In Plato’s famous Allegory of the Cave, people see only shadows, mistaking those shadows for reality because they cannot see what casts them. I’ve already explained why I think we are all like those people, our world full of shadows we think are real.
In a new twist, every time I join a video call those shadows now dance on my screen — screen-people, choppy two-dimensional LCD images cast digitally by distant people I cannot see. Yet I call it seeing.
I talk to the screen-people, who, for all the sophistication that brings them to me, are no more real than the shadows in Plato’s cave. The screen-people talk back. Sometimes they talk to each other. Once I even enjoyed a festive dinner in the company of some screen-people (though an observer has claimed that I dined with only my iPad).
This experience gives me, for the first time, some direct if tiny insight into the tremendous gap between reality and shadows, and it highlights what gets lost when shadows substitute for reality.
I know that a video call masks the depth of the human being, just as any Platonic shadow masks the depth of what casts it, but in this case I also know the person — the real thing, as it were. So I can compare the shadow to what casts it, compare the screen-people to the real people.
This interests me because “real” people are shadows too. That’s the whole point. On a video call I’m missing out on the real person, but, equally, when I’m with a person I’m missing…
What? I don’t know what I’m missing, of course. And I can’t.
But I can wonder.
What could cast the shadow that we call people? What majestic mystery lies behind a human being in the same way that a human being lies behind an image on a screen?
My screen-people vanish and then return. Is the same true for “real” people?
The screen-people make it possible for me and my “real” friends to stay in touch when we’re apart. Do in-person encounters do the same thing for whatever casts us as shadows? When a friend and I visit in person, do we bring together beings who would otherwise be apart? Or perhaps our in-person encounters are only one way the unseen beings communicate. This might explain why I sometimes meet someone “for the first time” yet feel as though we’ve met before.
(And what about the other way around: Do screen-people wonder what real people are like?)
Additionally, I find myself drawn in to my video chats, my life reduced to the screen as I forget about the fullness of the people beyond, even forget about my own self beyond the screen.
Could my reality ever vanish so completely that all I’d have left is screen-people and my screen-self?
Has that already happened?