Been following along, maybe this helps.

I guess if we took $\Omega=\{0,1\}$, equipped it with the topology $T=\{\emptyset, \{0\},\{1\},\{0,1\} \}$, with the usual unions and intersections and complements, we could conceive that:

$\{T, \cup,\cap,{}^{c}\}$ is some sort of algebra (where the symbols have their usual meaning). Every open set is also closed.

If we have a proposition $P_i$, an interpretation $I$ is a mapping from $P_i$ to $\{0,1\}$. If we imagine "starting with $\Omega=\{0,1\}$", a proposition is something like pre-image of $I$. If we have a family of such propositions, $Q = \{P_i, i \in J \}$, we could imagine each proposition being such a pre-image. If we consider propositional formulae from this alphabet containing at most $K$ symbols, $\times_K Q$, we could equip this with functions to $\{0,1\}$ (of up to arity $K$) that evaluate to true or false. These are then truth functions. Like $f: Q \times Q \rightarrow \Omega: (x,y) \rightarrow 1$ iff $x=y=1$ else $0$ is the truth function for AND.

If we extended the topology to the product space $\times_{K} \Omega$, I thiiiink this ends up being the discrete topology? But then it's also the set of all truth table rows of propositional logic formulae containing at most $K$ proposition symbols. If we took the intersection of {1} with {1} we get 1, intersection {1} with {0} we get 0... and can construct AND as a truth function on the open sets of this topology.

If we set out the production rules of propositional logic on $Q$, an "open set" might be an interpretation of a syntactically valid formula. There looks to be a topology here: closed under finite conjunctions (intersections), finite disjunctions (unions), interpret the empty string as mapped to empty set.

The negation of a syntactically valid formula is a syntactically valid formula, so the closed sets are all open... Any subformula of a well formed formula is syntactically valid. Well formed formulae are closed under finite conjunction and finite disjunction (since it's a finite alphabet this gives the appropriate topology properties, or somehow corresponds to them). "Pulling back" a truth function along an interpretation might give the propositions which satisfy it. If we "pulled back" a tautology (the truth function which is 1 for all arguments), we would (probably) get a theorem - signified by all the truth table rows being in the pull back. Pullbacks and fibre products are intimately related (somehow, I'm not sure on the details, I've been working through Category Theory for Scientists and pullbacks/fibres were my last session).

This starts looking suspiciously like a correspondence is in play between the algebra of sets on the product topology of $\times_{K} \Omega$, and the production rules on the propositional symbols. The possible "propositional assignments" that satisfy an interpretation maybe float above an interpretation as an algebra (algebraic structure, anyway).

Maybe it doesn't help though, it's very scattered.

Forgive the facetiousness. — Virgo Avalytikh

But of course! I can hardly write parables at you and not expect some facetiousness in return. :smile:

On the understanding that that which is expropriated by taxation is the rightful property of her who is taxed, taxation would indeed be coercive, for precisely the same reason as theft and extortion are coercive. — Virgo Avalytikh

This is what we are arguing about. Whether we should accept this as a premise, and why. Holding the background fixed.

But this takes a good deal for granted. Your assumption seems to be that, if the State declares itself, by means of the law that the State itself produces, to own object x, then the State rightfully owns object x. Moreover, you seem to imply on one or two occasions that all ownership rights in general are what they are because the State declares them to be so. Perhaps you would want to refine this further, but since you haven’t, I am going to tease out some problems with this view. — Virgo Avalytikh

Yes. My view is that the social customs that define who owns what are sufficient to define who owns what. More formally, a person's property is defined by what the social customs of property say is their property. Sometimes there may be legal disputes over the specifics, but as a rough and ready characterisation, yes, this is my view. Who owns what is defined by social custom. What it means to own something is defined by social custom. I believe this is accurate to how property works in the world.

