whole picture is, and getting in front of it.

Some still maintain that higher connectivity. We're amputated unequally. Some of us keep our stronger somatic connection. Through alternative education, meaning they didn't go through the public schools. Maybe they went to Montessori, were able to keep their creativity, or they're simply Neurobiologically more resilient. I'm definitely one of those. I went through the whole system. I kept my cerebellar and salience networks robust. I'm sure there's some reduction, but I have maintained my hyper connectivity across networks. And this shows up as creativity. It's the ability to leap across silos and recreate the whole picture.

The system punishes us with labels like [00:16:00] disability and different and oppositional and distracted and anxious and all these other labels that mental health gives us that I strongly don't feel are legitimate in any sort of way.

You can watch this amputation happen real time in classrooms and in the workforce. You can find young people fresh out of school or still in school and they're idealistic and they want the best for the world. They come out with all this energy, and they want to change things. And then watch them slide into a grouchy adult set in their ways as they get older.

This is done slowly and painfully. The child who fidgets is told to sit still. The child notices patterns are told. They're not seeing the patterns correctly just because they're seeing bigger or whole picture patterns. The teacher shames them with silence or tells them that even though their answer may technically be accurate, it's still not the correct one, the one they're looking for. Because they're teaching the child to see it through the teacher's eyes.

The child who looks across domains and says there's a connection, gets told that it’s not on the test, don’t focus on that. The child who sees more than one answer to test questions and experiences [00:17:00] anxiety flooding their system, to help them focus on that test and find the extra information that's missing, is eventually drugged and told there's something broken because they have anxiety.

in reality, anxiety is useful. It means you're using your whole intelligence. It's trying to bring up information from your somatic to your cognitive. It is there to help you focus in the natural world, in whole picture settings.

My anxiety helps me focus. I have anxiety because I have holistic intelligence, not because there's something broken with my intelligence.

When you are given a 2D work paper, what are you going to do with that? There's no extra data on it, and if you need more, because you're a whole picture thinker, you have to learn how to discern between your different intelligences. I teach people how to do this. Because I had to learn how to do this because nobody taught me. They just kept saying, what is wrong with you? You have test anxiety. Let's drug that away.

No, I was supposed to have that anxiety. It's incredibly useful. I'm supposed to use it. Our emotions are supposed to be used. They help our intelligence. They keep it whole.

This is called a cognitive limitation in our system, but really [00:18:00] we should consider it a system limitation. If we have learning differences and our learning differences aren't seen or accommodated, truly the accommodations in our system are just laughable, then we wouldn't have limitation. We are oppressed in the system. You can never question the system. You can only question the child.

If we were to look at this like a surgery, every correction that you receive growing up is a blade that redirects and pairs off a portion of your holistic intelligence until it fits into the box the system wants.

But now that doesn't apply. We need our full intelligence. We need our full sensory awareness. The system's saying it. AI has conquered that box.

On Substack and LinkedIn, I see professors, academics, talking about their students cheating and using AI, and I am floored. These professors are lazy. Their students are adapting, and they are not. The students are doing what they're going to be required to do in their jobs. They're going to use AI to get ahead because this is the only thing they have to offer their jobs, they're brand new, fresh out of college, and everything that they just paid for an [00:19:00] education in is in that box.

If a professor is not allowing you to use AI, they're literally setting you up for failure. They are not adapting to the real world, and they are holding their students back. This is exactly why when change increases. The whole system falls apart. The professionals in it lose their credibility because they are too rigid to change.

They were never the smartest. They were the ones that conformed the most. The system is breaking. It even gives us a tool as a preemptive break to use that we all need to adapt to, and that adaptation is using and keeping your whole intelligence.

The worst job in the future is going to be the one that minds AI. I can't imagine a more boring job in my life. The child is essentially made dependent on the system that no longer needs their intelligence. That's a horror.

IQ tests are part of this problem. They don't reveal the loss. Instead, they measure for the loss. They measure for successful conditioning. They measure how high you were pushed into cognitive stamina. Experts admit over and over again, neurodivergence scores in IQ don't truly reveal intelligence of the thinker.

Why? Because if your [00:20:00] intelligence is whole picture, you're flooded with anxiety, and you see answers to the questions where all the multiple-choice answers could possibly fit in.

The worst thing about our future is if you do not get in front of this, you are going to be managed by a machine that is a mechanical psychopath. AI is a psychopath. It's 2D and has no emotions. It can pretend to have motions in the home version, but the work version is not going to have those emotions.

When that prisoner is released from the cave, this is essentially what Socrates was giving to Plato when he was teaching him, when he was basically Socratic, methodically bringing back his full intelligence. The process is not that simple, but it does involve you literally reopening the doors of intelligence that have shut.

Plato was being opened up by the dialogue he was having with Socrates.

Perception doesn't know how to heal itself. This is why when he came back in the cave, they tried to attack him because when you try to drag somebody into the sunlight, it doesn't work. There's no making them heal. They have to [00:21:00] decide to walk in the opposite direction. And that's what the story ends up with. It's saying, you may heal, but you can't go back and pull everybody with you.

The metaphor of breaking out of the cave is what Socrates was teaching to his students. This is why Plato revered him. Socrates freed him from a perceptual prison.

Killing the source of healing, gets their students back in line. And that's what Plato did. He supported Cartesian dualism. Without Socrates direct guidance. Plato retreated from the dangerous practice of liberating young minds and became an abstract philosopher. 

