_____. "Bucles en la mente: Autointeracción, retroalimentación cerebral, y la realidad como expectativa autocumplida." Knowledge Commons Works 17 June 2026.*
https://doi.org/10.17613/mz3e2-12x32
https://works.hcommons.org/records/mz3e2-12x32
2026
En Retrospection:
Bibliografía sobre el CEREBRO https://bibliojagl.blogspot.com/2025/12/cerebro.html
(Or—a peek from the peak)
One of the passages in Daniel Dennett's From Bacteria to Bach and Back in which he comes really really close to cracking the code of reality—or perhaps closer to blowing your mind away into smithermemes... The passage in question is found in the chapter "Consciousness as an Evolved User-Illusion".
Its title is unpromising,
"How do human brains achieve 'global' comprehension using 'local' competences?"
... but the going gets really good with the epigraphs—especially when the epigraphs get glossed and riffed in the text itself. The trip goes from a bon mot to a reflexive hall of mirrors in the funhouse of your brain, so... brace your self for a dive ride into your own mind, and other minds as well:
Language was given to men so that they could conceal their thoughts.
—Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand
Language, like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity, of intercourse with others.
—Karl Marx
Consciousness generally has only been developed under the pressure of the necessity for communication.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
There is no General Leslie Groves to organize and command the termites in a termite colony, and there is no General Leslie Groves to organize and command the even more clueless neurons in a human brain. How can human comprehension be composed of the activities of unncomprehending neurons? In addition to all the free-floating rationales that explain our many structures, habits, and other features, there are the anchored reasons we represent to ourselves and others. These reasons are themselves things for us, denizens of our manifest image alongside the trees and clouds and doors and cups and voices and words and promises that make up our ontology. We can do things with these reasons—challenge, reframe, abandon, endorse, disavow them—and these often covert behaviors would not be in our repertoires if we hadn't downloaded all the apps of language into our necktops. In short, we can think about these reasons, good and bad, and this permits them to influence our overt behaviors in ways unknown in other organisms.
The piping plover's distraction display or broken-wing dance gives the fox a reason to alter its course and approach her, but not by getting it to trust her. She may modulate her thrashing to hold the fox's attention, but the control of this modulation does not require her to have more than a rudimentary "appreciation" of the fox's mental state. The fox, meanwhile, need have no more comprehension of just why it embarks on its quest instead of continuing to reconnoiter the are. We, likewise, can perform many quite adroit and retrospectively justifiable actions with only a vague conception of what we are up to, a conception often swiftly sharpened in hindsight by the self- attribution of reasons. It's this last step that is ours alone.
Our habits of self-justification (self-appreciation, self-exoneration, self-consolation, self-glorification, etc.) are ways of behaving (ways of thinking) that we acquire in the course of filling our heads with culture-borne memes, including, importantly, the habits of self-reproach and self-criticism. Thus we learn to plan ahead, to use the practice of reason-venturing and reason-criticizing to presolve some of life's problems, by talking them over with others and with ourselves. And not just talking them over—imagining them, trying out variations in our minds, and looking for flaws. We are not just Popperian but Gregorian creatures (see chapter 5), using thinking tools to design our own future acts. No other animal does that.
Our ability to do this kind of thinking is not accomplished by any dedicated brain structure not found in other animals. There is no "explainer-nucleus" for instance. Our thinking is enabled by the installation of a virtual machine made of virtual machines made of virtual machines. The goal of delineating and explaning this stack of competences via bottom-up neuroscience alone (without the help of cognitive neuroscience) is as remote as the goal of delineating and explaining the collection of apps on your smartphone by a bottom-up deciphering of its hardware circuit design and the bit-strings in memory without taking a peek at the user interface. The user interface of an app exists in order to make the competence accessible to users—people—who can't know, and don't need to know, the intricate details of how it works. The user-illusions of all the apps stored in our brains exist for the same reason: they make our competences (somewhat) accessible to users—other people— who can't know, and don't need to know, the intricate details. And then we get to use them ourselves, under roughly the same conditions, as guests in our own brains.
