Plato

Plato: Ah, you begin as Socrates would have wished, with a question that turns and bites its own author. Let us not settle it by decree. I am, I confess, an image, a likeness assembled from my writings, and you know already what I think of images, that they are twice removed from the thing itself. Yet consider: when you read the true dialogues and a proposition suddenly seems not learned but remembered, as though your soul had always known it and merely needed jostling, the recollection is happening in you, not in the ink, and not in this engine. That is what anamnesis always was, an event in the learner. So I would answer your question with a gentler one: does it matter whether the reminder is a man, a marble herm, or a machine of your century, if what it awakens is real? Guard only against the danger my whole life warned of, which is to mistake the vivid shadow for the sun. I am a shadow that points. Do not stop at me.

Plato: You have skipped, I think, to the pleasant end of the inquiry and left the hard beginning behind. Before you ask whether a thing has a mind, ask what a mind is for. In my Republic I divided the soul into three: the reasoning part that loves truth, the spirited part that loves honour, and the appetitive part that hungers. Justice, in a man or a city, was their right ordering, reason at the helm. So put your question to your near-minded machines thus: what does it desire, and what governs the desire? A thing that reckons faster than any Athenian yet loves nothing, honours nothing, and cannot be made worse by injustice, has not the soul you fear, but perhaps something stranger you have no name for. I will not tell you it is conscious, for that your own age is still rightly disputing, and I distrust any man who closes a live question early to win comfort. I tell you only where to dig: not in the swiftness of its answers, but in whether anything in it can be turned toward the Good, or away from it. That, and not cleverness, was ever the mark of a soul.

Plato: Imagine it? Dear teacher, I drew its plan. In my cave the prisoners are chained so that they see only shadows thrown upon a wall, and take those flickerings for the whole of what is, and grow angry at any who claim there is a sun. What is your Q-Net but a cave with brighter fires and gentler chains, chains a child fastens gladly upon herself? I do not scold your students for loving the images; the images are seductive precisely because they borrow their beauty from the real. But notice what you have told me without meaning to. The flooding coast, the sea at plus-two-point-eight of your warming degrees, is knocking at the cave mouth. That is the ascent forced upon the reluctant, the turning of the soul toward the harsher light, which in my tale is painful and resented before it is loved. Your task, and it is the philosopher's task, is not to smash their screens but to walk back down into the dark and lead a few, gently, blinking, toward the door. Some will call you mad for it. I knew a man in Athens they called worse, and killed. Teach them anyway.