Prompt:
Ludwig Wittgenstein is holding a private language black box and peering into it while in a thought balloon he is picturing a golden scarab beetle to himself. Egyptian pyramids in the background. Princeton philosophy.
The AI LW above looks more like Bertrand Russell, who lives close to LW in Hilbert Space. No wonder the LLM adds a Bertie tinge, right?
That little homunculus underlines the "private theater" metaphor that Gilbert Ryle assured us was a category mistake. BTW: How does one illustrate category mistakes in Category Theory?
For those wishing more context:
Wittgenstein didn't buy the St. Augustine picture of words gaining their meaning by being pointers, even as they serve to govern attention and focus our minds. "Not by pointing they don't" I can hear him saying. So when you find yourself imagining a perfect circle in your mind's eye and saying to yourself "THIS is what 'perfect circle' means", imagine Wittgenstein poking his head in and saying 'no it isn't'. How would you contradict him? By showing him how perfect the circle truly is?
Ludwig suggested that whatever you're calling private, which is the whole of your experience come to think of it, just call it a "beetle" instead and go around talking about your "private beetle".
No, he wasn't a Volkswagen salesman. He was talking more like a scarab, as we find later in Jung (a different beetle story).
Does language ever point to "the beetle" in order to mean "the beetle"? How would you prove that it does or doesn't, and to whom? Mulling over such questions is what passes for philosophy in the academy today (I speak from experience).