One problem with this view is that it gives rise to in-compossible property claims. If, as currently obtains, there is more than one State in the world, then they may both lay claim to one and the same object (a landmass, for instance), which would show the above principle to be deficient in establishing a rightful property claim. To counteract this, we may limit the State’s ‘expropriation powers’ only to a certain territory. This seems like a plausible move, since this is already how we think of States as being distinguished from one another. — Virgo Avalytikh

Yes. Because who owns what is defined by social custom, property claims are incompossible. That is, it may be the case that nations and groups and firms disagree about who owns what and it what way. This is a fact of life. When an oil company builds a pipeline on a reservation, there is an ownership dispute. This doesn't get resolved by who has the most moral claim, it usually gets resolved by who has the most power. That is, it gets resolved politically rather than conceptually, and usually there is a huge power asymmetry which is leveraged in the resolution.

These are not logical contradictions, "X claims P exclusively" and "Y claims P exclusively" entail no logical contradiction, just a political or legal dispute. I am not providing a moral justification of this, just a description of how things are. What happens will happen even if there is no argument for why it must be so.

This is consistent with my strategy of showing that what you're talking about has no basis in reality. You are attributing blame to the state (which still, apparently cannot exist) for failing to live up to an impossible standard (and failing to behave like another thing which cannot exist). It really is like humanity being torn between God and Devil.

The contingent character of coercion – or, as I would rather put it, the fact that the NAP is philosophically dependent upon a system of property rights – is an observation I have made enthusiastically elsewhere. I resist strongly the identification of the law which the State produces with ‘social norms’. This should not be surprising, given how anti-social I believe the State to be in its essence. If you really do wish to make this identification, then the consequence would seem to be that the State can never be a coercive institution, by definition: any ostensibly coercive act in which the State engages may be legitimised as the State doing as it wishes its own property, on the understanding that its property is what it is because the State has declared it to be so. — Virgo Avalytikh

It is extremely bizarre that you criticise the definition of property ownership through social customs like a state's laws on property ownership, but that you also think that the non aggression principle depends upon a social system of property rights. Presumably, in that system, whatever it is, who owns what on which basis and what ownership means is specified by the social code, such that owning something within that system is being in a situation of ownership as defined by the code!

Perhaps you are saying that ownership is defined entirely by social custom, but that different systems of ownership can be more or less coercive. Specifically, perhaps you are claiming that a system of ownership is non-coercive only when it satisfies the non-aggression principle.

To that end; I'll re ask a question from earlier which you dodged (or otherwise neglected to answer): a new resource is discovered in your ideal system, two distinct firms make a property claim for "productive transformation", how can you possibly establish which is right without defining ownership through the code and coercing the loser to back off?

Unfortunately for the Statist, it is difficult to give a non-question-begging account of why these persons in particular come to own this territory in particular. — Virgo Avalytikh

I'm perfectly happy to accept that ownership rights are typically coercive - they are enforceable claims! How in the hell are you going to have a system of property rights without each right in accordance with the social customs being a claim backed up by violence? How are property rights established in a non-coercive way in your ideal system? It must be possible for property rights to be established non-coercively in order for the claim "we ought establish property rights non-coercively" to make sense; ought implies can, therefore if it is impossible to abide by a standard we are not obliged to follow it!

In absence of spelling out how this mythical system of non-coercive property works, how to put the social customs in place to ensure they satisfy the non-aggression principle, what you're talking about does not function as standard to hold current property rights up to

I am not defending excesses of coercion here, I am recognising that legal codes are always coercive to some degree; they are enforceable claims. By virtue that if one fails to abide by them one suffers the consequences. Politics top to bottom is saturated by power; negotiations, leverage, the "continuation of politics by other means", subterfuge, sabotage etc etc. Firms need no hand outs from the state to fuck with each other as much as possible, it's all in the spirit of competition.

What would it take for me to be wrong about this? It would take my scrabble club’s having a ‘mind of its own’. When I and my co-scrabblers sit, the four of us, around our square table, what exactly do you think ‘emerges’? Have we now been joined by a ‘someone’, a 'who', that is not identifiable with any one of the four of us? It sounds like a séance to me. Forgive the facetiousness. — Virgo Avalytikh

You're missing a vital distinction, I'll try and spell it out formally. Say there is an aggregate A of individuals I. The individuals have a collection of properties, relations and functions (behavioural outputs) P(I), call these I type predicates. The aggregate has a collection of properties, relations and functions P(A), call these A type predicates.

