The Only Five Senses In Plato's The Cave

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The concept that humans have only five senses is outdated. In fact, scientists have identified up to twenty one senses. The five primary ones are simply the best known. Sight can be relied on very heavily though it may not be the best sense to observe the world around us. The eyes of a human can be easily deceived, much like how they were in Plato’s “The Cave” where the people who have spent all of their lives in a cave being shown nothing but shadows of people passing in front of a flame and hearing nothing but the voices and shuffling feet of those same people who have been casting the shadows. (657) The people who see these shadows perceive them as the real thing, not just a casting of something that is in itself just a copy of something. According to Plato’s thinking and the thinking of Greek…show more content…
Thus, as Plato would say it nothing that can be seen with the naked eye is real, everything is fake due it being a copy of the perfect, heavenly original. The closest thing to the shadows being cast on the wall that can be seen today are films. Much like the shadows they are meant to be a distraction from the truth that is the world outside the cave. The people being thrown upon the wall by a projector are not actually there, they are nothing light being spewed out in a specific pattern by a machine. There have been studies that state that when a person is watching television or a movie the brain is active in the same places that it would be if the viewer was on heroin.

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