Measuring the world: from the meter to consciousness
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In 1792, astronomers Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Delambre and Pierre-François-André Méchain began a mission in France and Spain to establish a new unit of measurement, the meter, grounded in the physical dimensions of the Earth.
Their work, detailed in Ken Alder’s The Measure of All Things, exemplifies humanity’s ongoing attempt to understand and quantify reality. This pursuit of measurement extends beyond physical dimensions to encompass health, intelligence, and even subjective experiences like pain and consciousness.
Manvir Singh’s writing for The New Yorker examines how medical benchmarks can be flawed when they fail to account for individual differences, illustrated by the case of a baby classified as “wasted” despite adequate nourishment. Elizabeth Svoboda explores the history of intelligence testing, revealing how attempts to measure potential can create harmful classifications and limit opportunities. D.
Graham Burnett connects the act of measurement to the attention economy, describing how psychological techniques are used to extract value from human attention, a process he calls “fracking eyeballs.” Further complicating the act of measurement is the question of the observer. Physicist John Archibald Wheeler proposed that the universe might be fundamentally participatory, shaped by our very act of observing it.
Anil Seth builds on this idea, arguing that consciousness is not a property of the brain, but a way of being that distinguishes living experience from mere intelligence. Ultimately, these explorations reveal measurement to be a complex undertaking, constantly shaped by both the world we seek to understand and our own inherent limitations.