Your claim amounts to the observation that I type predicates need not be a subset of A type predicates. Prosaically, individual predicates need not transfer to aggregates. I agree.

My claim amounts to A type predicates and I type predicates are distinct.

An example; the ability to communicate is an I type property. The ability to negotiate is an A type predicate. Laws are not I type predicates, laws are A type predicates.

A type predicates may depend existentially upon the presence of select I type predicates; writing requires hands. A type predicates need not be reducible to I type predicates: humans want, cells do not (non-reducible); gas molecules have speeds, gases have temperatures (average speeds, reducible in some sense).

For a given collection of individuals in an aggregate, can A type predicates constrain or promote I type predicates? Yes. Gas molecules have speeds but not enclosing volumes, decreasing the enclosing volume of the gas increases their temperature; the average speed of the gas molecules goes up. Does this require any specific change in gas molecule speeds? No, lots of speed distributions produce the same average.

In societies: an A type predicates like a system of ownership can promote an I type predicate like rent seeking behaviour. Does this require that any individual must rent seek? No, it makes it possible and advantageous; it introduces a statistical proclivity, just like decreasing the enclosing volume of a gas introduces a statistical proclivity for its molecules to speed up.

Do firms have A type predicates? Yes, they can change investment strategy or mandate the use of new technology. Does this mean that firms have minds? No. It does mean that firm structure can constrain or promote individual behaviour. Firms have properties like corporate personhood! Corporate persons can be legally responsible for things. That's a legal responsibility attributed to something which is not an agent. Update your metaphysics to accommodate this.

I much prefer the kind of direct, philosophical engagement you were producing before. Little is gained from analogising my arguments to religious dogma, or translating my arguments into vocabulary of which I have not made use (like ‘free will’). My arguments are what they are. You can either engage with them, as you were before, or play around with them, as you are doing now. — Virgo Avalytikh

Awww ok then. I was hoping that we might have a parable off.

I'm going to assume that you see tax as coercive. Coercive because a government takes stuff off people. Let's formulate that as an argument. Let's also brush aside the issue of a government having its own sense of agency, since you seem to be able to understand it as a shorthand.

(A1) If an agent A deprives an agent B of access to what they own, the depriving action is coercive.
(A2) Governments deprive agents of a portion of their profits or earnings through tax.
(A3) That action is coercive.

The argument as it stands is invalid, it needs an additional premise.

(A2a) An agent owns the portion of their profits or earnings which a government takes.

Unfortunately, that premise is false. The reason governments (at least the UK, I would assume it's the same for most countries with a tax system) can collect on tax is because they already own that portion of earnings or profits. How do they own it? They are legally stipulated to, in the laws that define who owns what. So in order for (2a) to be true and make the argument go through (assuming the other premises), people would have to own the taxed portion of earnings or profits in some other sense. An interesting implication of that argument is:

(B1) If an agent A deprives an agent B of access to what they own, the depriving action is coercive.
(B2) An agent deprives their government of a portion of their profits or earnings by not paying tax.
(B2a) Governments own that taxed portion of earnings.
(B3) That action is coercive.

While (A2a) is false, (B2a) is true. The validity of the first argument entails the validity of the second, so not paying tax is coercive. To make a convincing argument, there needs to be a sense of ownership distinct from the "mere" legal one that makes (A2a) true but (B2a) false.

If we add in the non-aggression principle, "we ought not do that which is coercive", we can conclude that "we ought to pay our tax". (this is because not(pay tax) is coercive, if we ought not (not pay tax), we ought pay tax).

Given that ownership (who owns what and on what basis) is necessarily determined by social codes, IE that ownership is determined by the (more or less codified) rules of ownership in a society, forcing (A2a) to be true and (B2a) to be false looks to require a standard of ownership which is not based upon adhering to social customs.

We're left with the conclusion that tax is not coercive, and that refusing to pay tax is. Unless you give an account of ownership rights that hold independently of social custom.

The main thrust here is to get you to say where property rights come from, and to address the contingent character of coercion within a social form based on the rules of ownership it follows.

____________________________________________________________________________________________

Now let's return to the argument about individuals and states; that individuals exist but states merely subsist.