There might be some other evolutionary path—genetic, not cultural—to a somewhat similar user-illusion in other animals, but I have not been able to conceive of one in convincing detail, and according to the arguments advanced by the ethologist and roboticist David McFarland (1989), "Communication is the only behavior that requires an organism to self-monitor its own control system." Organisms can very effectively control themselves by a collection of competing but "myopic" task controllers, each activated by a condition (hunger or some other need, sensed opportunity, built-in priority ranking, and so on). When a controller's condition outweighs the conditions of the currently active task controller, it interrupts it and takes charge temporarily. (The "pandemonium model" by Oliver Selfridge [1959] is the ancestor of many later models). Goals are represented only tacitly, in the feedback loops that guide each task controller, but without any global or higher level representation. Evolution will tend to optimize the interrupt dynamics of these modules, and nobody's the wiser. That is, there doesn't have to be anybody home to be wiser!
Communication, McFarland claims, is the behavioral innovation which changes all that. Communication requires a central clearing house of sorts in order to buffer the organism from revealing too much about its current state to competitive organisms. As Dawkins and Krebs (1978) showed, in order to understand the evolution of communication we need to see it as grounded in manipulation rather than as purely cooperative behavior. An organisms that has no poker face, that "communicates state" directly to all hearers, is a sitting duck, and will soon be extinct (von Neumann and Morgenstern 1944). What must evolve to prevent this exposure is a private, proprietary communication-control buffer that creates opportunities for guided deception—and, coincidentally, opportunities for self-deception (Trivers 1985)—by creating, for the first time in the evolution of nervous systems, explicit and more globally accessible representations of its current state, representations that are detachable from the tasks they represent, so that deceptive behaviours can be formulated and controlled without interfering with the control of other behaviors.
It is important to realize that by communication, McFarland does not mean specifically linguistic communication (which is ours alone) but strategic communication,
which opens the crucial space between one's actual goals and intentions
and the goals and intentions one attempts to communicate to an
audience. There is no doubt that many species are genetically equipped
with relatively simple communication behaviors (Hauser 1996), such as
stotting, alarm calls, and territorial markings and defense.
Stereotypical deception, such as bluffing in an aggressive encounter, is
common, but a more productive and versatile talent for deception
requires MaFarland's private workspace. For a century and more
philosophers have stressed the "privacy" of our inner thoughts, but
seldom have they bothered to ask which this is such a good design
feature. (An occupational blindness of many philosophers: taking the
manifest image as simply given and never asking what it might have been given to us for).
A Ivo le gustan mucho los modelitos a escala de edificios para la promoción de urbanizaciones, sobre todo si tienen figuritas y coches. Hoy hemos descubierto uno en el que aparece él, talmente, cruzando un paso de peatones de la mano de una oronda señora, y le ha entusiasmado verse a través del cristal, miniaturizado:
- Papá, ¿cómo saben que exixto?
Pregunta muy razonable; pero lo hemos oído mal, y hemos pensado que Ivo decía "cómo sabes que exixto", y que ya filosofaba. Álvaro ha contraatacado con una hipótesis extraída de las Meditaciones Metafísicas-cum-Manual de Forestales Juveniles al uso de su generación, a saber, la Guía para la Vida de Bart Simpson:
- Es cierto, ¿cómo podemos estar seguros de que no estamos soñando todo esto, y que en realidad no somos un cerebro en un frasco de algún científico loco?
En efecto, Álvaro, nunca descartes esa posibilidad. A René le asaltó la duda del Genio Maligno siendo uno de los cerebros privilegiados de Europa —su razonamiento subsiguiente refutándolo se quedó un poco cojito, porque poniendo a Dios en el lugar del genio maligno no solucionamos gran cosa. En mi generación se pasaba esta crisis existencial cuando se te juntaban la adolescencia, el estudio de la metafísica, y la desconfianza hacia la Divinidad. Y ahora ya les llega a los niños la problemática trascendentalmente reducida o condensada a través de los Simpson, en forma de parodia de cine serie B. Yo me quedo con la duda de si el ver su propio cloncillo en miniatura le ha inducido a Ivo una meditación transcendental, y le vuelvo a preguntar:
- Oye, Ivo, ¿cómo sabes que existes?
