What is Real?

Plato and The Matrix

C. N. Vujanovic

“WHAT TRUTH?”

“THAT YOU ARE A SLAVE, Neo. Like everyone else you were born into bondage. Into a prison that you cannot taste or see or touch. A prison for your mind.”

The Matrix, for over 20 years, has penetrated the collective minds of the Western world, prompting the question: “What is real?” These three words have left people questioning reality for over 2,500 years. The thought experiment of Plato’s cave is the genesis of this question, demonstrating that to understand ‘what is real’, we must begin by explaining it.

Imagine there are several prisoners shackled facing the back wall of a cave. They cannot see each other, nor know they are shackled. All they see are shadows on the back of the wall which are – unbeknownst to the prisoners – projected onto the wall by their captors. From the prisoners’ perspective the shadows are ‘what is real’, however outside observers know that this is only a fraction of what they perceive as reality. 

One day, one of the prisoners is freed from his shackles by a liberator. This prisoner subsequently goes up to the surface and sees the sun, grass, trees, and the whole world. Desiring to share this with the other prisoners, he goes back down into the cave and attempts to convince the other prisoners to escape. However they refuse, saying that he is lying to them, that all that is real is right in front of them, and so they remain in the cave, forever believing that the shadows are all that is real.

Plato’s cave has striking similarities to The Matrix. In both stories a character is offered a decision to escape from ‘reality’ and become ‘enlightened’. However in Plato’s cave, the result is beauty and goodness, but in the Matrix reality is, to put it lightly, unattractive.

So, given that the question – ‘what is real’ – appears so relevant, let us consider it through the allegory of the cave.

To begin, one ought to consider what the question actually means. Most significantly, what do humans mean when they refer to something being ‘real’? The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy explains that “To treat something as real, without qualification, is to suppose it to be part of the actual world”. This means that something is real if it is part of the fundamental nature of reality. That is to say, after deconstructing ‘everything’, ‘this’ is what you are left with. 

There are broadly two ways I will unpack what is real, and I will do both.

Firstly, there is a scientific understanding of the fundamental nature of reality. Dr Brian Greene — professor at Columbia — in his book The Emergent Universe posits that “underneath the molecules, atoms, and particles there is another layer of reality … a layer that is based on information”. The reason he explains this is due to Theoretical Quantum Physics which describes each particle in the universe as a wave function which is itself simply information.

Now from here on, both my knowledge and word count begin to run low, so I would encourage anyone who wishes to learn more about this to search up ‘The Holographic Principle’. But at the core of it is that science is telling us that the world, space, time, and matter emerge from information and our reality is simply a projection of information. In this case, modern theoretical physics strangely seems to comport with Plato’s allegory of the cave.

Secondly, there is a philosophical understanding through which we can understand the fundamental nature of reality. Such an approach leans towards the primacy of language and concepts. As Wittgenstein – a famous German philosopher – said, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world”. Hence, a philosophical understanding of the fundamental nature of reality is language which is, at its most fundamental level, a form of information. 

Furthermore, Plato explains in his ‘Theory of Forms’ that ultimate reality are concepts which most of humanity is not able to grasp. Therefore, in the beginning of the same book where he describes the cave – The Republic – he begins the book with the Greek word κατέβην which means ‘I went down’. The protagonist of his book is Socrates who has an understanding of ‘what is real’ and so desires to spread it to the rest of the world. So in the same way that the liberator went down into the cave, Socrates goes out into society, attempting to liberate people from the false reality.

The question that remains is, is this process of ‘escaping the cave’ or ‘escaping the matrix’ a good decision irrespective of the results? I am not sure, but hopefully, in two weeks today, I will have written, and you will be reading the answer on the Blue and White Insight.