The free market and the State are not two ‘things’ to be compared. To say that markets have never been unaccompanied by the State is merely to say that the free associations between persons have always been invaded by aggressors. So what? Does this mean that aggression is not objectionable? Does it mean that peaceful activity must always be accompanied by coercive invasion? Of course not: none of this is implied, logically. States do not exist for the good of ‘us’. Their perdurance is not owing to their practical indispensability, their inevitability, or because of the good which they produce. They are agencies of monopolised coercion, which have an interest in their own self-preservation. — Virgo Avalytikh

If neither free markets nor the state have existed in the sense you describe them, they are useless as analytic categories - "the State is lumbering and inefficient" becomes a statement about an inexistent entity's behaviour. But let's put that aside for now, and focus on the principles that allow you to claim that persons exist but states merely subsist.

Collective action designates the reality that individuals may act in concert with one another, towards some common end. It does not mean that there is a subsistent entity, such as you and I are, called a ‘collective’, which acts by the power of its own agency. That is poetry only. — Virgo Avalytikh

(C1) If individual entities compose an aggregate, we can infer that the aggregate does not exist.
(C2) Human cells are individual entities.
(C3) Humans are aggregations of human cells.
(C4) Humans do not exist.

But clearly you believe humans exist. What principle of metaphysics allows you to claim that humans exist but not states?

I would suggest that you believe humans exist because we are agents, that we have distinct causal powers irreducible to the properties of the cells which composes us. Cells do not want or desire, only humans do.

Applying this principle consistently yields the existence of aggregates like states. and firms. Individual humans do not produce laws, social customs or economies, only aggregates do. Laws, economies and social customs would be impossible if only individuals existed, in the same sense that want, desire and agency would be impossible if only cells did.

The main thrust here is to challenge the ontological principles you are using in your arguments to deny causal powers to aggregates.

Jews are born to Jews. Aryans to Aryans — frank

And the child of an Aryan and a Jew?

Again: if your point is that race isn't biological, though true, that's irrelevant to Madfool's point. — frank

It rather is, it's about what we're attributing causal power; stuff that drives distinctions; to.

Circumstances of birth — frank

What're the circumstances of birth that make them distinguished?

Why is this confusing to anyone? — frank

Will ask you a similar question: what makes an Aryan an Aryan and a Jew a Jew?

Yes. Looking at bodies. Phenotype. — TheMadFool

An Aryan and a Jew have a baby, is it an Aryan or a Jew? How do you decide?

Kindly explain what you mean by social artefact? — TheMadFool

Here you go. Will make it clearer.

Social differences were race-based weren't they and race, as you agree, is all about, as you put it, observable differences — TheMadFool

Nah. Did you watch part 2 of that video I linked?

Races are "buckets" of people. Let's take "the Aryan race" and "the Jews".

The character of a bucket is how it is determined who goes into each bucket. Races are buckets.

If you take "the Jews" and "the Aryans" - these have been an interbreeding population with shared traits. It's continuous variation and gene exchange and everything available for one group is available for another. If you wanted to "bucket" humans into Aryan and not Aryan, the cut off point would be more like going to a wallpaper shop and selecting a skin colour, a nose size, a hair type, a history... Then using those to define "Jewish race" rather than finding "Jewish race" as a category rooted in biological difference from "Aryan race"; such a distinction does not identify human population with a distinct character driven by biological differences. What decides who goes into the "Aryan race" bucket is social stuff, not finding a genetically distinct sub population whose genetic differences are driven by biological difference makers. Social stuff "looking at" bodies and bucketing them based on social principles - stereotyping, mythmaking, storytelling, politics...

I don't think Derrida actually said anything about randomness? There's a very old reading group on the forum for "Voice and Phenomenon" which goes into a lot of detail, you'll see that he can be quite rigorous.

In conclusion, is chaos theory all bunk? — Gregory

Made a post describing how "chaos" is actually a property of a system here. Other I made in that discussion talk about the role random variables (which can be deterministically driven anyway) play in them (up to my idiosyncratic interpretation of things).

Deleted the post since I wanted to explain why I wrote the parable, I thought it would be clear.



It's the evening and I decided to write down a parable rather than writing another essay.