- ¡Es cierto! ¿Por qué ahí exixtía?
Está visto que nuestra sustancia existente la construimos sobre la base de las imágenes que nos representan - (Aquí René Descartes, George Berkeley, Oscar Wilde, Jacques Lacan, Miguel Bosé y Bart Simpson, cantando en sexteto a capella:) "La vida es sólo fantasía...."
Cárceles y mundos de la mente: https://blogdenotasvanityfea.blogspot.com/2025/06/carceles-y-mundos-de-la-mente.html
The Origin of the Human Mind in Infant Dramatism: https://www.academia.edu/35827813/
Prisons and Worlds of the Mind (Mind-forged 'carceri', in a nutshell) https://www.academia.edu/34701501/
Viendo el mundo con la mente (Un retropost de 2011 —o de 1711): https://www.academia.edu/52555514/
From Daniel Dennett's From Bacteria to Bach and Back, p. 185:
The problem with introspection is that it acquiesces in the illusion that there is an inner eye that sees and an inner ear that hears—and an inner mind that just thinks—these intimately familiar items, the objects of consciousness that parade across the stage in the Cartesian Theater (Dennett 1991). There is no Cartesian Theater; there just seems to be a Cartesian Theater. There fo indeed seem to be these items, audible and visible and thinkable, and—setting magic aside—it couldn't seem so unless there really were physical tokens in the brain playing these roles, but how, physically, anything in the brain manages to play any of these roles is a topic for future scientific investigation, not introspection.
'Lo mismo despiertos, que soñando': Hobbes sobre la virtualidad de lo real https://www.academia.edu/31599964/
Retropost, 2013:
Aquí hay un interesante artículo de Michael Graziano sobre el "efecto de consciencia" por así llamarlo:
Retropost, 2013:
Hay un pasaje de Hamlet
en el que Shakespeare esboza una teoría de la realidad como una
dimensión subjetiva, generada por la mente y sus actitudes más que por
la objetividad del mundo. El mundo es una cárcel en la que se siente
atrapado Hamlet, y Dinamarca es una celda, una de las peores—les dice
Hamlet a sus "amigos" Rosencrantz y Guildenstern. A ellos no se lo
parece, replican—pero Hamlet les espeta que las cosas son o no lo que
son según el color de la mente con que se miran. El color de Hamlet es,
claro, el negro.
Decía James Shapiro (en 1599: Un año en la vida de William Shakespeare)
que los soliloquios de Hamlet pudieron verse influidos por el nuevo
género ensayístico que por entonces ensayaban William Cornwallis y
otros, siguiendo a Montaigne. Algo leyó Shakespeare a Montaigne, desde
luego—por ejemplo el ensayo sobre los caníbales que daría algunas ideas
a La Tempestad. Yo creo
que también leyó el importante ensayo (I.xiv) "Que el gusto de los
bienes y los males depende en gran parte de la idea que de ellos
tenemos." Todo el ensayo es una especie de meditación admirada sobre la
multiplicidad de las realidades humanas, de la manera en que la mente
es un filtro que transforma la realidad de tal modo que proporciona a
cada cual una realidad a su medida, podíamos decír una realidad virtual
en la que habitar—al igual que la labor del poeta, diría Shakespeare en
A Midsummer Night's Dream,
proporciona a las fantasías aéreas un nombre y un lugar donde habitar.
