What the Allegory Implies for People Living in a World of Senses
             The Allegory of the Cave implies that if we rely on our perceptions to know the truth about existence then we will know very little about it. The sense are unreliable and their perceptions imperfect because perceptions are only how we as individuals view things and not how they truly are. People are like the figures in the cave because they believe the things they see are how they truly are, much the way we believe the things we perceive to be the truth. The cave is like the world we live in because the things we see only resemble their true forms, much they way the shadows on the wall were only resemblances of their physical form.
             We can only know what is true when we know what is importance to us beyond what our senses perceive. We can not live ethically if we do not understand this. The virtues of the soul are akin to bodily qualities however we can not rely on these qualities for the truth, we must only understand their implications. Opinion gives way to knowledge through reasoning. Through the reasoning of this statement we can assess that our senses (opinions or perceptions) give way to understanding (knowledge) through their implications, or in other words, by our reasoning of their implications.
             People today are like the people of the cave because we are chained by our senses to what we perceive to be the true. The darkness is a metaphor for our eyes not being able to see in the dark how things physically are because sight is a sense that we can not rely on to see the truth even in the light. Plato implies that reality is like sitting in a cave with our back to the light. We can describe the shadows we see on the wall, but we never turn our heads around to see where the light comes from. Even worse, we never really see each other -- we are in the dark.
             The world we live in is like the cave because the shadows represent the objects we perceive to be t...