I could've made the post more along the lines of:

(1) If a free market is only a stipulated idea, it has never existed.
(2) Therefore it has no causal powers.
(3) Therefore deviation from it is impossible.
(4) Therefore attributing blame to the state for the consequences of deviating from it is impossible.

"If only we didn't deviate from the Free Market by having a State (with such and such properties, then..."

Then pointed out the analogy:

(1) If God is only a stipulated idea, it has never existed.
(2) Therefore it has no causal powers.
(3) Therefore it can make no edicts.
(4) Therefore deviation from its will is impossible.
(5) Therefore attributing blame to people for the consequences of deviating from it is impossible.

"If only we didn't split ourselves from God by having free will (and doing such and such), then..."

And then pointed out that this is the reverse of a religious doctrine:

(1) God existed in our stipulated form.
(2) Therefore God made edicts.
(3) Therefore deviating from those edicts is possible.
(4) Therefore we can attribute blame to people for deviating from those edicts.

It was therefore easy to construe your position in terms of the religious doctrine. The parallels do not end there.

Going from (3) to (4) often involves "free will", which is "agency" in our discussion. An ideal system having "compossible rights" articulated in terms of "private property" and a "non-aggression principle" comes down to "in an ideal social system we cannot violate another's agency" and "violating another's agency only makes sense in terms of violating commercial property rights". These stipulations together give "the only way we can violate another's agency is by violating their property rights" - so Eve was punished for taking an apple which wasn't hers. This makes coercion attributable to some devil like The State which comes into the picture against humanity because private property rights are stipulated as intimately tied to agency. The ultimate situation of freedom is stipulated in your world as The Free Market, which is entirely non-coercive, and coercion becomes attributed solely to the State.

In that regard, in your view, humans are tied between two abstractions, a force of coercion called The State and a force of freedom called The Free Market, neither of which has ever existed (as aggregates or as individuals, as I'm sure you'll agree), but humanity feels the effects of deviating from freedom through the always illegitimate actions of the State. We feel these effects apparently as inefficiencies and needless poverty, prices far above the (always allegedly cheap) "true competitive rate", monopolies etc...



This is exactly the same as deviating from the edicts of God, which has never existed, but still blaming our sufferings on deviating from the edicts. People however are tempted to use the witchcraft of The State, as in regulatory capture or the collective bargaining of unions, to do things which they otherwise wouldn't and (by definition) violate people's agency, through taxes, redistributive measures etc.

But it's a far more effective rhetorical strategy to portray it as a parable. Considering your model of The State and your model of The Free Market have never existed, the comparison is pretty strong.

We just burned all the books that talk about how private property became a thing. How it violates a previous state of unrestricted (or far less restricted) access and must have its ownership strongly enforced. This is the real history of private property; it was imposed on the unwilling to turn a profit on what was once theirs. Commercial private property arises as part of a victory against those who it dispossesses, and only after became embodied in legal codes in a more polite form; only those who had private property or benefitted from its acquisition had a hand in setting up how it worked. As a social process, it has always been rigged, a means of attaching value to land that was acquired by force, and owning that which comes from it.

'Society' is what happens when we don't aggress against one another and invade one another's property. — Virgo Avalytikh

And lo, the prophet spake: "Let it be known that the human will, of sovereign import and power, seeks accord with its other as they are alike in essence, flowing from the ownership of our bodies and of things, the State will impose themselves upon you and the property which flows from your essence, and rob you of the power of violence which is your own. The statist will tell you that commercial private property is a social arrangement that arose contingently in the history of economic development after merchants leveraged their wealth to obtain other forms of power, but more truly it is the expression of the inviolable sanctity of our wills!"

Society is not the State. States, as coercive institutions, are precisely anti-social in their working. The fact is, those whom you identify as 'downtrodden' are downtrodden on the State's watch. But I am sure, in your mind, it will be be laissez faire which receives the blame. — Virgo Avalytikh

It would be hard to say that free markets exist when the state has always been involved, no? You're positing "markets" as some imaginary arrangement which has never existed:

If people are free from coercive invasion, both in their persons and their property, then their interactions will be confined to those that are peaceful and voluntary. 'Market' is just a description of what this would look like, — Virgo Avalytikh

If the books you have referenced are consistent with your use of market; as an economic structure free from coercion; they are talking about an economic system which has never existed. I repeat, you are talking about something which has never existed.

