Wired News: I Dance, Therefore I Am

Wired News: I Dance, Therefore I Am

As I sat with my back to the wall, watching Xavier prancing around like a delusional lunatic (in fact, he was watching himself dispatch ninjas in a karate game called Kung 2), I couldn’t help thinking of Plato’s famous metaphor of the cave, which occurs in The Republic and is, in a way, the ancestor of Descartes’ idea of the deceiving god. How do we know that everything around us isn’t a deception? Plato asks us to imagine people chained in a cave in which a fire throws flickering shadows against the wall. Never having left the cave and seen the sun, these people (prototype video gamers, perhaps) would believe that the shadows were reality.