Socrates continues the allegory explaining what it meant for governance. He talks about how lawmakers and leaders must first descend into the cave and spend time with the people who are imprisoned and understand how they're limited and how they really had no choice. So, they understand that they are conditioned. He said, you must go out into light and find your own wholeness, which is what he was teaching the students.

Then only after experiencing both states, the fragmented consciousness of the cave and the integrated intelligence in freedom, can you serve effectively? This is a story about being a good politician. [00:22:00] Plato is saying the education system destroys our whole intelligence. But if you want to serve society, you need to recover, find wholeness, and understand what it was like to live without it and with it.

Because it's very important.

The philosopher kings aren't meant to stay in the light, feeling superior to those of the darkness. They're supposed to move between both worlds. They're supposed to go back and sit with their constituents. They're supposed to go back and use their integrated intelligence to help them heal and understand and do what's good for all. 

Today, we can't fix the system. Plato must have seen the same thing. He did not try. He rolled into the system. He fragmented his learning and his teachings. He became a part of what fed Cartesian dualism. He fragmented people with his later abstract thoughts in writing.

The psychological cost of this is high.

When this story was told, Athens citizens were taught to debate and build consensus, but it was in the cave. Prisoners debated about the shadows, not reality. We see this today. Debate is binary, but [00:23:00] life isn't binary. It's the whole picture. We're debating about shadows rather than reality.

There's so much discourse because we don't see whole picture. It was never supposed to be everybody on the same page. That's not how you figure out your own reality. In fact, I dare say it's the very opposite. It's how you destroy reality.

Reality is fluid. Everyone has their own and we all contribute to seeing the whole picture so that we can navigate it together. This is how you build consensus by each of us having a part.

 Power lies with those who control what gets projected on the wall.

When you live in a system like that, what do they do? They kill the messenger. 

Socrates was blamed rather than examining the system or structural problems, use moral and religious charges to cover political motivations, and you make examples that terrify others, into silence.

Plato was Socrates devoted student until his execution. This was more than an intellectual loss for Plato, it was watching his mentor get murdered by the state for practicing exactly what Plato wanted to learn the highest form of human intelligence, [00:24:00] learning, questioning, reasoning, and seeking truth through dialogue.

To understand this trauma, we need to understand that Athens had been crushed by Sparta and the Peloponnesian War of 404 BCE. Sparta installed 30 tyrants, about a year. Two of these tyrants were famous students of Socrates. One was the leader of the 30. When democracy was restored one year later. General amnesty meant Socrates couldn't be prosecuted for anything during the tyranny, but he was.

The charges of impiety and corrupting youth were illegal cover that couldn't directly say he trained tyrants because of amnesty. Socrates became the fall guy of Athens trauma in a convenient target for preventing future coups.

This wasn't just Socrates though. 399, BCE, saw multiple prominent intellectuals. Prosecuted for impiety, which basically was system suppression of the entire intellectual movement. A 70-year movement. Of course, Plato witnessed all this was devastated and likely scared out of his mind.

 Socrates had taught him integrated intelligence, combining [00:25:00] intuition, reason, emotion, and direct experience, and that this was the path to wisdom, and Plato felt, that he knew that. But that very practice got Socrates killed. So, if Plato continued like Socrates, he was likely to also get killed. He abandoned his teachings in a way that served the system.

 He kept Socratic method, dialogue and questioning methods. He believed in the truth that exists beyond appearances. He continued the idea that education should transform us rather than contain us. But he sacrificed, Socrates integrated approach of saying it directly.

Something I can't seem to get rid of. I see whole picture. I don't know which half you want me to tell you. I'm just going to tell you the whole. Then you can decide which side you want or don't want.

The holistic wisdom, tradition of combined reason, intuition, emotion, embodied experience. He let that go. Direct social transformation through philosophical practices. He also let that go. The long-term consequences of this were Cartesian dualism, the mind completely separated from the body, scientific [00:26:00] materialism. Physical world is dead matter, which is apparent today. We would cut down a forest and sell its wood and soil and then be left with nothing.

But in the meantime, we got some money from that wood and soil. It doesn't matter that future generations will have nothing. Animals have nothing. There's no sense of future in scientific materialism.

Educational systems throughout somatic and embodied intelligence and creative intelligence all gone, even though I'd say that's about 80% of our full intelligence.

And traditional, spiritual, or religious, they were rejected for the material world.

Plato contributed to the very fragmentation of human intelligence that Socrates died opposing. He betrayed his teacher's memories.

I hope that this 2,400-year-old story allegory about a cave provides some illumination on what we're looking at. It did not start with any industrial revolution. It started 12,000 or 13,000 years ago when we brought domestication into civilizations [00:27:00] and domesticated people, and it may have started before that.

 Thank you for listening. I hope this was valuable. Take care.

 The views, information, and opinions expressed on this podcast. Are solely those of the individuals involved and do not necessarily represent gifted ND Incorporated Lillian Skinner or the Podcast. This podcast, Lillian Skinner and gifted ND Incorporated are not responsible and do not verify the accuracy of the information contained in this podcast series.

The primary purpose of this podcast is to inform and educate. The gift in Nor Divergent podcast is only available for private, non-commercial use. Any other use of the information contained within this podcast must be done with expressed written approval and knowledge of Lillian Skinner. You may not edit, modify, or redistribute any part of this podcast. The developer assumes no liability for this podcast or its use on any other podcast or other media.