If you were to experience something, but couldn’t understand
or express the experience with words, then of course, you
wouldn’t be able to accurately describe the experience to other
people. Thus, no one else would ever be able to know what you
experienced. If this were true though, would that also mean that
neither could you? Ludwig Wittgenstein was a 20th century, Austrian-British
philosopher known for his uniquely innovative and often confusing ideas regarding the nature
of language, internal experience, and the relationship between them. To help illustrate
this relationship, Wittgenstein proposed the following metaphorical thought experiment
in his primary later book, Philosophical Investigations. In which, he suggested that we imagine a group
of people. Each person has a box. Inside each box, there
is a thing that everyone calls a beetle. However, in the context
of this thought experiment, no one is allowed to look inside
anyone else’s box. Everyone can only look inside their own and
talk about what’s in their box. So, the question is, can anyone
ever know if anyone else actually has a beetle in their box? And
can anyone know what anyone else’s beetle actually looks
like, if they do? Sure, everyone can talk about what’s in their
box, but they can, of course, only talk using words that everyone
shares and understands regarding what’s in their box,
which in this case is beetle. According to Wittgenstein, though,
the thing inside the box cannot be meaningfully talked about using
the word beetle because no one can ever confirm what anyone
means by beetle. As a result, the meaning of the word beetle is
created only through the use of the word in reference to the thing
in everyone’s box, but doesn’t and can’t necessarily describe
the thing that’s actually in anyone’s box.
Wittgenstein uses this beetle analogy to suggest that the
felt states and sensations that occur in a person’s mind; things
like smell, pain, love, happiness, sadness, and so on are things
that no one can ever communicate sufficiently enough to share
and reveal their experience of to others. The box is our head,
and the beetle is the internal sensation. I can never see your
beetle, and you can never see mine. When we attempt to think and
communicate about the beetle, though, the word has to be a word
everyone understands and can be taught for the word to have any
meaning. According to Wittgenstein and many others, language is
entirely social. This theory is known as the Private Language
Argument, which proposes that no language can be understandable
if it is solely to one individual. Language is only formed
through shared use amongst a community of others. Thus, the
sensation of something might exist exclusively to one’s self,
but it can never be understood in terms of language exclusively
to one’s self. Meaning, we can never know if anyone experiences
anything the same way we experience it, even if everyone talks
about it with the same words. We can only assume.
Arguably, trying to rationalize, communicate, and comprehend
the mental experience of a sensation as it actually is becomes
inconceivable after a certain point. For example, one could say
that fresh cut grass smells good, but when asked what it smells
like, they would have to go on to say things like it smells
natural or like the spring season. If then asked what that
smells like, perhaps if one tried hard enough, they could come
with a few other smells to compare it to, but they would
eventually and inevitably reach the limits of language. There
would be a final question of what it smells like that would have
no answer. A sensation beyond words that no one besides the
smeller could know for sure what is like. “Whereof one cannot
speak, thereof one must be silent.” Wittgenstein writes when
referring to the notion of subjective experience and that which
exceeds language and logical understanding. Beyond the suggestions of language and shared
meaning, arguably what is most thought-provoking about
all of this is the notion that we can never know what it feels
like to be anyone else other than our self. We can never know
what the world might look, taste, smell, sound, and feel like from
outside our own head. We can never verify what any one else’s
color blue looks
like, or what any one else’s punch in the arm feels like, or
what anyone else’s sense of love or happiness is like. We are
all locked inside our minds, yelling out to each other in an
attempt to find out, but never capable of entering anyone else’s
to find out for sure. Even if the framework, structure and wiring
of each of our brains are mostly identical, the unknowable
psychological layer on top of it all transmutes the experience
of neurological occurrences into something abstract, distanced
enough from the measurable and communicable to ever know exactly
what any of it is, where it comes from, and how it might
change in different heads.
Ultimately, no matter any philosophical stance or scientific
theory, it is fair to argue that at a minimum, no one can or
will ever know what it means to have navigated and experienced
this universe in the way that you have and will. No one can ever
see from the exact positions of time and space in the exact
order that you have and will. Each moment that you experience a
particular sense or image of the world with your particular
conditions of consciousness, is forever yours exclusively,
withholding the mystery of what it means to actually be you for
all of eternity. Perhaps we all feel and experience in nearly
identical ways, or perhaps we all feel and experience in very
dissimilar ways.
Your version of blue, your sensation of pain, your experience of love, could perhaps be
its only version of blue, it only version of pain, and its only version of love to ever
exist in the entire universe. The point is, we don’t know, because each of us holds
the answer that no one else can ever access.