Plato's cave

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The Greatest Story Ever Told--So Far by Lawrence M. Krauss

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, Ernest Rutherford, Higgs boson, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, Isaac Newton, Large Hadron Collider, Magellanic Cloud, Murray Gell-Mann, Plato's cave, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, the scientific method, time dilation

Second, he could argue that as the length oscillates, the maximum length of the shadow when the arrow is pointing in one direction will always be exactly the same as the maximum length of the shadow when it is pointing in the other direction. Plato’s cave thus becomes an allegory for far more than he may have intended. Plato’s freed man discovers the hallmarks of the remarkable true story of our own struggle to understand nature on its most fundamental scales of space, time, and matter. We too have had to escape the shackles of our prior experience to uncover profound and beautiful simplifications and predictions that can be as terrifying as they are wonderful. But just as the light beyond Plato’s cave is painful to the eyes at first, with time it becomes mesmerizing.

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In some sense, Plato’s cave prepared our minds for Einstein’s relativity, though it remained for Einstein’s former mathematics professor Hermann Minkowski to complete the task. Minkowski was a brilliant mathematician, eventually holding a chair at the University of Göttingen. But in Zurich, where he was one of Einstein’s professors, he was a brilliant mathematician whose classes Einstein skipped, because while he was a student, Einstein appeared to have a great disdain for the significance of pure mathematics. Time would change that view. Recall that the prisoners in Plato’s cave also saw from shadows on their wall that length apparently had no objective constancy.

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., 132, 148 radiation cosmic microwave background (CMB), 290, 292–93 Dirac’s research on, 98, 114 Einstein’s research on, 81, 89 Planck’s research on, 78–81, 89, 115 radioactivity artificial, 119, 128 Fermi’s research on, 125, 128 human bodies with, 113, 120 types of rays in, 119–20 in uranium, 119 relativity antiparticles and, 97, 100, 102 clocks relative to moving objects (time dilation) research on, 58–61 Dirac’s research on quantum mechanics and, 92, 95, 151 impact of Einstein’s discovery of, 95 Minkowski’s four-dimensional “space-time” theory and, 66–68, 71 Plato’s cave allegory and, 65–66 ruler measurement example of, 65–67 religion compatibility between science and, 21, 22 early pioneers in science and belief in, 21–22, 43 Galileo’s belief about Earth and rest and, 45, 46–47 longing as ultimate motive for exploration in, 6 role of light in, 19–20 renormalization, 105–6 Republic (Plato), 11. See also Allegory of the Cave Riess, Adam, 295 Roosevelt, Franklin D., Einstein’s letter to, 129 Ross, Graham, 204 Royal Institution, 25, 26, 36 Royal Society, 23, 24, 25, 35, 118 Rubbia, Carlo, 251, 252–54, 262, 270 Rutherford, Ernest, 114, 116, 118, 119–20 S “sacred,” concept of the, 2, 14–15 Sakurai, J.

Early Retirement Extreme by Jacob Lund Fisker

8-hour work day, active transport: walking or cycling, barriers to entry, book value, buy and hold, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, delayed gratification, discounted cash flows, diversification, dogs of the Dow, don't be evil, dumpster diving, Easter island, fake it until you make it, financial engineering, financial independence, game design, index fund, invention of the steam engine, inventory management, junk bonds, lateral thinking, lifestyle creep, loose coupling, low interest rates, market bubble, McMansion, passive income, peak oil, place-making, planned obsolescence, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, power law, psychological pricing, retail therapy, risk free rate, sunk-cost fallacy, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, time value of money, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, wage slave, working poor

Sure, they could explain how I should first purchase a "starter home," so I could "upgrade" later. But nobody could or would explain why I should buy a house in the first place. Nobody could or would explain why I should have a career, only that career development was important. There are a few allegories that explain this progression in thinking. The oldest is Plato's Cave.4 In Plato's Cave prisoners have been arranged in a row in a dark cave since childhood. They're chained so that they can't move their bodies, and their heads are restrained too so they can only face forward, towards a wall. They can hear and speak but they can't see each other, nor can they see themselves.

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A wage slave is a person who is not only economically bound by mortgages, loans, and other obligations, but also mentally bound by an inability to perceive that there are other options available, like the prisoners in Plato's Cave. Their chains are not physical like those of 150 years ago (though they still are in some parts of the world); the chains are mental, which in some sense makes them worse, because it turns the prisoners into their own prison wardens. Like the slaves in Plato's Cave, the only commonly accepted way for one of them to leave is to win the "prison game," which means accumulating at least a million to retire.5 The disenchanted grumble about "the system" or "the man."

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Having a job so that the bills get paid and one can go back home every night and pass out in front of the TV is what the good life is all about, right? Most people would agree, because most people can't imagine any alternatives. They are, in other words, prisoners chained to the floor in Plato's Cave. To break away mentally, one needs to be conscious of the fact that one is chained to the floor in Plato's Cave. The best way to understand this is to see the cave--that is, your current perspective--from a different perspective--namely, looking into the cave from the outside. Here is what I see. Education and training Children naturally try to emulate their parents, at least in the early years, and for the most part a child's values are a direct reflection of his parents', either conformingly aligned or diametrically opposed.

The Simulation Hypothesis by Rizwan Virk

3D printing, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, Benoit Mandelbrot, bioinformatics, butterfly effect, Colossal Cave Adventure, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, DeepMind, discovery of DNA, Dmitri Mendeleev, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ernest Rutherford, game design, Google Glasses, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Andreessen, Minecraft, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, technological singularity, TED Talk, time dilation, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Zeno's paradox

The reality of the world around us is something that philosophers have debated for some time. Thousands of years ago in The Republic, Plato described his analogy of the cave. In this cave, the residents are chained to a wall so they can’t see the world outside; the best they can perceive are shadows of the real world, reflected on the wall of the cave by some light outside. The residents of the cave construct an elaborate idea about what reality is, and Plato surmised that we are like the residents of this cave, seeing only shadows of the real world. Many of the world’s religious traditions tell us that the world around us is an illusion created for our benefit.

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Finally, we’ll end with a discussion of how the simulation hypothesis may provide the first plausible bridge between two of the most important searches for truth in humanity’s history: those of the scientific community and the mystics who are responsible for the world’s religions. First, before we wrap up on these bigger notes, let’s look at one of the oldest recorded references to the simulation hypothesis in the Western philosophical tradition. Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and the Simulation Hypothesis In his classic work, The Republic, Plato recites the allegory of a den or cave where prisoners are chained to an inside wall with a clear view of a blank wall that is just opposite the entrance. As forms move in front of the cave, the prisoners can see the reflections of those forms on the wall as shadows in front of some source of light.

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Some Unexplained Areas: God, Angels, NDEs, and UFOs 218 God and The Creation of the Physical World God and the Afterlife Angels AI: Gods and Angels and the Simulation Hypothesis Near-Death Experiences UFOs The Fermi Paradox Jung and Synchronicity OBEs, Remote Viewing, Telepathy and Other “Unexplained” Phenomenon Part IV: Putting it All Together 245 Skeptics and Believers: Evidence of Computation 246 The Categories of Arguments/Experiments A Quick Note About Metaphysical Experiments and Consciousness The Skeptics: The Resource Argument Evidence of Conditional Rendering Experiments for Evidence of Pixels Evidence of Computation: Error-Correcting Codes Quantum Computers, Error Codes, and Quantum Entanglement Quantum Entanglement and Simulation Fractals and Evidence of Computation in Nature Simple Programs and A New Kind of Science Conclusion—the Search for Evidence of Computation The Great Simulation and Its Implications 269 Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and the Simulation Hypothesis What is the Great Simulation and Who Runs It? What Are the Main Elements of the Great Simulation? Conscious Beings or Unconscious Simulations—PCs vs. NPCs The Big Picture: Computation Underlies the Other Sciences Parting Thoughts: Bridging the Great Divide Acknowledgements 292 Index 293 About the Author 308 Part 0 Overview Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.

Humankind: Solidarity With Nonhuman People by Timothy Morton

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Anthropocene, capitalist realism, David Brooks, Georg Cantor, gravity well, Ian Bogost, invisible hand, means of production, megacity, microbiome, mirror neurons, Oklahoma City bombing, phenotype, planetary scale, Plato's cave, Richard Feynman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, trolley problem, Turing test, wage slave, zero-sum game

What’s fascinating is that the film opens up a literal passageway from one kind of space to the other, from the realm of engineering to the realm of dreamtime. The wormhole and its filmic cousins (Murph’s room, the tesseract within the black hole and its seemingly inviolable fourth walls, its cinema-screen-like separation of past and present) are the reverse of Plato’s cave, another form of cinema. Plato’s character can’t wait to get out of the cave to see the truth. In Interstellar, the truth lies within the cinema cave, the image for which keeps amplifying and amplifying as the film proceeds. The ship Endurance is one kind of cave. The wormhole is the pivotal instance: it floats in space like a gigantic crystal ball, as if we were able to see a dreaming mind, a mind full of other stars and planets.

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Claiming that “Marx Already Thought That” means that ecological politics and ethics amount to “saving the Earth,” which means “saving the world,” which means “preserving a reasonably human-friendly environment.” This isn’t solidarity, this is infrastructural maintenance. What is preserved is the cinema in which human desire projection can play on the blank screen of everything else. The cinema is surely a contemporary version of Plato’s cave. The implicit warm, dark, tactile intimacy of such a cave is overlooked if all we want to do is preserve the quality of the shadow play on the walls. And we seem very certain about that shadow play. It has precisely lost a whole dimension of its playful quality, becoming in-flight entertainment, a high-fidelity screen with no flickering, on which we see what we know and know what we see.

The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture by Brian Dear

air traffic controllers' union, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Apple II, Apple Newton, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Fairchild Semiconductor, finite state, Future Shock, game design, Hacker News, Howard Rheingold, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, lateral thinking, linear programming, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Palm Treo, Plato's cave, pre–internet, publish or perish, Ralph Nader, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, Skype, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the medium is the message, The Soul of a New Machine, three-martini lunch, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog

Bitzer had named this system PLATO, and his crowning achievement, the PLATO IV terminal with its gas plasma flat panel touch-sensitive graphical display, supporting internal mirrors and microfiche color slide projection, was indeed a cave of sorts, not unlike the cave in Plato’s allegory. And like Plato’s cave, this “cave” was one whose denizens preferred the depictions on its “wall,” rather than the Technicolor reality going on outdoors. Not only that, but PLATO could be something you belonged to. Something you experienced with others, side by side or virtually through cyberspace. It was something you did, but it was also a place you could hang out in.

