Wittgenstein’s Tractatus as a Digital Metaphysics

The Wittgenstein of the Tractatus and his teacher Russell where both logical atomists. On logical atomism, the world consists of logically describable facts composed of elementary or atomic facts. A Tractarian world, though, requires fewer atomic facts than a Russellian world. Here's an example to illustrate this. Suppose reality consists of precisely one colorable thing, t, that can possess one of sixteen different colors G, B, R and so on. To model the possible worlds, Russell would need sixteen atomic facts denoted by atomic propositions such as Gt, Bt, and Rt. These facts are not logically independent, as the truth of Gt, for example, entails the falsehood of Bt. Wittgenstein, on the other hand, needs only four atomic facts to model reality, namely four simple objects or bits being 'on'. Since each of these four atomic facts can be actual or not, we arrive at 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 = 16 possible worlds in each of which the colorable thing t has precisely one of those sixteen different colors. Moreover, Wittgenstein's four atomic facts are logically independent from each other since each of them can be actual or not while the rest can remain the same. However, Wittgenstein pays both an ontological and epistemic price for obtaining modeling efficiency and logical independence. Ontologically, he needs four simple objects instead of just one colorable thing as Russell does. Epistemically, those four simple objects and corresponding four atomic facts are quite mysterious compared to Russell's rather straightforward sixteen atomic facts. The four simple objects are not colorable themselves. What are they? It's no surprise that, in his Tractatus, Wittgenstein never explains what the simple objects of the world amount to. Yet, the reference to bits in the above example suggests that a Tractarian world is ultimately akin to the binary structure of a digital information system. On a Tractarian metaphysics, reality appears to be analogous to software that operates within a computer. This implies that Wittgenstein may have understood the world we inhabit as being isomorphic to a virtual field of binary information. A digital-like structure of reality posits an intriguing vision of the world. Wittgenstein's Tractatus can be seen as a predecessor to our digital age. The idea of simple objects functioning like binary bits grounds a digital metaphysics, suggesting a binary reality that can be understood in terms of digital information long before the advent of modern computing.