"The free market" is an imagining that has long echoed through the rooms of ivory towers, and prophets whisper to this day that it shall come and save us from ourselves. It is a God, a perfect ideal entity, and all that humans do is found wanting in the light of its reflected glory, cast from the gold adorning its invisible hand.

We have fallen from the light of this perfection, like the prophet Friedman wrote, all our ills are rooted in our deviation from the perfect form of The Free Market. Each of us stands like Eve, tempted from the garden of economic freedom by the devil of social organisation and democratic legislative bodies; that which we call the State. The Free Market punished humanity, as the apple was not Eve's to take, the first violence done unto humanity was the violation of the first property right.

Why do we suffer? For we have sinned. Exercising the sacred faculty of our inviolable wills to take that which is not ours. All human pains are rooted in that which separated us from The Free Market.

The prophet Friedman, always the rebel, would give the devil precisely his due. The irony of the human condition was that to see the face of God and live together in accordance with her Holy form, we must entrust only what is necessary for God to manifest in our reality to the bureaucratic authority of the Devil. Humanity is a bridge tethered between light and darkness, Free Market and State, and we twist precariously in the wind.

The heathen investors believe it to be the breath of animal spirits, that the wind too is a whisper of God, but we know it to be the exercise of individual Will, that the essence of the Free Market is within us as our soul.

A load of horseshit really. It's just theology, "explaining" what happens to us with with reference to the edicts of gods which never existed.

Differences in phenotype - physical appearance - seems to be key to racism. I maybe wrong but don't racists compare some races to monkeys and apes in order to show their superiority and the inferiority of the other races? I reckon that in the remote past, when we were still hunter-gatherers, monkeys and apes were tough competition; after all they are either more agile or physically stronger. :joke: — TheMadFool

Phenotype - observable characteristics of organism.
Humans - organisms.
Racism - uses observable characteristics of humans.
Racism - requires specific differences in observable characteristics of humans in compared aggregates? No.
Racism - renders those aggregates relevant or stipulates them to exist through other means, which usually have no basis in the facts of human biology.

Let's take a case where the prejudice would be related to a biological fact. Let's say that we're eugenicists and we decide to kill all the people with the mutation that causes sickle cell anemia. Why? Because they have sickle cell anemia. Is that enough of a reason? No, we have to flesh out why that's a relevant selection criteria for killing people, and why we should kill people for the mutation at all. The mutation didn't cause us to want to kill them, the criteria we adopted did. Not the biology, the social stuff.

Granted. But this is not the argument I presented. I pointed out that there are properties of my heart which do not trace to me unqualifiedly. And yet, I still exist, and engage in actions of my own. My point is that the kinds of things that are predicated of human collectives are not really proper to human collectives, but are really proper to persons. Countries per se do not mourn. — Virgo Avalytikh

What you have said functions when aggregate behaviours like negotiations, which are interactions of individuals that output states ("should we all do this?" "This law will be amended thus...") are analogised to individual properties. The functional relationship between a law and individuals, say, is that an aggregate of individuals acts together in the production of a law. An individual simply cannot produce a law through negotiation, as individuals cannot negotiate with themselves. The process of negotiation (an interaction of individuals) is what produces a law, not each individual.

Put another way; the outputs (like properties obtaining, propensities to be effected) of interacting aggregates need not be reducible to the isolated behaviour of individuals. The interaction is important, the individuals only enable and contribute to it.

The same principle applies in the paper I linked; macro policy influences how people interact, it's a "top down" process which works on interacting aggregates and thereby changes the individuals actions. Say an office has "friday casuals" day, then the workers can turn up in casual clothing. "Friday casuals day" is a firm policy, not reducible to the workers turning up to work in casual clothes, because it is what allows the workers to turn up on Friday in casual clothing and not be in breach of company policy.

Macro properties are "proper" (as you're using the word) of aggregates. A law which effects firms acts on firms

Individuals X composing Y does not mean Y behaviour is reducible to X behaviour. Wasps do things atoms can't. Collectives do things individuals can't - like have laws, negotiate, organise economic activity, form markets (themselves emergent in this sense) etc. Market behaviour is not reducible to individual behaviour. Microproperties don't uniquely determine macroproperties - this says the same thing.