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It was something you did, but it was also a place you could hang out in. Its more obsessed users viewed the actuality of the PLATO experience as dwarfing what one experiences in real life: more interactions, a sense of hyper-accelerated self, poring through content faster than possible in the real world. Like Plato’s cave, the “drawings” on the wall were crude, shadows only, but still PLATO users were undeterred. For instance, pornography. Another inevitable consequence of bringing a lot of people, particularly young people, together into a virtual space online and then providing a variety of open-ended tools at their disposal to be as creative as possible, is the inevitable arrival of pornography.

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IEEE History Center (New Brunswick, NJ) Oral History Interview by Janet Abbate. Golub, Gene. 1979-06-08. CBI-UM Oral History Interview OH 105 by Pamela McCorduck. Johnson, Roger. 2002-11-29. Interview by James Hutchinson, UIUC ECE. Unpublished. Jones, Steve, and Guillaume Latzko-Toth. 2017. “Out from the PLATO Cave: Uncovering the Pre-Internet History of Social Computing.” Internet Histories 1, nos. 1-2 (2017). Retrieved 2017-05-17 from https://protect-us.mimecast.com/​s/​mmYrB6c7KDzwhY?domain=tandfonline.com Kay, Alan. 2016-06-21. “Alan Kay Has Agreed to Do an AMA Today.” Hacker News. Retrieved 2016-06-21 from https://news.ycombinator.com/​item?

Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy by Wolfram Eilenberger

Albert Einstein, Charles Lindbergh, disinformation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, liberation theology, Plato's cave, precariat, scientific worldview, side project, traveling salesman, wikimedia commons

Moore, regarded as one of the most brilliant thinkers and logicians of his time, who, according to Wittgenstein, “shows you how far a man can go who has absolutely no intelligence whatsoever.” How was he to explain the ladder of nonsense thoughts that one had first to climb and then push away in order to see the world as it really is? Hadn’t the wise man from Plato’s cave, once he had reached the light, failed to make his insights comprehensible to the others still trapped deep inside? Enough for today. Enough explanations. Wittgenstein stands up, walks around the table, claps Moore and Russell cordially on the shoulder, and utters the sentence that all aspiring doctors of philosophy must dream about the night before their oral exams: “Don’t worry, I know you’ll never understand it.”

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Setting our clinical suspicions aside, the notion that his access to the so-called world outside, and to all the others “out there,” was at a fundamental level disturbed or distorted effectively sums up the founding doubt of Western philosophy: Is there something that separates us from the true nature of things? The actual experiences and sensations of others? And if so, who or what could it be? Plato’s parable of the cave already relies on the assumption that the world as we perceive it is in fact one of only shadow and appearance. About two thousand years later, in the actual founding document of modern epistemological and subjective philosophy, René Descartes’s Meditations, written in 1641, we can see an analogy that gives concrete form to Wittgenstein’s simile of the person behind the “closed window.”

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Because even if the author of the article in the Paris guide that Benjamin cites did not see it, and in all likelihood did not deliberately intend it, it reflects the whole history of metaphysics. It is expounded in what we might call magazine-speak, and is granted a weird afterlife as if by a ghostly hand: just like the shadow plays in Plato’s cave, the displays of commodities in the deep mirrored passageways of the arcades receive “their light from above,” in the form of artificial fire (gaslight). As in Leibniz’s Monadology, even the windowless arcades appear as “a world in miniature.” And as Kant (and of course Marx) would have it, all that maintains these passages through whole buildings—which are themselves only superficially buildings—is the “speculative” will of their owners, “united” for this apparent purpose, if not for anything else.

Life Is Simple by Johnjoe McFadden

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Alfred Russel Wallace, animal electricity, anthropic principle, Astronomia nova, Bayesian statistics, Brownian motion, Commentariolus, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, COVID-19, dark matter, double helix, Edmond Halley, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, gentleman farmer, Gregor Mendel, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, horn antenna, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, lockdown, music of the spheres, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Plato's cave, retrograde motion, Richard Feynman, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, William of Occam

Plato believed that the Forms or universals are the true reality that exists in an invisible but perfect realm beyond our senses. His system is often known as philosophical realism to denote that Plato, and his followers, believed that Forms or universals are not only real but are the ultimate reality that give rise to our sensory perceptions.vi Plato graphically illustrated his model in his famous Allegory of the Cave in which he compared the human experience to that of people chained facing the wall of a cave lit by a fire. Real objects (analogous to his Forms) pass between them and the fire but the inhabitants of the cave can only perceive their own shadows projected onto the cave wall.

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He urged his followers to ignore the distorted lens of their senses and instead use their intellect to discover the ‘circular motions, uniform [speed across the sky] and perfectly regular, [that] are to be admitted as hypotheses so that it might be possible to save the appearance presented by the planets’.8 Thus, saving the appearance of the planets, as this quest came to be called, became the primary mission of astronomers for more than two thousand years. The first to take up the challenge of saving the appearance of the heavens was Plato’s pupil, Eudoxus of Cnidus (410–347 BCE) who, in a pattern that will become familiar, added more spheres. Imagine you are standing in Plato’s cave, which lies at the centre of a simplified version of Eudoxus’s model consisting of just a single sphere, which we will represent in Figure 5 as a band-like section of the crystal sphere (though remembering that Eudoxus imagined an entire sphere). Attached somewhere on the inside of the band’s circumference is a bright light, which we will call the ‘Planet’.

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The addition of the wheel now accounted for the waxing and waning of the planets but how can any kind of wheel swing a planet through a supposedly rock-solid crystal sphere? Ptolemy did not attempt to explain. Even with all this complexity, the motions of the planets did not entirely fit Ptolemy’s model. To fix the problem, he introduced two additional complications. First, he shifted the earth (Plato’s cave in the figure) from the precise centre of the sphere’s rotations to a point, just off-centre, which was called the eccentric. He also quietly dropped the Platonic principle of uniform motion by allowing each planet only to appear to rotate at uniform speed from an imaginary point in space termed the equant.

Fuller Memorandum by Stross, Charles

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Beeching cuts, Bletchley Park, British Empire, carbon credits, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, congestion charging, Crossrail, death from overwork, dumpster diving, escalation ladder, false flag, finite state, Firefox, Herman Kahn, HyperCard, invisible hand, land reform, linear programming, messenger bag, MITM: man-in-the-middle, operational security, peak oil, Plato's cave, post-work, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, quantum entanglement, reality distortion field, security theater, sensible shoes, side project, Sloane Ranger, telemarketer, Turing machine

Note that this does not involve potions, pentacles, prayers, eldritch chanting, dressing up in robes and pointy hats, or most (but not all) of the stuff associated with the term in the public mind. No, our magic is computational. The realm of pure mathematics is very real indeed, and the . . . things . . . that cast shadows on the walls of Plato's cave can sometimes be made to listen and pay attention if you point a loaded theorem at them. This is, however, a very dangerous process, because most of the shadow-casters are unclear on the distinction between pay attention and free buffet lunch here. My job--applied computational demonologist--comes with a very generous pension scheme, because most of us don't survive to claim it.

The Right Side of History by Ben Shapiro

Abraham Maslow, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, classic study, Donald Trump, Filter Bubble, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, income inequality, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, means of production, microaggression, Peace of Westphalia, Plato's cave, Ronald Reagan, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, W. E. B. Du Bois, white picket fence, women in the workforce

But the heroes of Greek legend are those who challenge the fates, seeking to glorify their own independence: Prometheus, Antigone, Achilles . . . even Socrates himself. As famed drama critic Walter Kerr puts it, “Tragedy speaks always of freedom.”6 This tragic quest for knowledge is endemic to Greek thought. It is a tragedy shot through with hope. Plato’s allegory of the cave is the most famous example of striving to reach the light. In that allegory, Plato paints a picture of men chained to a wall in a cave, prevented from seeing the source of light outside the cave; their ignorance restricts them to the belief that “the truth is nothing other than the shadows of artificial things.”

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Jesus’s story was meant to extend to the entire world. Because Jesus was no longer a Jewish figure in the Christian view, but the material incarnation of the divine, that meant that Jewish law could be abandoned in favor of universalism. As historian Richard Tarnas writes, “That supreme Light, the true source of reality shining forth outside Plato’s cave of shadows, was now recognized as the light of Christ. As Clement of Alexandria announced, ‘By the Logos, the whole world is now become Athens and Greece.’”3 The Judaic notion of God, so focused on law and the Jewish people as God’s torch burning in the darkness through fulfillment of that law, was turned aside.

The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age by Tim Wu

AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Big Tech, collective bargaining, corporate personhood, corporate raider, creative destruction, Donald Trump, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, move fast and break things, new economy, open economy, Peter Thiel, Plato's cave, price discrimination, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, The Chicago School

The man who described the mood was author John Perry Barlow, who in the 1990s implored those interested in cyberspace to “imagine a place where trespassers leave no footprints, where goods can be stolen an infinite number of times and yet remain in the possession of their original owners, where businesses you never heard of can own the history of your personal affairs, where only children feel completely at home, where the physics is that of thought rather than things, and where everyone is as virtual as the shadows in Plato’s cave.” Everything was fast and chaotic; no position was lasting. One day, AOL was dominant and all-powerful; the next, it was the subject of business books laughing at its many failures. Netscape rose and fell like a rocket that failed to achieve orbit (though Microsoft had something to do with that).

Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters With Reality and Virtual Reality by Jaron Lanier

4chan, air gap, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, carbon footprint, cloud computing, collaborative editing, commoditize, Computer Lib, cosmological constant, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, game design, general-purpose programming language, gig economy, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, Howard Rheingold, hype cycle, impulse control, information asymmetry, intentional community, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kuiper Belt, lifelogging, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, Murray Gell-Mann, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, peak TV, Plato's cave, profit motive, Project Xanadu, quantum cryptography, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, Skype, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons

People will spend centuries on the problem, mark my words.16 The established way we cope with very large numbers of concrete possibilities is through abstraction. The open question is whether there’s a more fluid form of concrete expression that can become a practical alternative to abstraction. It’s only imaginable in user interfaces beyond what we know, probably in future versions of VR. Rubble Fills Plato’s Cave Computer science can be thought of as a branch of engineering, or an art, a craft, or even a science. It’s all these things, but mostly, to me, it’s applied philosophy, or better yet, experimental philosophy. Computer scientists have ideas about the meaning of life, and the practices that make life good, and implement those as patterns that will guide the real lives of real people.

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Poïesis Fascination Versus Suicide Rue Goo Appendix Two: PHENOTROPIC FEVERS (ABOUT VR SOFTWARE) Mandatory Metamorphosis Grace Picture This Sleight Editor and Mapping Variation Phenotropic Trial Run Scale Motivation Role Reversal Expression The Wisdom of Imperfection Resilience Adapt Swing Rubble Fills Plato’s Cave Many Caves, Many Shadows, but Only Your Eyes Appendix Three: DUELING DEMIGODS Not Artificial, but Imaginary The Banality of Weightlessness The Invisible Hand on a Multitouch Screen The Absurdity of Demanding That AI Fix Itself The Humane Use of Human Systems NOTES INDEX ALSO BY JARON LANIER ABOUT THE AUTHOR ILLUSTRATION ACKNOWLEDGMENTS COPYRIGHT Illustration Acknowledgments All images in this book are courtesy of the author with the exception of the following: Photographs by Kevin Kelly, used with permission

Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media by Peter Warren Singer, Emerson T. Brooking

4chan, active measures, Airbnb, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Comet Ping Pong, content marketing, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, global reserve currency, Google Glasses, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker News, illegal immigration, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jacob Silverman, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Mohammed Bouazizi, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, moral panic, new economy, offshore financial centre, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, pattern recognition, Plato's cave, post-materialism, Potemkin village, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, RAND corporation, reserve currency, sentiment analysis, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social web, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, too big to fail, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, Upton Sinclair, Valery Gerasimov, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

He sees real light for the first time, finally understanding the nature of his reality. Yet the prisoners inside the cave refuse to believe him. They are thus prisoners not just of their chains but also of their beliefs. They hold fast to the manufactured reality instead of opening up to the truth. Indeed, it is notable that the ancient lessons of Plato’s cave are a core theme of one of the foundational movies of the internet age, The Matrix. In this modern reworking, it is computers that hide the true state of the world from humanity, with the internet allowing mass-scale manipulation and oppression. The Matrix came out in 1999, however, before social media had changed the web into its new form.

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The Matrix came out in 1999, however, before social media had changed the web into its new form. Perhaps, then, the new matrix that binds and fools us today isn’t some machine-generated simulation plugged into our brains. It is just the way we view the world, filtered through the cracked mirror of social media. But there may be something more. One of the underlying themes of Plato’s cave is that power turns on perception and choice. It shows that if people are unwilling to contemplate the world around them in its actuality, they can be easily manipulated. Yet they have only themselves to blame. They, rather than the “ruler,” possess the real power—the power to decide what to believe and what to tell others.

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abstract_id=3048994. 271 approached the task “laterally”: Ibid. 271 “a maze”: Carrie Spector, “Stanford Scholars Observe ‘Experts’ to See How They Evaluate the Credibility of Information Online,” Stanford News Service, Stanford University, October 24, 2017, https://news.stanford.edu/press-releases/2017/10/24/fact-checkers-ouline-information/. 271 “seeking context and perspective”: Ibid. 271 Reality is one: Paul J. Griffiths, An Apology for Apologetics: A Study in the Logic of Interreligious Dialogue (Wipf and Stock, 2007), 46. 272 most important insights: Plato, “The Allegory of the Cave,” Republic, 7.514a2–517a7, trans. Thomas Sheehan, https://web.stanford.edu/class/ihum40/cave.pdf. 273 “believe whatever you want”: The Matrix, directed by the Wachowski Brothers (Warner Bros., 1999). Index A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z A Abbottabad, Pakistan, 53–55 Abdallat, Lara, 213 account suspensions, 92, 235, 236, 242 Active Measures Working Group, 263 Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), 26–27 Advocates for Peace and Urban Unity, 14 Ahmadinejad, Mahmoud, 60 AIDS disinformation campaign, 104, 208 Airbnb, 239 Al Qaeda, 54, 65, 79–80, 149, 234 Alabed, Bana, 214–16 al-Assad, Bashar, 9, 72, 88, 215 al-Awlaki, Anwar, 234 Albright, Jonathan, 113 Alefantis, James, 128 Algeria, 88–89 algorithms, 124, 139, 141, 147, 209, 221, 251 Ali, Muhammad, 254 al-Jabari, Ahmed, 193 Allen, George, 55–57, 58 #AllEyesOnISIS, 5–7, 10 Al-Shabaab, 235 alternative (alt-)right, 133–34, 170, 188–89, 232, 237–39 Al-Werfalli, Mahmoud, 76 Al-Zomor, Aboud, 151 Amazon, 41 America Online, 218–19, 244–45 American Civil War, 30–31 Android, 48 anger, 162–63, 165 Anonymous (hacktivist group), 212–13 anti-Semitism, 146, 190, 198, 238 anti-vaxxers, 124–25 “Anyone Can Become a Troll” (report), 165 Apple, 47–51 Apprentice, The (TV show), 2 apps, 47–48, 58, 101, 200 Arab Spring, 85–87, 126, 183 Arendt, Hannah, 170 Argus Panoptes, 57 arms dealers, 76–77 Armstrong, Matt, 108 Aro, Jessikka, 114 ARPANET, 27, 35–42 historical background, 27–35 Arquilla, John, 182–83 arrests, 91, 92, 100, 200 artificial intelligence, 250, 255–56 Aristotle, 168 Ashley Madison (social network), 59 Asif, Khawaja, 135 astroturfing, 142 AT&T, 26, 31, 37–38 “@” symbol, 36 Athar, Sohaib, 53–55 attacks, on others.

Fool's Gold: How the Bold Dream of a Small Tribe at J.P. Morgan Was Corrupted by Wall Street Greed and Unleashed a Catastrophe by Gillian Tett

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Black-Scholes formula, Blythe Masters, book value, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, buy and hold, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, easy for humans, difficult for computers, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, junk bonds, Kickstarter, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, McMansion, Michael Milken, money market fund, mortgage debt, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, Plato's cave, proprietary trading, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, tail risk, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, value at risk, yield curve

A “silo” mentality has come to rule inside banks, leaving different departments competing for resources, with shockingly little wider vision or oversight. The regulators who were supposed to oversee the banks have mirrored that silo pattern, too, in their own fragmented practices. Most pernicious of all, financiers have come to regard banking as a silo in its own right, detached from the rest of society. They have become like the inhabitants of Plato’s cave, who could see shadows of outside reality flickering on the walls but rarely encountered that reality themselves. The chain that linked a synthetic CDO of ABS, say, with a “real” person was so convoluted, it was almost impossible for anybody to fit it into a single cognitive map—be they anthropologist, economist, or credit whiz.

Is God a Mathematician? by Mario Livio

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Brownian motion, cellular automata, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, cosmological constant, Dava Sobel, double helix, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, Future Shock, Georg Cantor, Gerolamo Cardano, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, music of the spheres, Myron Scholes, Plato's cave, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, Russell's paradox, seminal paper, Thales of Miletus, The Design of Experiments, the scientific method, traveling salesman

In fact, to the Pythagoreans, God was not a mathematician—mathematics was God! The importance of the Pythagorean philosophy lies not only in its actual, intrinsic value. By setting the stage, and to some extent the agenda, for the next generation of philosophers—Plato in particular—the Pythagoreans established a commanding position in Western thought. Into Plato’s Cave The famous British mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) remarked once that “the safest generalization that can be made about the history of western philosophy is that it is all a series of footnotes to Plato.” Indeed, Plato (ca. 428–347 BC) was the first to have brought together topics ranging from mathematics, science, and language to religion, ethics, and art and to have treated them in a unified manner that essentially defined philosophy as a discipline.

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires by Douglas Rushkoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, buy low sell high, Californian Ideology, carbon credits, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, digital capitalism, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, Fairphone, fake news, Filter Bubble, game design, gamification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Haight Ashbury, hockey-stick growth, Howard Rheingold, if you build it, they will come, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megaproject, meme stock, mental accounting, Michael Milken, microplastics / micro fibres, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mirror neurons, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), operational security, Patri Friedman, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, QAnon, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sam Altman, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, SimCity, Singularitarianism, Skinner box, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the medium is the message, theory of mind, TikTok, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, We are as Gods, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , working poor

Once a member of the New York Socialist Party, Lippmann was concerned that people are more apt to believe and react to “the pictures in their heads ” than whatever is really happening in the world outside. Journalism and other media inserts what Lippmann called “a pseudo-environment” between us and the environment in which we are actually living. This pseudo-environment, in turn, stimulates us to act in ways that really do change the world. Like the people in the allegory of Plato’s cave, we’re responding to what amounts to shadows on the wall, and this makes us particularly vulnerable to dangerous despots and demagogues who can create the most compelling pictures. Where the people reforming today’s social media platforms may hope to mitigate the influence of alt-right extremists and conspiracy theorists on our beliefs and behavior, Lippmann and Wilson were concerned about early-twentieth-century nationalists who sought to keep America isolated and turned inward.

Defending the Free Market: The Moral Case for a Free Economy by Robert A. Sirico

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, corporate governance, creative destruction, delayed gratification, demographic winter, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Ford Model T, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, informal economy, Internet Archive, liberation theology, means of production, moral hazard, obamacare, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Plato's cave, profit motive, road to serfdom, Tragedy of the Commons, zero-sum game

Could this be what the end of freedom looks like? One thing seems certain: something in our world is distracted, disordered, out of joint. We see it all around us and, if we are honest, we find it inside of ourselves as well. So much of the current political and economic debate is like the man in Plato’s cave, mistaking shadows for substance. Talking points are not a philosophy of life nor are they good governance. Strong currents are tugging at us, pulling us away from our moorings, pulling us away from a clear vision of a free and virtuous society—the one that the American Founders envisioned, and that we still hunger for.

