Advanced Philosophy
The Oversupply and Triviality of All Natural Beings
Naturalizing Plato’s pessimism about nature.
Is everything we perceive cheapened by its inferiority to a deeper reality?
This is what Plato argued, building on a presocratic dichotomy between an eternal, abstract, unified reality, and the mere appearance of a multiplicity of changing things in nature. Plato in turn distinguished between the eternal Forms or blueprints, such as the perfect triangle or the perfect dog, and the instances or approximations that only imperfectly imitate the Forms.
The surprise for us, though, should be that this subversive dualism can be reformulated in scientific terms. There is, then, no need to think of the deeper reality as ideal, to begin to worry about the status of the particulars we encounter every day, including ourselves.
The Oversupply of Digital Content
To see this, first consider an analogy relating to the value of art. Centuries ago, an artist might paint a masterpiece that would be difficult to copy. The painting might take years to reproduce, and the forger would have had to spend more years acquiring the skills in the first place to even attempt to copy the original. The original work would be…