La realidad humana—no la de los animales, especifica Montaigne—es una
realidad virtual:
Es curiosa la elección de términos de Montaigne. El hombre está
liberado de la brida de la naturaleza; está "emancipado"—términos que
parecen sugerir un estado previo de naturaleza, quizá el Paraíso o la
Edad de Oro, cuando el hombre estaba en armonía con la naturaleza, o
domesticado por ella. Pero asoma en la reflexión de Montaigne una
visión del hombre como el mono loco,
el que no tiene justo medio ni sigue su propia naturaleza—el que no
tiene naturaleza, de hecho, porque se ha liberado de ella, y ahora no
vive en un mundo natural sino en un mundo generado por su propia
imaginación, regido no por la sensatez del cuerpo animal sino por "la
libertad vagabunda de nuestras fantasías." Los animales (podríamos
apostillarle) viven cada especie en su propio mundo virtual o mental;
el mundo del topo no es el del águila y en ese sentido también es a la
vez un nicho ecológico diferente y una realidad mental "virtualizada". The emmet's inch and the eagle's mile / Cause lame philosophy to smile" decía Blake—el poeta, en cambio, sabe que la realidad es múltiple. A lo que parece referirse Montaigne no es a que todos los animales hagan lo mismo, sino que todos los animales de la misma especie hacen lo mismo,
habitan en la misma realidad, reaccionan parecido, se mueven igual, no
ensayan danzas extrañas, no hablan idiomas mutuamente incomprensibles
ni inventan artilugios diferentes, no crean mundos mentales
distintos e incomunicados sino que viven en el mundo que
comparten de modo natural, el mundo de los sentidos y del cuerpo.
Mientras que el hombre, el mono loco...
Es interesante la reflexión de Montaigne por la manera en que es protoevolucionista—a la manera de muchos otros loci classici, empezando
por los mitos, pero llevando la reflexión un poco más allá.
Sugiere el desarrollo de la evolución humana como una creación de
mundos mentales, emancipados de la naturaleza, para bien o para mal;
unos absurdos, otros maravillosos, algunos las dos cosas a la
vez. Lleva a reflexión sobre la manera en que las culturas
humanas son otras tantas realidades virtuales en las que habitamos,
mundos (o cárceles) de la mente, mind-forged manacles como
decía también Blake, y a la vez palacios imaginarios sin los cuales no
llegarían a existir los palacios reales. Que también son, en buena
medida, imaginarios—tanto los de los libros de arte como esos otros
palacios flotantes en los que cada uno somos les rois du monde.
Y también es este ensayo, por cierto, muy sugestivo a la hora de
desarrollar una teoría de la atención. Porque en efecto, la atención es
un instrumento de primer orden para la creación de estas realidades
mentales alternativas. La atención es de por sí una modificación de la
realidad. Donde están las mujeres en general, yo veo sólo a esa mujer.
En un mundo de fútbol y coches de alta gama, yo paso por medio sin ver
nada, y centro mi atención en este ensayo de Montaigne, que otros no
ven. Y así organizo en torno mío un mundo mental en el que vivir, y que
da forma al resto de la realidad, o lo que de ella pueda verse desde
este observatorio, desde la casa de enfrente a Alpha Centauri. Y así
nos vamos haciendo cada vez más parecidos a nosotros mismos, creando
formas sostenidas en el aire, organizando la realidad a nuestra imagen
y semejanza. Casi como dioses, decía Hamlet.
Retropost, 2013:
Mendilow (Time and the Novel, p. 114) cita esta especulación de Stendhal:
Sobre Joyce como observador de la mente, puede verse este ensayo de John Horgan, "A Bloomsday Appreciation of Ulysses by James Joyce, Greatest Mind Scientist Ever."
"Joyce
was not a theorist of mind but he was an exceptional observer of it,
far more so than any scientist. He helped us become more aware of our
awareness."