Time Travel: A History by James Gleick

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Arthur Eddington, augmented reality, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, crowdsourcing, Doomsday Book, Eddington experiment, index card, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, luminiferous ether, Marshall McLuhan, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Plato's cave, pneumatic tube, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, telepresence, The future is already here, time dilation, Wayback Machine, wikimedia commons

The physicist and historian Peter Galison puts it this way: “Where Einstein manipulated clocks, rods, light beams, and trains, Minkowski played with grids, surfaces, curves, and projections.” He thought in terms of the most profound visual abstraction. “Mere shadows,” Minkowski said. That was not mere poetry. He meant it almost literally. Our perceived reality is a projection, like the shadows projected by the fire in Plato’s cave. If the world—the absolute world—is a four-dimensional continuum, then all that we perceive at any instant is a slice of the whole. Our sense of time: an illusion. Nothing passes; nothing changes. The universe—the real universe, hidden from our blinkered sight—comprises the totality of these timeless, eternal world lines.

Collider by Paul Halpern

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, Dr. Strangelove, Ernest Rutherford, Gary Taubes, gravity well, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, horn antenna, index card, Isaac Newton, Large Hadron Collider, Magellanic Cloud, pattern recognition, Plato's cave, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, time dilation

Studying such excitations would yield valuable information about the size, shape, and other properties of the bulk. Finding evidence of extra dimensions isn’t one of the primary goals of the LHC. However, discovering unseen romping grounds beyond the view stands of our familiar arena would make particle physics a whole new game. Like Plato’s cave dwellers, we’d have to face the possibility that everything around us is a shadow of a greater reality. Yet if, on the other hand, visible space plus time make up all that there is, the quest for extra dimensions would ultimately prove futile. Theorists would need to concoct other explanations for why all the other forces are so much more potent than gravity.

Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle by Chris Hedges

Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bear Stearns, Cal Newport, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, Glass-Steagall Act, haute couture, Herbert Marcuse, Honoré de Balzac, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, income inequality, Joseph Schumpeter, Naomi Klein, offshore financial centre, Plato's cave, power law, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, single-payer health, social intelligence, statistical model, uranium enrichment

The fame of celebrities, wrote Mills, disguises those who possess true power: corporations and the oligarchic elite. Magical thinking is the currency not only of celebrity culture, but also of totalitarian culture. And as we sink into an economic and political morass, we are still controlled, manipulated and distracted by the celluloid shadows on the dark wall of Plato’s cave. The fantasy of celebrity culture is not designed simply to entertain. It is designed to keep us from fighting back. “What Orwell feared were those who would ban books,” Neil Postman wrote:What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.

Uncanny Valley: A Memoir by Anna Wiener

autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, basic income, behavioural economics, Blitzscaling, blockchain, blood diamond, Burning Man, call centre, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, digital divide, digital nomad, digital rights, end-to-end encryption, Extropian, functional programming, future of work, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, growth hacking, guns versus butter model, housing crisis, Jane Jacobs, job automation, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, means of production, medical residency, microaggression, microapartment, microdosing, new economy, New Urbanism, Overton Window, passive income, Plato's cave, pull request, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Social Justice Warrior, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, tech bro, tech worker, technoutopianism, telepresence, telepresence robot, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, urban planning, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, work culture , Y2K, young professional

We gathered on the couches in the center of the office, around a flat-screen television. The television was hooked up to a laptop, and most days, the engineers fed it content, silently streaming nature documentaries and recordings of strangers playing video games. Beers circulated. The CEO sat with his laptop open, working while he watched. The film was a transparent riff on Plato’s Cave, or so the internet said—I had never read Plato. It was also a delicious allegory for techno-libertarianism, and probably LSD. It was easy to see why the movie appealed. Canonically, what hackers accessed was the ability to surveil without consent. I knew the genuine thrill of watching a cross-section of society flow through a system, seeing the high-level, bird’s-eye view—the full map, the traffic, the stream of data pouring down the screen.

The Doomsday Calculation: How an Equation That Predicts the Future Is Transforming Everything We Know About Life and the Universe by William Poundstone

Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Arthur Eddington, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, conceptual framework, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, CRISPR, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, DeepMind, digital map, discounted cash flows, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Elon Musk, Geoffrey Hinton, Gerolamo Cardano, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, Higgs boson, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, Peter Thiel, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sam Altman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, tech billionaire, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, time value of money, Turing test

The Omphalos Scenario How has the simulation hypothesis gained such intellectual currency? Does it merit being taken even a little seriously? The answer has to do with the self-sampling assumption, and with a set of beliefs ingrained in contemporary culture. The notion that the world could be an illusion is as old as philosophy. Plato’s cave, and all that. It was, however, an eminent Victorian, Philip Henry Gosse (1810–1888), who took Plato’s idea to the next level. Gosse was a naturalist who invented the aquarium and corresponded with Darwin on orchids. His 1857 book, Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot, considers this puzzle: Did Adam and Eve have navels?

Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger, Kenneth Cukier

23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Black Swan, book scanning, book value, business intelligence, business process, call centre, cloud computing, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, dark matter, data science, double entry bookkeeping, Eratosthenes, Erik Brynjolfsson, game design, hype cycle, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, lifelogging, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, obamacare, optical character recognition, PageRank, paypal mafia, performance metric, Peter Thiel, Plato's cave, post-materialism, random walk, recommendation engine, Salesforce, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, systematic bias, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Turing test, vertical integration, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

Our current big-data world will, before long, look as quaint as the four kilobytes of writeable memory in Apollo 11’s guidance control computer does now. What we are able to collect and process will always be just a tiny fraction of the information that exists in the world. It can only be a simulacrum of reality, like the shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave. Because we can never have perfect information, our predictions are inherently fallible. This doesn’t mean they’re wrong, only that they are always incomplete. It doesn’t negate the insights that big data offers, but it puts big data in its place—as a tool that doesn’t offer ultimate answers, just good-enough ones to help us now until better methods and hence better answers come along.

Death of the Liberal Class by Chris Hedges

1960s counterculture, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, call centre, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbine, corporate governance, deindustrialization, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, food desert, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, hive mind, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, military-industrial complex, Murray Bookchin, Pearl River Delta, Plato's cave, post scarcity, power law, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, strikebreaker, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tobin tax, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, W. E. B. Du Bois, WikiLeaks, working poor, Works Progress Administration

This militarization, as Sheldon Wolin writes, combines with the cultural fantasies of hero worship and tales of individual prowess, eternal youthfulness, beauty through surgery, action measured in nanoseconds, and a dream-laden culture of ever-expanding control and possibility, to sever huge segments of the population from reality. Those who control the images control us. And while we have been entranced by the celluloid shadows on the walls of Plato’s cave, these corporate forces have effectively dismantled Social Security, unions, welfare, public health services, and public housing—the institutions of social democracy. They have been permitted to pollute the planet, long after we knew the deadly consequences of global warming. We are living through one of civilization’s seismic reversals.

In Our Own Image: Savior or Destroyer? The History and Future of Artificial Intelligence by George Zarkadakis

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, animal electricity, anthropic principle, Asperger Syndrome, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, British Empire, business process, carbon-based life, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, continuous integration, Conway's Game of Life, cosmological principle, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Edward Snowden, epigenetics, Flash crash, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, income inequality, index card, industrial robot, intentional community, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, machine translation, millennium bug, mirror neurons, Moravec's paradox, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, off grid, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Plato's cave, post-industrial society, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, theory of mind, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y2K

The Scientist as Rebel by Freeman Dyson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Asilomar, Boeing 747, British Empire, Claude Shannon: information theory, dark matter, double helix, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Gregor Mendel, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, kremlinology, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Norbert Wiener, Paul Erdős, Plato's cave, precautionary principle, quantum entanglement, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, undersea cable

“The gyroscope that guides a rocket is an emissary from a six-dimensional symplectic world into our three-dimensional one; in its home world its behavior looks simple and natural.” “Even those who see stars ask ‘What is a star?,’ because to see merely with one’s eyes is still very little.” “The image of Plato’s cave seems to me the best metaphor for the structure of modern scientific knowledge; we actually see only the shadows.” “In a world of light there are neither points nor moments of time; beings woven from light would live nowhere and nowhen; only poetry and mathematics are capable of speaking meaningfully about such things.”

The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature by Steven Pinker

airport security, Albert Einstein, Bob Geldof, classic study, colonial rule, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, Ford Model T, fudge factor, George Santayana, language acquisition, Laplace demon, loss aversion, luminiferous ether, Norman Mailer, Philippa Foot, Plato's cave, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, science of happiness, social contagion, social intelligence, speech recognition, stem cell, Steven Pinker, Thomas Bayes, Thorstein Veblen, traffic fines, trolley problem, urban renewal, Yogi Berra

Any inventory of human nature is bound to cause some apprehension in hopeful people, because it would seem to set limits on the ways we can think, feel, and interact. “Is that all there is?” one is tempted to ask. “Are we doomed to picking our thinkable thoughts, our feelable feelings, our possible moves in the game of life, from a short menu of options?” It is an anxiety that goes back to Plato’s famous allegory of the prisoners in the cave. Captives are shackled in a grotto, their heads and bodies chained so that they can look only at the rear wall. The cave is a kind of movie theater out of The Flintstones, with a fire behind a balcony on which projectionists hold up cutouts and puppets, which cast moving shadows onto the wall.

