The grey area
By Elvie Howell
In this piece, Elvie Howell looks at everything from the miniscule to the meta. The pursuit of exactness in measurement is ultimately a futile one. Everything is fuzzy, even at the smallest scale. So, how does this same idea apply to the scale of our ideas, thoughts, and opinions?
I recall sitting in my maths classroom at age fourteen and learning about measurement error. It amazed me to think that no matter what, there is always an error margin to accompany a measurement. No matter how small of a unit you use. There’s always ± 50%. I couldn’t help but dwell on the consequences of this idea. There’s error all the way down.
German physicist Werner Heisenberg’s ideas regarding indeterminacy (retrospectively stolen from 14-year-old me) also describe the concept that even the most precise measurement we could possibly make will always have some degree of uncertainty. Our measurements will always be imperfect, even if the margin of error is miniscule. In this regard, precise measurement is unthinkable. But if we accept this, we must also accept that this may mean we no longer have a reason to think that the world has any ultimate exactness to measure. There is no finish line. Even on the smallest particles from which the world is built, there is no edge. There is no black and white. Everything is a shade of grey.
Everything is fuzzy.
This forces us to rethink “edges” and “lines”, at the least on a physical level, but perhaps on a metaphysical level as well. As we apply this concept from the material to the immaterial, we rethink boundary-making. Boundaries and edges between categories, people, opinions, right, and wrong. We must rethink whether they exist, what they look like, or how we get closer to them. I won’t ignore the risks of philosophical naturalisation, which, as defined by Datson and Vidal in their 2003 book The Moral Authority of Nature, is the act of appealing to nature’s authority to justify social conventions. This can also be described using the language of David Hume as using the way something ‘is’ to imply what ‘ought’ to be. Often this can be problematic, or dangerous. A crude and rudimentary example of this is suggesting that since a female body is capable of carrying a baby, it ought to have babies, and placing this at the centre of its purpose. Thus, in our case it may be naïve to use the fuzziness of the physical world to deny the existence of all quantised, determinable things. Things we could call real imaginaries.
Although, boundaries aren’t entirely unthinkable. If we look towards something like binary computing, where we can conceptually demarcate a “0” from “1” without ambiguity, you could argue that the gradual ascent between 0 and 1 on the measuring ruler doesn’t always apply to our constructs and categories.
In the technological sphere, humans have created numerical binaries as a way for computers to see, process, and present information. Despite the binary of ‘1’ and ‘0’ being something constructed or imaginary - as in, not something that necessarily existed inherently in nature, nor something we can hold - it is still a real ‘thing’ or ‘entity’, and its existence has real world implications. This is something completely foreign to the world of the ruler and the measurement of something physical like length.
But at the least, the measurement error, and the uncertainty of the physical world, forces us to contemplate our world view of the metaphysical and immaterial world from a different perspective. Perhaps we shouldn’t seek an answer, a correct way of seeing, but only interrogate deeper and deeper, with all our imprecision, all the way down. We should accept the fuzzy edges between you and me, between your judgement and mine.