Mendilow,
al contrario que Stendhal, no cree en la posibilidad de un registro
completo de los procesos mentales o emocionales. Escribiendo en 1952,
después de Hartmann y después de Freud, ya sabe que la consciencia es
sólo la punta del iceberg de los procesos inconscientes de la mente. Los
novelistas imitan con su transcripción verbal no el conjunto de los
procesos mentales, sino sólo de los procesos de atención consciente—la
atención es enormemente potenciada por el lenguaje—y en menor medida los
elementos preconscientes o subliminales,
Aquí hay una charla de
Daniel Dennett sobre la consciencia, en la que propone lo que llama su
"teoría de la consciencia como fama":
(Vaya, cambio el vídeo desaparecido por otro posterior en el que menciona su teoría)...
Quizá se podría llamar más adecuadamente la teoría de la consciencia como retrospección reflexiva. La cuestión es que la consciencia reflexiva de algo, así podríamos traducir awareness en
el sentido más fuerte, cuando no es mera percepción consciente, sino
atención a esa reflexión consciente—esa consciencia reflexiva, dice
Dennett, es algo que se crea mediante una retroalimentación o lazo
retroactivo. El tiempo consciente es de esta manera totalmente diferente
del tiempo de la percepción subliminal, y lleva siempre un ligero
desfase.
El fenómeno consciente por tanto se crea en una especie
de tiempo gobernado por el círculo hermenéutico, y se genera como
fenómeno antes de llegar a ser consciente; sólo por esa
retroalimentación y permanencia, lo que Dennett llama la "fama" de la
consciencia, llega a ocupar un lugar prominente en la atención, o más
bien a generar esa atención consciente como tal. Una analogía que usa
Dennett es la de la especiación. Hay también una relación algo
paradójica entre especiación y retrospección—es un tema del que yo he
escrito alguna cosa, por ejemplo en este artículo sobre el evolucionismo de Darwin y de Gustavo Bueno—con
razonamientos algo parecidos a los de Dennett. En fin, que el momento
de especiación se genera retroactivamente, como toda una serie de
fenómenos históricos e interpretativos que siguen esta curiosa
temporalidad gobernada por la retrospección. Ver más sobre esta
retroactividad aquí ("En el retrovisor").
Otra
de las cosas interesantes que dice Dennett es que no hay una frontera
clara entre lo consciente y lo preconsciente o inconsciente. La
consciencia es un fenómeno emergente, que vivimos "en primera persona",
de modo particular en la experiencia subjetiva de las diversas
modalidades de atención. Pero al descomponerla, lo que encontramos no
es, precisamente, consciencia, sino sólo las señales que, organizadas
del modo esencialmente narrativo y retrospectivo que describe Dennett,
dan lugar a la experiencia consciente.
Por eso es por lo que los
novelistas no pueden representar la consciencia como tal, sino sólo una
especie de simulación o ficcionalización de la misma. Ya comenzando por
el hecho mismo de que en la narrativa psicológica, la percepción se
verbaliza—en el cine puede darse una aproximación más cercana, con una
mezcla de imágenes visuales perceptuales y memorísticas, y pensamiento
verbalizado o parcialmente verbalizado. Aunque es un experimento más
bien infrecuente, a no ser en pasajes breves de sueños o de inmersión
momentánea en la mente de un personaje.
Sea como sea, tanto el cine como la ficción son, como dice Horgan del Ulises de
Joyce, un ejercicio de atención reflexiva sobre la consciencia, que la
convierte en una especie de hiperconciencia. Al igual que el lenguaje
estructura el pensamiento y potencia la atención, la representación
experimental de los procesos de consciencia es de por sí una experiencia
única para la consciencia. La novela psicológica, o el cine
psicológico, abren los ojos a la atención sobre nuestra experiencia de
vivir como una consciencia en flujo y una atención variable que pasa
como un proyector luminoso de un aspecto a otro del paisaje barroco
interior, y del exterior, resaltándolos y llevándonos al siguiente
momento de ese tiempo interior construido casi como un telefilm
producido, dirigido y emitido en directo.
