Back to the beginning: the cave

[The Grand Nudger]

That adequately describes our predicament as knowledge-seeking beings. 

Does it, though?  When you describe the hypothetical limitation you've used a tiny hole in the wall..but that's not -our- limitation.  Conceptually, if the hole were bigger we'd see more.  Personally, while I doubt we have a full south wall of windows, I think it's equally misleading to characterize our perceptive apparatus as a peephole..I'm willing to posit that we have a floor to ceiling bay window.  Sure, there are things we don't have a view of, and what we do have a view of may be distorted in subtle and serious ways by the lens of the glass...but we can stick our head in and look around - still knowing that there are some thing we cannot see from this vantage point in addition to understanding the ways in which our perceptions can be faulty (itself another expression of our perceptive ability).

I find myself saying it alot..but..sure, we don't know everything, that doesn't mean we know nothing or that we know very little.  There's just alot to know, and the majority of it may be beyond our individual possession, but that doesn't mean that it's beyond our individual capabilities or our collective possession.

Personally, I think that the allegory of the cave would have been much more compelling in the late bc's...lol eh? Those poor fuckers really were stumbling around...but so far as we know nothing has changed within us, from that day to this day. Transport any one of those people to the present and they might have a wholly different view of existence. What we've learned since then..has, after all, given -us- a different view from theirs.