Okay, so, like, imagine you’re in this dark cave, right? And you’ve been there your whole life with a bunch of other people. You’re all chained up so you can’t move, and you’re just staring at this wall. Behind you there’s this big fire, and between you and the fire there’s a walkway where people are carrying stuff back and forth, right? But you can’t see them, you can only see the shadows they cast on the wall in front of you. Like one of them is carrying a chair, so all you see is the shadow of a chair, and one is carrying a goat so all you see is the shadow of a goat. All those shadows are what you think of as real. All you know about the world are these shadows, and you think that’s all there is because it’s all you’ve ever seen, right?