Or "the Myth of the Cavern". A famous passage from the Republic. I quote (and correct a bit) from Reading about the World vol. 1, which establishes an analogy between Plato's cave and contemporary film spectatorship:
Editors' comments:
Plato,
the most creative and influential of Socrates' disciples, wrote
dialogues, in which he frequently used the figure of Socrates to espouse
his own (Plato's) full-fledged philosophy. In "The Republic," Plato
sums up his views in an image of ignorant humanity, trapped in the
depths and not even aware of its own limited perspective.
Yes, he said.
And if they were able to converse with one another, would they not suppose that they were naming what was actually before them?
Very true.
And
suppose further that the prison had an echo which came from the other
side, would they not be sure to fancy when one of the passers-by spoke
that the voice which they heard came from the passing shadow?
No question, he replied.
To them, I said, the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images.
That is certain.
And
now look again, and see what will naturally follow if the prisoners are
released and disabused of their error. At first, when any of them is
liberated and compelled suddenly to stand up and turn his neck round and
walk and look towards the light, he will suffer sharp pains; the glare
will distress him, and he will be unable to see the realities of which
in his former state he had seen the shadows; and then conceive some one
saying to him, that what he saw before was an illusion, but that now,
when he is approaching nearer to being and his eye is turned towards
more real existence, he has a clearer vision,--what will be his reply?
And you may further imagine that his instructor is pointing to the
objects as they pass and requiring him to name them,--will he not be
perplexed? Will he not fancy that the shadows which he formerly saw are
truer than the objects which are now shown to him?
Far truer.
And
if he is compelled to look straight at the light, will he not have a
pain in his eyes which will make him turn away to take refuge in the
objects of vision which he can see, and which he will conceive to be in
reality clearer than the things which are now being shown to him?
True, he said.
And
suppose once more, that he is reluctantly dragged up a steep and rugged
ascent, and held fast until he is forced into the presence of the sun
himself, is he not likely to be pained and irritated? When he approaches
the light his eyes will be dazzled, and he will not be able to see
anything at all of what are now called realities.
Not all in a moment, he said.
He
will require to grow accustomed to the sight of the upper world. And
first he will see the shadows best, next the reflections of men and
other objects in the water, and then the objects themselves; then he
will gaze upon the light of the moon and the stars and the spangled
heaven; and he will see the sky and the stars by night better than the
sun or the light of the sun by day?
Certainly.
Last
of all he will be able to see the sun, and not mere reflections of him
in the water, but he will see him in his own proper place, and not in
another; and he will contemplate him as he is.
Certainly.
He
will then proceed to argue that this is he who gives the season and the
years, and is the guardian of all that is in the visible world, and in a
certain way the cause of all things which he and his fellows have been
accustomed to behold?
Clearly, he said, he would first see the sun and then reason about him.
And
when he remembered his old habitation, and the wisdom of the den and
his fellow-prisoners, do you not suppose that he would felicitate
himself on the change, and pity them?
Certainly, he would.
And
if they were in the habit of conferring honors among themselves on
those who were quickest to observe the passing shadows and to remark
which of them went before, and which followed after, and which were
together; and who were therefore best able to draw conclusions as to the
future, do you think that he would care for such honors and glories, or
envy the possessors of them? Would he not say with Homer,
Better
to be the poor servant of a poor master, and to endure anything, rather
than think as they do and live after their manner? (1)
Yes, he said, I think that he would rather suffer anything than entertain these false notions and live in this miserable manner.
Imagine
once more, I said, such a one coming suddenly out of the sun to be
replaced in his old situation; would he not be certain to have his eyes
full of darkness?
To be sure, he said.
And
if there were a contest, and he had to compete in measuring the shadows
with the prisoners who had never moved out of the den, while his sight
was still weak, and before his eyes had become steady (and the time
which would be needed to acquire this new habit of sight might be very
considerable), would he not be ridiculous? Men would say of him that up
he went and down he came without his eyes; (2)and that it was better not
even to think of ascending; and if any one tried to loose another and
lead him up to the light, let them only catch the offender, and they
would put him to death. (3)
No question, he said.
