The False Prison
A Study of the Development of Wittgenstein's Philosophy
by David Francis Pears

Capitalists and Socialists can both view the practitioners of the other economic system as being in a prison. The capitalist sees the socialist as being restricted by the demands of the social order, as sacrificing personal freedom and subjugating one's self interest to the interests of a larger social organism. The socialist sees capitalists as slaves to a system that enforces an endless personal struggle to compete with all other individuals for personal gain and survival.

Think of two snakes eating each other.

In a similar way, it is possible for most people to view Solipsism as a self-constructed prison. We say that the solipsist, in viewing everything as being internal to his own thoughts, has trapped himself in a self-deceiving prison that forces one to lose faith in the existence of an observer-independent external reality. We can view the solipsist as imprisoned in his own mental universe.

However, Wittgenstein showed a way to move beyond this type of conventional view of Solipsism. The core truth of Solipsism need not be rejection of the existence of a reality external to the solipsist, but rather as a special way of thinking about the world that involves a personal focus on the fact that all of human experience is generated from within, by one's own brain.

The solipsistic focus is on the importance of personal experience. In contrast, the critic of Solipsism is focused on the intersubjective world of human discourse. The scientific (modern approach) and metaphysical (classical approach) thinkers are focused on objectification of the world at the expense of (and often with a severe lack of trust in) personal subjective experiences. In the game of scientific and metaphysical theorizing, we attempt to eliminate dependence of our theories on the subjective experience of individual observers and construct a publicly accessible, objective understanding of the world. In contrast, a solipsistic attitude leads one to emphasize the view from within and it forces you to realize that even the game of scientific objectification of reality must be played out within the larger stage of personal subjective experiences. Even scientific objective knowledge must enter into each human's awareness through personal subjective experiences.

A focus on personal experience allows each of us to recognize that our personal experiences are presented to us by our brains in two distinct ways. First, we are consciously aware of the external world because our brains construct and present to us a type of virtual reality view of the outside world. The naive human does not ever question the illusion that this brain-built virtual reality is just REALITY, the external world itself. This trust by the human observer is usually well placed because evolution has designed our brains to do such a good job of translating external reality into our individual virtual reality. Second, we are each consciously aware of our SELF. Our experience of our personal inner world of SELF is VERY different from our experience of the virtually-real outside world. Our virtual-reality is constructed for us by our sensory cortex regions and powerful loops of confirmatory sensory/motor feedback produce within us a consistent and persistent view of external reality as a place of 3D spatial extension and temporal regularity. In contrast, our view of SELF is constructed by an inward-directed sense. This "inner sense organ" is the means by which a subset of the brain can monitor the activity of a subset of the brain. For this inner-directed sense, there is no spatial organization imposed from without, only the free-wheeling, context-sensitive, associative memory system of the brain itself.

By focusing equally on these two distinct domains of human personal experience, a philosopher like Wittgenstein can view conventional philosophers as attempting to limit themselves, as being imprisoned within the virtual reality part of human experience and never questioning it, never realizing its virtual nature and instead simply accepting that virtual reality as Ultimate Reality and always seeking to eliminate from our descriptions and explanations of reality the world of subjective experience, in particular concern for one's experience of SELF. Wittgenstein can thus turn the tables on conventional thinking and allow us to lead a liberated existence within the domain of personal experience, which, after all, encompasses all of human activity, in particular, it includes and can swallow the results generated by the classical approach which by its powerful empirical methodology seeks to elevate objective reality over subjective experience.

So who is really in prison? We can now view Wittgenstein's type of philosophy (I am still tempted to see in it the possibility of a science of the subjective!) as providing a type of liberation that encompasses all of human existence and hence, all of the world. Other philosophical traditions have been more limited because they have tried to focus either on experience of the SELF or on experience of our virtual reality view of external reality. Wittgenstein's approach is more balanced and more free.

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