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menstruation, taboo words and mental imagery metaphors abstract concepts expressed in all metaphors as dead body terms for place and direction dead importance of as key to explaining thought and language mixed in neologisms space for time ubiquity of see also conceptual metaphors; literary metaphors Metaphors We Live By (Lakoff and Johnson) Metcalfe, Alan metonymy Michelangelo Michotte, Albert microclasses, semantic middlemen middle voice Miller, Jonathan mind-body dualism minorities: African Americans epithets for Jews and middlemen nouns for momentaneous verbs monkeys Monroe, Marilyn Montagu, Ashley Monty (comic) Monty Python’s Flying Circus morality: causality and intentionality and responsibility Kantian categories and Morning Star morphemes morphology Morrison, Philip and Phyllis motherfucker moving observer and moving time metaphors Mundurukú Murphy, Gregory mutualism mutual knowledge My Fair Lady Nabokov, Vladimir Naked and the Dead, The (Mailer) names, personal fashion cycles for meaning of naming children semantics of see also proper names Nativism, Extreme, see Extreme Nativism natural kinds nature-nurture debate necessity negative evidence negative exceptions negative space neocortex neologisms methods of forming Neologizing Imperative Retort Newell, Allen Newtonian physics New Yorker magazine New York Times Nietzsche, Friedrich nigger 9/11 Nisbett, Richard nominal kinds nouns from adjectives compounding in literary metaphors polysemy and stereotypes turning into verbs see also common nouns; proper names number (grammatical) number (quantity) Nunberg, Geoffrey Nyhan, David oaths object-centered frame objectivity obscenity see also swearing (taboo language) obsessive-compulsive disorder Oedipus Oh-Shit Wave on onomatopoeia Orwell, George Ose, Doug Page, Larry paint paintbrushes Papafragou, Anna Papuan language Parker, Dorothy passive voice past past tense perfective aspect perfect tense Peterson, Scott philosophy: of causality epistemology of language and Linguistic Determinism of meaning moral of names of science Western phonesthesia phonetic symbolism phonological loop physics: intuitive Newtonian quantum relativity and space and time Piatelli-Palmarini, Massimo Pica, Pierre Pile ’Em High Pirahã piss planets Plato’s allegory of the cave plausible deniability pluperfect tense plural nouns Pluto podcast poetic devices politeness cultural differences in deferential as human universal indirect (polite) requests and intellectual consensus sympathetic Politeness Theory political debate: framing in metaphor in polysemy reasoning not affected by of spatial terms Pöppel, Ernst Porter, Cole portmanteau words Portnoy’s Complaint (Roth) Portuguese language possession possessor-raising construction possible worlds Potter, Stephen Potts, Christopher power Powers of Ten pragmatics see also implicature; indirect speech; politeness; Radical Pragmatics predicating versus referring prefixes prenuptial agreements prepositional dative prepositions Presley, Elvis present specious present progressive tense present tense priming probabilistic theories of causality problem isomorphs profanity, see swearing (taboo language) Project Steve promises pronouns: second-person third-person proper names: brand names indexicals compared with meaning of as rigid designators treated as common nouns see also names, personal Proust, Marcel Provine, Robert Pullum, Geoffrey pussy Pustejovsky, James Putnam, Hilary Pygmalion (Shaw) Quang Fuc Dong quantum mechanics Québecois French language queer Quine, W.

Roads to Berlin by Cees Nooteboom, Laura Watkinson

Berlin Wall, centre right, Deng Xiaoping, Fall of the Berlin Wall, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Martin Wolf, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Peace of Westphalia, Plato's cave, Potemkin village, Prenzlauer Berg, rent control

If he was impatient, you could only tell from his fingers, which occasionally started drumming, as though they had escaped the control of headquarters. Women in the crowd pointed at him, pointed him out to one another, laughed, sometimes ecstatically; you could see it happening, in wave after wave. The others—government, Politburo—were grouped around the two leaders. The figures in the back row had no faces, were mere outlines, shadows from Plato’s cave. In the spring, one of the men had been in the West, where he was applauded as he was now in the East. Back then, for one brief moment, as he stood waving in a car, he had looked like someone who was certain that he had achieved something: he had surrounded the D.D.R. His own country, Poland, Hungary and the West had combined forces to draw a merciless ring around the D.D.R.

Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators by Ronan Farrow

Airbnb, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, business intelligence, Citizen Lab, crowdsourcing, David Strachan, Donald Trump, East Village, fake news, forensic accounting, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Live Aid, messenger bag, NSO Group, Peter Thiel, Plato's cave, Saturday Night Live, Seymour Hersh, Skype

That chance encounter with Oppenheim eventually led him from conservative punditry to producing on MSNBC, and then to a senior producer role on Today. But he always had wider ambitions. He co-authored a series of self-help books called The Intellectual Devotional (“Impress your friends by explaining Plato’s Cave allegory, pepper your cocktail party conversation with opera terms,” read the jacket copy) and boasted that Steven Spielberg had given them out as holiday gifts, “so now I can die happy.” In 2008, he left the network and moved his family to Santa Monica to pursue a career in Hollywood. Referring to journalism, he said, “I had an amazing experience through my 20s doing that but had always loved the movie business, and movies, and drama.”

When Einstein Walked With Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought by Jim Holt

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, anthropic principle, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, Brownian motion, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, classic study, computer age, CRISPR, dark matter, David Brooks, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fellow of the Royal Society, four colour theorem, Georg Cantor, George Santayana, Gregor Mendel, haute couture, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Large Hadron Collider, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, luminiferous ether, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, Monty Hall problem, Murray Gell-Mann, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, Paradox of Choice, Paul Erdős, Peter Singer: altruism, Plato's cave, power law, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantum entanglement, random walk, Richard Feynman, Robert Solow, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, selection bias, Skype, stakhanovite, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Thorstein Veblen, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, union organizing, Vilfredo Pareto, Von Neumann architecture, wage slave

Could such worlds ever be visualized by the human imagination? What would it be like to exist in one? Was it just an accident that among all the possible spatial architectures we find ourselves living in a world of three dimensions? Or—an even more heady thought—could it be that we do live in a world with more dimensions, but like the prisoners in Plato’s cave we are too benighted to realize it? “A person who devoted his life to it might perhaps eventually be able to picture the fourth dimension,” wrote Henri Poincaré in the late nineteenth century. He made the task seem rather daunting, but maybe that is because, as a mathematician of peerless spatial intuition himself, he had very high standards.

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt

affirmative action, Black Swan, classic study, cognitive bias, cognitive load, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, index card, invisible hand, lateral thinking, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, Necker cube, Nelson Mandela, out of africa, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, Philippa Foot, Plato's cave, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, social web, stem cell, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, tech billionaire, The Spirit Level, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Timothy McVeigh, Tony Hsieh, Tragedy of the Commons, ultimatum game

Martha Nussbaum (2004) has made this case powerfully, in an extended argument with Leon Kass, beginning with Kass 1997. 24. Popes Benedict XVI and John Paul II have been particularly eloquent on these points. See also Bellah et al. 1985. 25. For example, the Hindu veil of Maya; the Platonic world of Forms and the escape from Plato’s cave. 26. According to data from the American National Election Survey. Jews are second only to African Americans in their support for the Democratic Party. Between 1992 and 2008, 82 percent of Jews identified with or leaned toward the Democratic Party. 27. As I’ll say in chapter 8, it is only recently that I’ve come to realize that conservatives care at least as much about fairness as do liberals; they just care more about proportionality than about equality. 28.

Jihad vs. McWorld: Terrorism's Challenge to Democracy by Benjamin Barber

airport security, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, classic study, computer age, Corn Laws, Corrections Corporation of America, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Gilder, global village, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Joan Didion, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, Live Aid, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, Norbert Wiener, North Sea oil, off-the-grid, pirate software, Plato's cave, postnationalism / post nation state, profit motive, race to the bottom, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, undersea cable, vertical integration, young professional, zero-sum game

Imagine imagination without words: does it ennoble or debase? Or simply cease to exist? Imagine an ontology, a science of the real, conceived in cyberspace: reality itself is transmuted into a virtual cousin, a species of the extant consisting in equal parts of pretense, illusion, and deception. Virtuality displaces reality, and Plato’s Cave, where flickering shadows dancing on a smoky wall are our only clue to the “real,” becomes the whole of our world. Words open the soul’s window to ideas and the discourse of words is how we grope our way to conversation and, when conversation can be stripped of its inequalities and hidden hegemonies, how we eventually become capable of cooperation, of common life with others, and even of justice.

The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads by Tim Wu

1960s counterculture, Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bob Geldof, borderless world, Brownian motion, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, colonial rule, content marketing, cotton gin, data science, do well by doing good, East Village, future of journalism, George Gilder, Golden age of television, Golden Gate Park, Googley, Gordon Gekko, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, informal economy, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Live Aid, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, mirror neurons, Nate Silver, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, Pepsi Challenge, placebo effect, Plato's cave, post scarcity, race to the bottom, road to serfdom, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, the built environment, The Chicago School, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Tim Cook: Apple, Torches of Freedom, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, Virgin Galactic, Wayback Machine, white flight, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Unlike our day of always-on Internet, back then one “jacked in” or perhaps passed through the back of the family wardrobe, and under a made-up name entered an entirely different kind of world populated by strangers, one where none of the usual rules applied. “Imagine,” said the cyber-pioneer John Perry Barlow, “discovering a continent so vast that it may have no end to its dimensions…where only children feel completely at home, where the physics is that of thought rather than things, and where everyone is as virtual as the shadows in Plato’s cave.”4 It was pretty cool stuff for the 1990s, intriguing enough to get AOL and the early web its first user base. In retrospect, however, the concept had its limitations. For one thing, once the novelty wore off, online content was circumscribed by the imagination of its users; that makes it sound unlimited, but in practice that wasn’t the case.

The Mole People: Life in the Tunnels Beneath New York City by Jennifer Toth

full employment, gentrification, Plato's cave, pneumatic tube

How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell

Airbnb, Anthropocene, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Big Tech, Burning Man, collective bargaining, congestion pricing, context collapse, death from overwork, Donald Trump, Filter Bubble, full employment, gentrification, gig economy, Google Earth, Ian Bogost, Internet Archive, James Bridle, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Kickstarter, late capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, Minecraft, Patri Friedman, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Plato's cave, Port of Oakland, Results Only Work Environment, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, Snapchat, source of truth, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, union organizing, white flight, Works Progress Administration

“Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.”29 Like Plato with his allegory of the cave, Thoreau imagines truth as dependent on perspective. “Statesmen and legislators, standing so completely within the institution never distinctly and nakedly behold it,” he says. One must ascend to higher ground to see reality: the government is admirable in many respects, “but seen from a point of view a little higher they are what I have described them; seen from a higher still, and the highest, who shall say what they are, or that they are worth looking at or thinking of at all?” As for Plato, for whom the escapee from the cave suffers and must be “dragged” into the light, Thoreau’s ascent is no Sunday stroll in the park.