This
entire allegory, I said, you may now append, dear Glaucon, to the
previous argument; the prison-house is the world of sight, the light of
the fire is the sun, and you will not misapprehend me if you interpret
the journey upwards to be the ascent of the soul into the intellectual
world according to my poor belief, which, at your desire, I have
expressed--whether rightly or wrongly God knows. But whether true or
false, my opinion is that in the world of knowledge the idea of good
appears last of all, and is seen only with an effort; and, when seen, is
also inferred to be the universal author of all things beautiful and
right, parent of light and of the lord of light in this visible world
(4), and the immediate source of reason and truth in the intellectual;
and that this is the power upon which he would act rationally either in
public or private life must have his eye fixed.
I agree, he said, as far as I am able to understand you.
Moreover,
I said, you must not wonder that those who attain to this beatific
vision are unwilling to descend to human affairs; for their souls are
ever hastening into the upper world where they desire to dwell; which
desire of theirs is very natural, if our allegory may be trusted.
Yes, very natural.
And
is there anything surprising in one who passes from divine
contemplations to the evil state of man, misbehaving himself in a
ridiculous manner; if, while his eyes are blinking and before he has
become accustomed to the surrounding darkness, he is compelled to fight
in courts of law, or in other places, about the images or the shadows of
images of justice, and is endeavoring to meet the conception of those
who have never yet seen absolute justice?
Anything but surprising, he replied.
Any
one who has common sense will remember that the bewilderments of the
eyes are of two kinds, and arise from two causes, either from coming out
of the light or from going into the light, which is true of the mind's
eye; and he who remembers this when he sees any one whose vision is
perplexed and weak, will not be too ready to laugh; he will first ask
whether that soul of man has come out of the brighter life, and is
unable to see because unaccustomed to the dark, or having turned from
darkness to the day is dazzled by excess of light. And he will count the
one happy in his condition and state of being, and he will pity the
other; or, if he have a mind to laugh at the soul which comes from below
into the light, there will be more reason in this than in the laugh
which greets him who returns from above out of the light into the den.
That, he said, is a very just distinction.
But
then, if I am right, certain professors of education must be wrong when
they say that they can put a knowledge into the soul which was not
there before, like sight into blind eyes.
They undoubtedly say this, he replied.
Whereas
our argument shows that the power and capacity of learning exists in
the soul already; and that just as the eye was unable to turn from
darkness to light without the whole body, so too the instrument of
knowledge can only by the movement of the whole soul be turned from the
world of becoming into that of being, and learn by degrees to endure the
sight of being and of the brightest and best of being, or in other
words, of the good.
The
dialogue takes place between "Socrates" and Plato's puppet Glaucon. Now
that I mention puppets—note that there is a feedback here between the
notions of reality and representation, one which pertains to the very
notion of representation. (See a Shakespearean analogue here).
The editors see an analogy between Plato's cavern and the film screen,
"had Plato been living today", and indeed the myth may serve as a primal
scene in film theory. Or dramatic theory, or theory of the spectacle, because (note well) the idea for the shadows on the wall already originates, as Socrates' analogy makes clear, in a theatrical spectacle—the cavern wall being like "the screen which marionette players have in front of them, over which they show the puppets". One
suspects that Socrates or Plato had been attending one of these
spectacles at night, illuminated by a fire at the back the audience, and
had somehow been more attentive to the shadows projected spontaneously
by the audience, and the shadow play being shown on this proto-cinematic
screen, than to the puppets above the screen. Or perhaps it is the
unexpected and serendipitous conjunction of these two modes of
representation, the theatrical one and the proto-cinematic images on the
screen, and the wobble or fluctuation in reality and attention caused
by their simultaneity and the interaction of several modes of reality
and images of the same, which made the fire of an idea light up in the
cavern of Plato's brain, and intuit the dialectical feedback or
paradoxical Escher-like circulation existing between so-called reality
and its representations.
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