On Words and Shadows
In The Republic, Plato famously describes prisoners chained in a cave, facing a blank wall. They watch shadows projected by objects passing behind them and name these shadows, believing them to be reality. A shadow of a book is "book." A shadow of a dog is "dog." If a prisoner were released and saw the actual object, they would be blinded, confused, and likely yearn for the safety of the silhouette.
Recently, i was discussing with a friend the ever-present topic of consciousness (this is SF, after all) and specifically why artificial intelligence lacks it. Artificial Intelligence is mostly statistical pattern-matching - it's great at classifying, predicting, and imitating what it has seen before, but it doesn't understand the structure of thinking. It can process, but it cannot synthesize. It lacks the biological machinery that binds perception, memory, and intention.
We missed a deeper point however. The issue isn't just processing power or the lack of biological 'glue' - but that artificial intelligence as it is today appears to be a prisoner of Plato's cave. Can it really see the things words represent? It knows the statistical probability of the word "rose" appearing near the word "red," but it has never stood in a garden. It lives entirely in a world of shadows. Ferdinand de Saussure, distinguished between the signifier (the sound or word image) and the signified (the concept or real thing). The connection between them, he argued, is arbitrary. There is no "treeness" in the word "tree." The word is just a container, and often a leaky one. This distinction is where the trouble starts. Words are the shadows on the cave wall. They are the vessels that travel across synapses to bring reality into consciousness, but they are clumsy, low-fidelity compressions of the thing itself. An unnamed idea is something that has not yet been brought into consciousness; the moment we name it, we capture it, but we also kill a part of it.
I felt this dissonance acutely a couple months ago camping in an aptly-named town Big Trees, standing in nature among enormous trees. It became obvious to me how different it is to experience something directly versus to have a label for it. The trees were huge, and that word felt insultingly inadequate. At some point in human history, proto-language, we would have just looked and felt and known. We were forced to pay close attention to the identifiable truths of the object—the smell, the texture, the light—because we had no names to categorize them away.
Now, we name things. And in doing so, we create a buffer between ourselves and the reality. We trade the essence for the shadow.
Once you accept that language is a leaky container, you start to see how readily it can become an instrument of power. Foucault argues that power doesn't only prohibit, it produces the "regimes of truth" we live inside: our knowledge, what normalcy is, what is sayable. Law is one of the machinations for this. It doesn't merely apply meaning, it manufactures it, stabilizes it when useful, and reopens it when leverage is needed. In that sense, the legal profession is less a search for truth that a disciplined practice of controlling interpretation: creating ambiguity where it serves strategy and calling that ambiguity "objectivity". It is the industrialization of the shadow.
We see this erosion of meaning in Art as well. We revere the classics as timeless, but are they? Or have we just lost the context of the shadow? We only have glimpses of the humor of the past. What if half of what we take seriously in museums was a joke the whole time? Because we only have the artifact: the word, the painting - but not the living context, we might be worshipping the silhouette of a clown.
"A rose by any other name would smell as sweet." Shakespeare suggests the essence remains regardless of the label. But I'm not so sure. Naming something changes how we perceive it. It changes how we relate to it. It flattens the multidimensional sensory experience into a string of letters.
The double-bind is that we need the names. We need the shadows on the cave wall because, without them, we couldn't communicate, couldn't build, couldn't collaborate. We are trapped in the cave, and language is the only vessel we have to pass ideas between us. If we abandon words, we abandon connection.
So, how do we live with this? My theory is that the goal - whether in writing, in coding, or in living - is to get closer to the thing itself while still using words. We have to accept the imperfection of the medium but refuse to settle for the blur. We must try to write in a way that makes the shadow on the wall shimmer like it's almost real. To pay attention so carefully to the world that the name becomes transparent and what remains is just the rose, smelling as sweet as it ever did, whether or not you call it anything at all.