Galileo's Dream by Kim Stanley Robinson

clockwork universe, dark matter, Dava Sobel, fail fast, gravity well, Johannes Kepler, Kim Stanley Robinson, Murano, Venice glass, music of the spheres, Plato's cave, power law, quantum entanglement

SMITH, Psychoanalytic Roots of Patriarchy BLACK SPACE, the dense spangle of stars. The great bulk of Jupiter, almost entirely sunlit, surreally present to the eye, crawling phyllotaxically with its hundreds of colors and thousands of convolutions— He was sitting in his chair in Hera’s little space boat, which was again rendered invisible—a kind of Plato’s cave through which the cosmos poured in. Below and behind them, the virulent ball that was Io jumped out of the starry blackness. “You’re back,” she noted. Her teletrasporta lay on the floor beside his chair. “Good.” “Where are you going?” he asked. “To Europa, of course.” She looked at him. “We’re still trying to keep Ganymede and his people away.”

A History of Western Philosophy by Aaron Finkel

British Empire, Eratosthenes, Georg Cantor, George Santayana, invention of agriculture, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, Plato's cave, plutocrats, source of truth, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, the market place, William of Occam

For he says: “Ah, woe is me that the pitiless day of death did not destroy me ere ever I wrought evil deeds of devouring with my lips! … “Abstain wholly from laurel leaves … “Wretches, utter wretches, keep your hands from beans!” So perhaps he had done nothing worse than munching laurel leaves or guzzling beans. The most famous passage in Plato, in which he compares this world to a cave, in which we see only shadows of the realities in the bright world above, is anticipated by Empedocles; its origin is in the teaching of the Orphics. There are some—presumably those who abstain from sin through many incarnations—who at last achieve immortal bliss in the company of the gods: But, at the last, they* appear among mortal men as prophets, song-writers, physicians, and princes; and thence they rise up as gods exalted in honour, sharing the hearth of the other gods and the same table, free from human woes, safe from destiny, and incapable of hurt.

…

Therefore the Creator, it would seem, created only illusion and evil. Some Gnostics were so consistent as to adopt this view; but in Plato the difficulty is still below the surface, and he seems, in the Republic, to have never become aware of it. The philosopher who is to be a guardian must, according to Plato, return into the cave, and live among those who have never seen the sun of truth. It would seem that God Himself, if He wishes to amend His creation, must do likewise; a Christian Platonist might so interpret the Incarnation. But it remains completely impossible to explain why God was not content with the world of ideas.

…

.), 236–238, 278, 314, 357 causal laws in physics, 669 causality, causation, 66, 658, 673–674, 717 and Hume, 663, 664–671, 702, 704, 707 and Kant, 715 cause-and-effect, 708 cause(s): and belief, 817, 826 and Aristotle, 169, 182 and Francis Bacon, 543 and Newton, 539 and Plato, 145. See also final cause First Cause prime causes cave, Plato’s, 57, 105, 124, 125–126, 130 Cebes, Greek philosopher (fl. 5th cent, B.C.), 138, 140 Cecil, Sir William (Lord Burghley), English statesman (1520–1598), 541 Cecrops, 265 celibacy, 134, 348, 459 of clergy, 112, 410, 413, 415 Celsus, Roman Platonist philosopher and anti-Christian writer (fl. 2nd cent.), 327–328 censorship, 835 Cephalus, 117 Chalcedon, 116 Council of, 333, 369, 374 Chaldeans, 227, 252 Chalons, 367, 369 Chamber of Deputies (France), 639 chance, 55, 58, 63, 66, 254 change(s), 46, 47, 61, 55, 56, 57, 68 and Bergson, 804–806 denied by Eleatics, 805 and Heraclitus, 43, 45, 48, 805 mathematical conception of, 804, 805, 806 and Parrnenides, 48, 51, 52, 105 and Plato, 105, 143, 158–159.

The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-But Some Don't by Nate Silver

airport security, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, availability heuristic, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, book value, Broken windows theory, business cycle, buy and hold, Carmen Reinhart, Charles Babbage, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disinformation, diversification, Donald Trump, Edmond Halley, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, en.wikipedia.org, equity premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, Freestyle chess, fudge factor, Future Shock, George Akerlof, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, haute cuisine, Henri Poincaré, high batting average, housing crisis, income per capita, index fund, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Japanese asset price bubble, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Laplace demon, locking in a profit, Loma Prieta earthquake, market bubble, Mikhail Gorbachev, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Monroe Doctrine, mortgage debt, Nate Silver, negative equity, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oklahoma City bombing, PageRank, pattern recognition, pets.com, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, power law, prediction markets, Productivity paradox, proprietary trading, public intellectual, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, savings glut, security theater, short selling, SimCity, Skype, statistical model, Steven Pinker, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, University of East Anglia, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wayback Machine, wikimedia commons

“Strange therefore . . . because he only sees the lowest part of this scale, [he] should from hence infer a defeat of happiness in the whole,” Bayes wrote in response to another theologian.23 Bayes’s much more famous work, “An Essay toward Solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances,”24 was not published until after his death, when it was brought to the Royal Society’s attention in 1763 by a friend of his named Richard Price. It concerned how we formulate probabilistic beliefs about the world when we encounter new data. Price, in framing Bayes’s essay, gives the example of a person who emerges into the world (perhaps he is Adam, or perhaps he came from Plato’s cave) and sees the sun rise for the first time. At first, he does not know whether this is typical or some sort of freak occurrence. However, each day that he survives and the sun rises again, his confidence increases that it is a permanent feature of nature. Gradually, through this purely statistical form of inference, the probability he assigns to his prediction that the sun will rise again tomorrow approaches (although never exactly reaches) 100 percent.

The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect by Judea Pearl, Dana Mackenzie

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Asilomar, Bayesian statistics, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, driverless car, Edmond Halley, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Isaac Newton, iterative process, John Snow's cholera map, Loebner Prize, loose coupling, Louis Pasteur, Menlo Park, Monty Hall problem, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, personalized medicine, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, Plato's cave, prisoner's dilemma, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, selection bias, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, The Design of Experiments, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Turing test

Yet it hinders learning systems that operate in environments governed by rich webs of causal forces, while having access merely to surface manifestations of those forces. Medicine, economics, education, climatology, and social affairs are typical examples of such environments. Like the prisoners in Plato’s famous cave, deep-learning systems explore the shadows on the cave wall and learn to accurately predict their movements. They lack the understanding that the observed shadows are mere projections of three-dimensional objects moving in a three-dimensional space. Strong AI requires this understanding. Deep-learning researchers are not unaware of these basic limitations.

A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market by John Allen Paulos

Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Brownian motion, business climate, business cycle, butter production in bangladesh, butterfly effect, capital asset pricing model, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversified portfolio, dogs of the Dow, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elliott wave, endowment effect, equity risk premium, Erdős number, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, four colour theorem, George Gilder, global village, greed is good, index fund, intangible asset, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, mental accounting, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, passive investing, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, power law, price anchoring, Ralph Nelson Elliott, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, short selling, six sigma, Stephen Hawking, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, transaction costs, two and twenty, ultimatum game, UUNET, Vanguard fund, Yogi Berra

With blackjack, however, there is a compelling mathematical explanation for those who care to study it. By contrast an effective technical trading strategy might be found that was beyond the comprehension not only of the people using it but of everyone. It might simply work, at least temporarily. In Plato’s allegory of the cave the benighted see only the shadows on the wall of the cave and not the real objects behind them that are causing the shadows. If they were really predictive, investors would be quite content with the shadows alone and would simply take the cave to be a bargain basement. The next segment is a bit of a lark.

The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection by Michael Harris

4chan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, Burning Man, Carrington event, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, dematerialisation, disinformation, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Google Glasses, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, Loebner Prize, low earth orbit, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, moral panic, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Plato's cave, pre–internet, Republic of Letters, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social web, Steve Jobs, technological solutionism, TED Talk, the medium is the message, The Wisdom of Crowds, traumatic brain injury, Turing test

The Kaiser Foundation’s latest numbers tell us that print consumption, outside of reading for school, takes up an average of thirty-eight minutes in every youth’s day (a small but telling drop from forty-three minutes five years earlier). 5. This is, yes, a hyped-up Hollywood version of Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave.” 6. To “an hero” is a synonym for committing suicide that is used by 4chan communities. 7. The gold medal has not been won yet. Smaller prizes are given each year for the “most human computer” in the bunch. 8. Such content will almost definitely be managed more tightly in the future than it is now—perhaps by the government.

Hyperion by Dan Simmons

classic study, gravity well, hallucination problem, invisible hand, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Plato's cave

Thus, on Heaven’s Gate, as I dredged bottom scum from the slop canals under the red gaze of Vega Primo or crawled on hands and knees through stalactites and stalagmites of rebreather bacteria in the station’s labyrinthine lungpipes, I became a poet. All I lacked were the words. The twentieth century’s most honored writer, William Gass, once said in an interview; ‘Words are the supreme objects. They are minded things.’ And so they are. As pure and transcendent as any Idea which ever cast a shadow into Plato’s dark cave of our perceptions. But they are also pitfalls of deceit and misperception. Words bend our thinking to infinite paths of self-delusion, and the fact that we spend most of our mental lives in brain mansions built of words means that we lack the objectivity necessary to see the terrible distortion of reality which language brings.

Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age by W. Bernard Carlson

1960s counterculture, air gap, Albert Einstein, Charles Babbage, Clayton Christensen, creative destruction, disruptive innovation, en.wikipedia.org, Ford Model T, Henri Poincaré, invention of radio, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Joseph Schumpeter, Menlo Park, packet switching, Plato's cave, popular electronics, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, undersea cable, yellow journalism

I have borrowed this tension from the allegory of the cave found in The Republic by Plato.15 Plato developed this allegory to illustrate the difference between ignorance and enlightenment, between how ordinary people and philosophers perceived the world and truth. To explain how ordinary people had a limited understanding of the truth, Plato imagined a group of individuals trapped in the cave who were shackled to chairs and their heads locked in braces so they could not turn around and see how light (or truth) came into the cave. Trapped in this way, they spent their lives debating the flickering shadows projected on the wall by people and things passing in front of a fire behind them.

