Analogy and the Law

 


The gavel falls.

"But your honour, I have more evidence to submit. 
 I am innocent I tell you. Inn-o-cent !"

It doesn't matter, the trial is over and ca314159 is 
ordered to be carted-off to a subjective prison cell.

"There is no room for your analogies in this court of law. 
 The law is logical, analogies take too much time to explain
 to the jurors and this court must make a speedy decision. 
 There are many other cases awaiting."

"But your honour, my case is just like this other case where
 the defendant was found innocent, except for the specific 
 details. The context is the same,..."

"I'm sorry, if you feel that the current law is in some 
 manner deficient, you may appeal to a 'higher' court, set 
 a precedant and have a new law written into the books. In 
 this manner we bypass analogies and have a new 
 law for each specific case."

"But don't you see how inefficient that is, your honour ? You 
 need a new law for each specific violation. Your legal books
 are expanding exponentially. Soon it will be impossible for
 an average citizen to know what all the laws are. Not only
 that, but you will have paradoxical contradictions between 
 separate judgements..."

"Really, we don't have time for all this non-sense. 
 Next case !"

The next case was an unquestionable case of murder. 
There were many eye-witnesses. The defendant was found 
guilty. Bang ! 
The hammer fell down with absolute speed and certainty.
The judge was confident in the pragmatic value of his 
world-view. Another criminal was justly and speedily 
Cartesianed off to prison with no chance for appeal.

ca314159 sat in its cell planning its appeal to analogy in
a higher court. It wondered if the higher court would speak
a higher level language than the binary logic of the lower
courts. "Oh well." he thought, "the system works for now.
It's slow for some cases and fast where needed."

Then he imagined how one day in the future, hybrid 
quantum/von Neumann computers would permit more abstract 
non-deterministic analogic and deterministic logics to 
handle both kinds of cases speedily.

Prologue
 In a lower court we are a "bit", 
 in the higher courts we are a "qubit",
 though we might be accused of "bullshit",  
 we are more generally an "it".