From Simulism
Plato, (c. 428-348 BC) in the seventh book of
The Republic relates the
Allegory of the Cave, in which a prisoner is chained to a wall in a cave lit by a fire, and can only see vague shadows on the wall caused by unseen hands moving statues. The prisoner's mind interprets these shadows, ascribing form and structure, and this is what the prisoner takes to be reality. When the prisoner is freed from the cave, he begins to understand that the shadows on the wall were not 'reality', and sees that he has been deceived. Outside, in the real world, the prisoner is initially blinded by the light of the sun, but then realises that real objects are illuminated by the sun, just as the shadows were lit by the fire in the cave, and what he thought was reality was merely an imitation of the real world.
Plato's metaphor of the sun is thus understood to be
intellectual illumination,
The prisoner's stages of understanding correlate with the levels on the so-called divided line, which is divided into the visible and intelligible worlds, with the divider being the Sun. In the cave, he is in the visible realm, receiving no sunlight and outside he is in the intelligible realm.
There are clear parallels here with the plot line of The Matrix, in which Neo initially thinks that he is living in the real world, but then is freed by Morpheus, who gives him understanding that what he took to be reality was in fact a computer simulation.
