| Admiral Fallow – Beetle in the Box Lyrics | 12 years ago |
| The song seems to be a pretty clear reference to Wittgenstein's writings on consciousness and subjective experience. Without delving into the real theories too far, the basic premise is that you need to imagine that everyone's mind is like a thing they carry around in a box that no one else can see into. And everyone calls it a beetle, but no one really knows what's inside anyone else's box, they just assume that it's the same as what's in their box. So, when he mentions the beetle in the box, he's talking about subjective experience and how people can't know what other people are really feeling, and what feeling is really like to them. The ghost in the machine is what Wittgenstein called consciousness, making a comparison between the human body as a machine and consciousness as a "ghost in the machine" so to speak, something that isn't located in any one place, but is there regardless. | |
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