12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next by Jeanette Winterson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, deep learning, deskilling, digital rights, discovery of DNA, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, flying shuttle, friendly AI, gender pay gap, global village, Grace Hopper, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, housing crisis, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, lockdown, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microdosing, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, off grid, OpenAI, operation paperclip, packet switching, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, Plato's cave, public intellectual, QAnon, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, speech recognition, spinning jenny, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, TikTok, trade route, Turing test, universal basic income, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

That is the world in our heads – because those are the worlds we live in – but it is also a chance at touching or glimpsing what might be the substance, and not the shadow. Physics is working on the same problems but using other methods. What else was Shakespeare talking about in his beautiful Sonnet 53? What is your substance, whereof are you made, That millions of strange shadows on you tend? Plato’s famous image of the cave, with its shadows on the wall, and its fire mistaken for the sun, isn’t so different from the Hindu, or later the Buddhist, insight into the delusional nature of the reality we take for granted. Plato, though, believed that the human soul is immortal – that it can think after death, know itself, live without its body, and will return.

The Human Cosmos: A Secret History of the Stars by Jo Marchant

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Arthur Eddington, British Empire, complexity theory, Dava Sobel, Drosophila, Easter island, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, founder crops, game design, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Nicholas Carr, out of africa, overview effect, Plato's cave, polynesian navigation, scientific mainstream, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, Skype, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, technological singularity, TED Talk, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, trade route

Being You: A New Science of Consciousness by Anil Seth

AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, backpropagation, carbon-based life, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Drosophila, en.wikipedia.org, Filter Bubble, GPT-3, GPT-4, John Markoff, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, mirror neurons, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, Plato's cave, precautionary principle, Ray Kurzweil, self-driving car, speech recognition, stem cell, systems thinking, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, TikTok, Turing test

As with the Copernican revolution, this top-down view of perception remains consistent with much of the existing evidence, leaving unchanged many aspects of how things seem, while at the same time changing everything. This is by no means a wholly new idea. The first glimmers of a top-down theory of perception emerge in ancient Greece, with Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. Prisoners, chained and facing a blank wall all their lives, see only the play of shadows cast by objects passing by a fire behind them, and they give the shadows names, because for them the shadows are what is real. The allegory is that our own conscious perceptions are just like these shadows, indirect reflections of hidden causes that we can never directly encounter.

The Reckoning: Financial Accountability and the Rise and Fall of Nations by Jacob Soll

accounting loophole / creative accounting, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, delayed gratification, demand response, discounted cash flows, double entry bookkeeping, financial independence, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Glass-Steagall Act, God and Mammon, High speed trading, Honoré de Balzac, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Waldo Emerson, scientific management, Scientific racism, South Sea Bubble, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route

Cosimo was a man of two worlds, for he had one foot in the Middle Ages and the other in the Renaissance, which he helped invent. Although some Neo-Platonists saw all formal knowledge as an element of holiness, others believed that some learning was inferior and beneath the interest of the noble, Platonic elite. Merchant and noble values began to clash. Plato’s allegory of the cave, which described a lower cave people being ruled by an intellectual elite who through the wisdom of their souls sought the good of the republic, was a model not only for secular education and culture but also for political elitism.18 The Neo-Platonic ideal of human glory based on artistic, cultural, and political achievement did not always leave a place for the gritty practical matters of business.

The Transformation Of Ireland 1900-2000 by Diarmaid Ferriter

anti-communist, Bob Geldof, British Empire, Celtic Tiger, collective bargaining, deliberate practice, edge city, falling living standards, financial independence, ghettoisation, greed is good, hiring and firing, housing crisis, immigration reform, income per capita, land reform, manufacturing employment, moral panic, New Journalism, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open economy, Plato's cave, postnationalism / post nation state, sensible shoes, the market place, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, wage slave, women in the workforce

Their labours revealed the extent to which many of the ‘pillars’ of Irish society – including the Church, the controllers of state power and the family – had not been scrutinised sufficiently. They also exposed the degree to which, despite the attention given to cultural studies, modernity and national identity, the analysis of class and economic issues had been neglected. It also seemed that many of the labels associated with particular years of Irish history – ‘Plato’s cave’ (the period of the Second World War), ‘The decade of the vanishing Irish’ (the 1950s) and the ‘Best of decades’ (the 1960s)1 – were not satisfactory in the light of ongoing research and newly available sources, while there was still a tendency to begin general histories of Ireland in the twentieth century between the years of 1912 and 1922 rather than in 1900.

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Apollo 11, Barry Marshall: ulcers, belling the cat, conceptual framework, discovery of penicillin, experimental subject, government statistician, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Helicobacter pylori, iterative process, Joan Didion, life extension, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, medical residency, meta-analysis, mouse model, New Journalism, phenotype, Plato's cave, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, Robert Mercer, scientific mainstream, Silicon Valley, social contagion, social web, statistical model, stem cell, women in the workforce, Year of Magical Thinking, éminence grise

Kissinger: A Biography by Walter Isaacson

Alan Greenspan, Apollo 13, belling the cat, Berlin Wall, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Dr. Strangelove, Great Grain Robbery, haute couture, Herman Kahn, index card, Khyber Pass, long peace, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Norman Mailer, oil shock, out of africa, Plato's cave, RAND corporation, restrictive zoning, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Socratic dialogue, Ted Sorensen, Yom Kippur War

“I’ve only been able to change a few places in the vicinity of Beijing,” Mao replied. Rather than discoursing on his worldview, Mao conveyed his thoughts through a bantering Socratic dialogue that guided his guests, with deceptive casualness, toward his conclusions. His elliptical comments seemed to Kissinger like the shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave, in that they reflected reality but did not encompass it. For the rest of the week, Chinese officials would cite Mao’s phrases from the hour-long meeting as being concrete guidance verging on gospel. The most important matter of substance, or so almost everyone thought, was Taiwan. In his elliptical fashion, Mao opened the way to a resolution by noting a truth so obvious that others had ignored it: Taiwan was not, in fact, the most important matter of substance between the two nations.

The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction by Matthew B. Crawford

airport security, behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, David Brooks, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital Maoism, Google Glasses, hive mind, index card, informal economy, Jaron Lanier, large denomination, new economy, new new economy, Norman Mailer, online collectivism, Plato's cave, plutocrats, precautionary principle, Richard Thaler, Rodney Brooks, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Stanford marshmallow experiment, tacit knowledge, the built environment, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Walter Mischel, winner-take-all economy

If they prevailed, they trickled down and settled as articles of faith, or cultural reflexes. One must deploy sharp implements to clear these away and recover a more immediate intelligibility to life. Philosophizing politically is not something you do only after you have figured things out, like Plato’s philosopher returning to the cave. It is how you figure things out to begin with. AN OVERVIEW OF THE ARGUMENT In the course of thinking about attention, we found that we had to reconsider the boundaries of the self through the idea of cognitive extension. As embodied beings who use tools and prosthetics, the world shows up for us through its affordances; it is a world that we act in, not merely observe.

The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Brownian motion, capital asset pricing model, card file, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, desegregation, do what you love, Donald Trump, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, financial engineering, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Golden Gate Park, Greenspan put, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, Honoré de Balzac, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, index fund, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, medical malpractice, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, money market fund, moral hazard, NetJets, new economy, New Journalism, North Sea oil, paper trading, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Plato's cave, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, Ralph Nader, random walk, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scientific racism, shareholder value, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, telemarketer, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, tontine, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, yellow journalism, zero-coupon bond

In Security Analysis, Principles, and Technique (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1934), Benjamin Graham and Dodd stressed that there is no single definition of “intrinsic value,” which depends on earnings, dividends, assets, capital structure, terms of the security, and “other” factors. Since estimates are always subjective, the main consideration, they wrote—always—is the margin of safety. 16. The apt analogy to Plato’s cave was originally made by Patrick Byrne. 17. Often this was because the kind of undervalued stocks he liked were illiquid and could not be purchased in large positions. But Buffett felt that Graham could have followed a bolder strategy. 18. Interview with Jack Alexander. 19. Interview with Bill Ruane. 20.

The World of Caffeine: The Science and Culture of the World's Most Popular Drug by Bennett Alan Weinberg, Bonnie K. Bealer

British Empire, clean water, confounding variable, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, gentrification, Haight Ashbury, Honoré de Balzac, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Lao Tzu, placebo effect, Plato's cave, spice trade, trade route, traveling salesman

In the dialectic of Socrates, the goal was similar: to treat of the ordinary aspects of life with the hope of achieving an understanding beyond imagination (eikasia), sense perception (pistis), and even reason (dianoia), to reach an intuitive understanding of the Forms, the illumination of the soul that Plato called noesis. Like the Bodhisattva of Buddhist tradition, who after his enlightenment returns from the Void to lead his fellow creatures on the Path away from suffering, the philosopher of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, after escaping to see the world illuminated by the light of the Good, returns to teach the way of liberation to his still ignorant compatriots. (Plato does not use these four words for the degrees of knowing consistently throughout the Republic. However, this is the scheme he sets up to accompany the Allegory of the Cave.) 5.

Cosmos by Carl Sagan

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, clockwork universe, dark pattern, dematerialisation, double helix, Drosophila, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, invention of movable type, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Lao Tzu, Louis Pasteur, luminiferous ether, Magellanic Cloud, Mars Rover, Menlo Park, music of the spheres, pattern recognition, planetary scale, Plato's cave, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, time dilation, Tunguska event

The Pythagoreans delighted in the certainty of mathematical demonstration, the sense of a pure and unsullied world accessible to the human intellect, a Cosmos in which the sides of right triangles perfectly obey simple mathematical relationships. It was in striking contrast to the messy reality of the workaday world. They believed that in their mathematics they had glimpsed a perfect reality, a realm of the gods, of which our familiar world is but an imperfect reflection. In Plato’s famous parable of the cave, prisoners were imagined tied in such a way that they saw only the shadows of passersby and believed the shadows to be real—never guessing the complex reality that was accessible if they would but turn their heads. The Pythagoreans would powerfully influence Plato and, later, Christianity.

