The Hollywood movie plot interpretation of cosmic history that we have been using to understand quantum reality has a famous philosophical ancestor. In Republic, the ancient Greek philosopher Plato introduced an allegory describing a group of prisoners who live their entire lives in a cave where they are chained to a wall. All they ever see are the shadows of things created by a fire behind them. For these prisoners, the shadows on the wall seem to constitute reality. Then, one of the prisoners escapes and climbs up to the sunlight. He sees the real nature of things and realizes that
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