Arjun Walia – Does life exist before birth? This is a question that’s been contemplated for thousands of years. In the Socratic dialogue, Meno by Plato, the character Socrates attempts to prove that life exists before birth. Instead of innate knowledge that we are simply born with, knowledge that simply comes naturally to us, Plato relies on prenatal knowledge to explain our ability to solve problems in mathematics and philosophy, and suggests that we must have known the answers to these problems all along.

Plato, among many others, was convinced that there were such things as absolute beauty and truths. He believed that what we call the ‘soul’ was eternal, and that all knowledge was simply a form of remembering things that our soul knew before birth. To explain his view, he wrote the parable of the cave, where people are sitting around a fire watching shadows of the outside manifest themselves on the wall of the cave. For their entire life, they watched these reflections, and to them, it was a representation of the real world. One day they ventured out of the cave, and the real world was finally revealed to them. Continue reading →