In Measure Began Our Might

In Measure Began Our Might

Raymond Tallis

But they are, irreducibly, theoretically self-sufficient entities, because they are inseparable from human beings with their points of view, who provide those frames of reference that are necessary for measurements.

Quantitative measurements cannot be accommodated in the world-picture of natural science which rests on them. If, as physicists would have it, the most faithful portrait of the universe really were that it was a ‘system of magnitudes’, there would be no place for the elucidation of those magnitudes. The expectation of Mach, whose philosophy inspired the young Einstein, “That the foundations of science as a whole, and of physics in particular, await their next greatest elucidations from the side of biology, and especially from the analysis of sensations” seems a forlorn hope.

So there we have it: measurement underpins a world picture that seems to support naturalism; naturalism, however, cannot support measurement. This takes us back to the fundamental fact that natural science cannot make sense of the human consciousness upon which it depends. It cannot, therefore, explain how it is possible that, while all entities are in time and have length, there have emerged creatures who tell the time and measure their length. In doing so, they express a unique human capacity to get themselves out of the way by privileging shared, quality-controlled observations over immediate experience. Most striking among the many things science cannot accommodate, is the existence of a scientific world picture.

Some of the meaning that’s lost as science progresses is recovered when we reflect on the capacity of science to further one version of the comprehensibility of the universe. Reminding ourselves of the scientific path to disenchantment may re-enchant the world.

In Measure Began Our Might

Raymond Tallis

yikes - I almost missed this.  Great article!  And a Yeats quote as the raw meat!

 The claim by W.B. Yeats in his poem ‘Under Ben Bulben’ (1933) that ‘measurement began our might’ is not entirely true. Our might has deeper roots than measurement. Yeats does, however, capture an important truth. Through measurement, our capacity to confront and act upon the natural world from a distance is vastly enhanced. Our collective facing of the world is supported by a gaze not localized in an individual body – and hence not vulnerable to its vicissitudes. This gaze looks at a world beyond the horizon that encircles biological vision, at a realm of knowledge, of facts, of possibilities, and ultimately of quantitative laws and equations. The out-of-body experiences of Man the Measuring Animal place him beyond the limits imposed by the biology of the human organism, and even outside of nature.

With this we come to the most astonishing truth about measurement. Although it is the lifeblood of physics, measurement does not fit into the world seen through the eyes of physics.

Measurement is a semantic process, which binds abstract units to real-world meanings.