The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought by Ayn Rand, Leonard Peikoff, Peter Schwartz

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business process, cuban missile crisis, haute cuisine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, laissez-faire capitalism, means of production, medical malpractice, Neil Armstrong, Plato's cave, profit motive, Ralph Nader, Recombinant DNA, Ronald Reagan, source of truth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, War on Poverty

Democracy Incorporated by Sheldon S. Wolin

affirmative action, Berlin Wall, British Empire, centre right, coherent worldview, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate governance, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, illegal immigration, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, mass incarceration, money market fund, mutually assured destruction, new economy, offshore financial centre, Plato's cave, public intellectual, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, single-payer health, stem cell, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen

Imagine also some persons carrying artificial objects of wood or stone, some resembling human figures or animals, whose shadow images appear on the wall. The “prisoners” cannot see themselves or other prisoners; they see only the shadows cast by the fire on the wall facing them. “Such prisoners would recognize as reality nothing but the shadows of those artificial objects.” Plato continues: Suppose, however, one of the cave-dwellers is spirited outside the cave and thrust into bright sunlight. Dazzled at first, he believes the “real” world is illusion but, after becoming accustomed to the light, realizes that now he sees the world in the light of true reality—that is, he has knowledge, and what he had formerly believed to be reality was illusion.

Can Democracy Work?: A Short History of a Radical Idea, From Ancient Athens to Our World by James Miller

Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, classic study, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, disinformation, Donald Trump, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, income inequality, Joseph Schumpeter, mass incarceration, means of production, Occupy movement, Plato's cave, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Republic of Letters, Steve Bannon, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto

Unlike Robert Michels, who focused on the institutional limits of modern democracy, Lippmann analyzed its psychological limits. In a complex environment, where only disconnected bits of information are available to the average citizen, it was almost impossible for the public’s opinion on any matter of moment to be either cogent or coherent. The book’s epigraph is Plato’s famous image, in the Republic, of inhabitants in a cave bewitched by shadows and unaware of the real world outside. What follows suggests that the great majority of modern men are inescapably prisoners of shadowy and unexamined assumptions, immersed in private lives involving the pursuit of various personal interests, with limited time, and even less attention to give to public affairs.

The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art by David Lewis-Williams

Alfred Russel Wallace, behavioural economics, centre right, conceptual framework, intentional community, Isaac Newton, language acquisition, Menlo Park, out of africa, Plato's cave, social intelligence, theory of mind

The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever by Christopher Hitchens

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, Ayatollah Khomeini, Boeing 747, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, cosmic microwave background, cuban missile crisis, David Attenborough, Edmond Halley, Georg Cantor, germ theory of disease, index card, Isaac Newton, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, phenotype, Plato's cave, risk tolerance, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Thales of Miletus, Timothy McVeigh, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics

“But—” Dale is awed not so much by what this man says as by his fervor, the light of faith in his little tripartite spectacles, the tan monotone of his face and its cascading folds, his receding springy hair, his thick eyebrows thrust outward and up like tiny rhinoceros horns. This man is living, he is on top of his life, life is no burden to him. Dale feels crushed beneath his beady, shuttling, joyful, and unembarrassed gaze. “But,” he weakly argues, “‘dust of points,’ ‘freezes,’ ‘seed’—this is all metaphor.” “What isn’t?” Kriegman says. “Like Plato says, shadows at the back of the cave. Still, you can’t quit on reason; next thing you’ll get somebody like Hitler or Bonzo’s pal running things. Look. You know computers. Think binary. When matter meets antimatter, both vanish, into pure energy. But both existed; I mean, there was a condition we’ll call ‘existence.’

The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning by Jeremy Lent

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Atahualpa, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, complexity theory, conceptual framework, dematerialisation, demographic transition, different worldview, Doomsday Book, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, Firefox, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of gunpowder, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jevons paradox, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, language acquisition, Lao Tzu, Law of Accelerating Returns, mandelbrot fractal, mass immigration, megacity, Metcalfe's law, Mikhail Gorbachev, move 37, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, peak oil, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Solow, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, scientific management, Scientific racism, scientific worldview, seminal paper, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, South China Sea, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological singularity, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, ultimatum game, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, wikimedia commons

By weaving together these different strands of thought, he would create a radically new, comprehensive cosmology that would serve as the underpinning for more than two thousand years of theological, philosophical, and mathematical speculation in the Western world.36 The Conflict of Body and Soul Plato's view of the soul and body incorporates the same general themes as Orphism and Pythagoreanism, envisaging the body as a prison or tomb in which the soul is confined. In one of his writings, Plato offers an allegory of men imprisoned in a deep cave, facing a wall and chained so they can't move their heads. Behind these men is a fire, in front of which other people and animals move. The prisoners can only see the changeable shadows on the wall cast by the flickering light of the fire. Because these unfortunate prisoners haven't seen anything else since their infancy, they mistake the shadows they're seeing for reality.

How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apple Newton, backpropagation, Buckminster Fuller, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, disinformation, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, experimental subject, feminist movement, four colour theorem, Geoffrey Hinton, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gregor Mendel, hedonic treadmill, Henri Poincaré, Herman Kahn, income per capita, information retrieval, invention of agriculture, invention of the wheel, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, lake wobegon effect, language acquisition, lateral thinking, Linda problem, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Necker cube, out of africa, Parents Music Resource Center, pattern recognition, phenotype, Plato's cave, plutocrats, random walk, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, sexual politics, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, tacit knowledge, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, Tipper Gore, Turing machine, urban decay, Yogi Berra

Since then psychology has brought the questions of history’s deepest thinkers into the laboratory and has made thousands of discoveries, on every aspect of the mind, that could not have been dreamed of a few decades ago. The blossoming came from a central agenda for psychology set by the computational theory: discovering the form of mental representations (the symbol inscriptions used by the mind) and the processes (the demons) that access them. Plato said that we are trapped inside a cave and know the world only through the shadows it casts on the wall. The skull is our cave, and mental representations are the shadows. The information in an internal representation is all that we can know about the world. Consider, as an analogy, how external representations work.

The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant

George Santayana, Gregor Mendel, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, long peace, mass immigration, means of production, MITM: man-in-the-middle, music of the spheres, Plato's cave, plutocrats, science of happiness, Socratic dialogue, the market place, the scientific method

Homer, 531 Horace, 115 Hugo, 259 Hume, D., 194, 253, 332, 334f., 345, 347, 348f., 356, 373, 379, 409, 460, 462, 464, 607, 641f., 665f. Huneker, J., 528, 564, 677 Huxley, T., 465, 468f., 501, 519, 586f. Huyghens, 204 Ibn Ezra, 191 Ibn Gebirol, 191 Idealism, 354, 402f., 612, 641 Ideas, Plato’s theory of, 38f., 436, 439, 624 Idols of the Cave, 167f. Idols of the Market-place, 168 Idols of the Theatre, 168f. Idols of the Tribe, 165f. Immortality, 191, 195, 240f., 312f., 360, 602f., 652 Individualism, 517 Induction, 170f., 177 Industrial Revolution, 460 Inquisition, 189, 192 Insanity, 428f. Instinct, 488f., 601f., 684 Instrumentalism, 681f.

The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication From Ancient Times to the Internet by David Kahn

anti-communist, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Charles Babbage, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Easter island, end-to-end encryption, Fellow of the Royal Society, heat death of the universe, Honoré de Balzac, index card, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Louis Daguerre, machine translation, Maui Hawaii, Norbert Wiener, out of africa, pattern recognition, place-making, planned obsolescence, Plato's cave, pneumatic tube, popular electronics, positional goods, Republic of Letters, Searching for Interstellar Communications, stochastic process, Suez canal 1869, the scientific method, trade route, Turing machine, union organizing, yellow journalism, zero-sum game

Before our man-in-space program becomes too successful, it may be wise to spend some time, talent, and money on research with the dolphins; not only are they a large-brained species living their lives in a situation with attenuated effects of gravity, but they may be a group with whom we can learn basic techniques of communication with really alien intelligent life forms. So far, however, Lilly has made little fundamental progress—and this in itself may be significant. Man’s situation in regard to the creatures of outer space and their messages may resemble that of the human beings in Plato’s parable of the cave. Trapped in an underground den, they thought that their shadows, thrown on the wall before them by a fire, were their substances. A whole school of linguists thinks that men are trapped, intellectually, by their languages. Following Benjamin Lee Whorf, they point out that the way each language dissects reality imposes a world-view upon its speakers.

Europe: A History by Norman Davies

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, centre right, charter city, classic study, clean water, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, Corn Laws, cuban missile crisis, Defenestration of Prague, discovery of DNA, disinformation, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, equal pay for equal work, Eratosthenes, Etonian, European colonialism, experimental economics, financial independence, finite state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, gentleman farmer, global village, Gregor Mendel, Honoré de Balzac, Index librorum prohibitorum, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, land reform, liberation theology, long peace, Louis Blériot, Louis Daguerre, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Murano, Venice glass, music of the spheres, New Urbanism, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, Peace of Westphalia, Plato's cave, popular capitalism, Potemkin village, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, road to serfdom, sceptred isle, Scramble for Africa, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, Thales of Miletus, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Transnistria, urban planning, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois

With them in mind, it has been said: ‘the legacy of the Greeks to Western Philosophy was Western Philosophy’.9 Of the two Plato was the idealist, creating the first imaginary utopias, fundamental theories of forms and of immortality, an influential cosmogony, a far-ranging critique of knowledge, and a famous analysis of love. Nothing in intellectual history is more powerful than Plato’s metaphor of the cave, which suggests that we can only perceive the world indirectly, seeing reality only by means of its firelit shadows on the wall. Aristotle, in contrast, was ‘the practitioner of inspired common sense’, the systematizer. His encyclopedic works range from metaphysics and ethics to politics, literary criticism, logic, physics, biology, and astronomy.