Measurement and Ethos

[Alan Sondheim]

Measurement and Ethos


Give the Schrodinger's cat paradox, think of the mixed state as the trag-
edy of the commons which ultimately reproduces itself through capital
accumulation. What should be taken as the constituents of the wave equa-
tion tending towards the sudden collapse with a particular eigenvalue.
Wave towards state, spread over E3 space towards specificity of value. Set
judgment equivalent to measurement. The field of behavior, environmental,
particle, cultural, human, tends towards those moments of relative inter-
ference. Measurement is performance judgment; the human sutures, closes in
upon itself, defends itself. The wave equation collapses, the commons is
bought out. Environmental factors of scale surely play a role; a murderer
is punished as a result of the collapse of a nearly=decomposable hierar-
chy, a moment in time when the bullet flies, the knife slips, burned into
the genidentical four-space of an organism. Measurement is presumed,
stated, neutral; judgment is presumed measurement, according to the law,
i.e. according to the justice of an N-dimensional manifold and its fields.
What mixes in the real cat, mixes in the law; what mixes in physical
description is accompanied by a disclaimer, i.e. 'not a real cat,' which
is part of the description. Nature abhors a vacuum but abhors as well the
many-worlds approach of continuous splitting; it's messy, as is absolute
and total relativism. Just as physics possesses no intrinsic ethos, ethos
possesses no physics. Morality is situation- and ethos-dependent, event
and law. Experiment is theory- and measurement-dependent, event and world.
World and law, Law, are orthogonal, disconnected; to measure is not to
adjudicate, but measure is to adjudicate. The stakes and foundation-spaces
are orthogonal. Given culture, every judgment is orthogonal to itself,
self-orthogonal, totalizing and split. Physics and ethos are entangled at
the level of the cat; it is the cat that is at stake, dragging quantum and
cultural theories with it. Both approaches reside within language; law
pretends towards the exactitude of physics, with insipid results. Both
tend as well towards mechanism: beam-splitters versus the panopticon,
collapse of wave-functions (coupled) with incarcerations. Neither cat nor
prisoner escape. In a hyperreal sense we are both; therein lies the
paradox.


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