I don't see any reason to agree with this, since economists do speak of markets independently of the State (David Friedman, for instance, examines how the Stateless market for law would operate), and the way economists define 'markets' tends to be quite straightforward and non-stipulative. There is little more to markets than what I have drawn attention to: they are just exchange processes between buyers and sellers of goods and services. — Virgo Avalytikh

You can speak of a market as an abstraction independent of a social form, you can also speak of a social form as an abstraction independent from a market. Real states and real markets are hopelessly intertwined.

.

Why should any person be obliged to continue to employ another person, if she doesn't wish to? The right to freedom of association by which workers are allowed to unionise is the self-same right that is being invoked when I decide that I no longer wish to employ someone. If you have the right to decide whom you wish to associate with, and whom not to associate with, and under what terms, then so do I. — Virgo Avalytikh

You make it sound like these "rights" are somehow imbued by a God. They're fought for. People establish rights through collective action; rights are really what people are entitled to under a given social form. That "entitlement" is a codification of hard won principles which applies to everyone in an aggregate, and acts upon the aggregate in constraining its behaviour. "Workers rights", "consumer rights" etc are only established through collective action; and every single one has been hard won. Your ability to reason like this, to have studied what you have, would not have occurred without establishing basic education as a right. Established as a right through successful collective bargaining, through establishing social institutions which are mandated to enforce the right. When we don't take care of these social institutions, the rights they enforce waver and die, as do the people who depend upon them.

In the absence of these rights, markets are extremely bad for workers. 14 hour days, children with black lung, perpetual immiseration as an alternative to starvation, slavery... If you want to see markets as the sine qua non of human freedom, note that the freedoms we have within them were established through collective action against their incredible power and those who wield it.

Your overall perspective sees markets as limited abstract mathematical devices, ways of matching individuals to available goods through the satisfaction of a constrained utility function. There's no history in it, no study of the social processes that markets are, where they come from, how laws interface with markets, how people collectivise to ensure that they are treated well in them. This has been shown to (1) not uniquely determine the behaviour of emergent properties (see the paper) and (2) has absolutely nothing accurate to say about markets as a form of human activity, and of how peoples and social institutions relate to them.

The foundations of this approach do not predict individual behaviour, nor do they describe it very well. Moreover, they are entirely unnecessary to explain individual or behaviour even when they produce the right things. That is, they are either redundant or wrong. Useless!

In these kinds of discussions, there always seems to be the assumption that the way goods and services are provided under Statism is the ‘correct’ way, and the burden is on the free-marketeer (who, I believe, ought also to be an anti-Statist, as I am) to answer the challenge of how they would hope to ‘match’ the State’s performance. But why think this way? In fact, the State is truly miserable in all that it does. There is just no reason to think that an association of persons who have a monopoly on force are going to provide any service remotely competently. — Virgo Avalytikh

With respect, I don’t think this argument amounts to much. The mere fact that currency-based markets have (always or nearly) always been Statist societies does not imply that a currency-based market is dependent upon a State. In fact, the history of money is a history of depreciation, as governments have involved themselves more and more in monetary systems. See Murray Rothbard, What Has Government Done to Our Money? https://cdn.mises.org/What%20Has%20Government%20Done%20to%20Our%20Money_3.pdf — Virgo Avalytikh

My intentions are simply to point out that historically, states (and other social institutions) and markets interface strongly. A lot of what social forms do concerns their economy (questions of access, distribution, production and exchange of goods) and who owns what. A lot of what economies do is provide a means to change who owns what . This is rather unsurprising. When we think of a state, we think of a state involved with a market economy. We have to look either quite far back in time or to quite isolated communities to find a social form which does not have something like a state and something like a market.

Notably, this doesn't mean that states and markets have to overlap. Nor does it mean that the ways central government interface with an economy are the right ways, nor does it mean that the ways markets interface with governments are the right ways. It's simply an observation that we have to imagine something very dissimilar to contemporary industrial societies, or modern merchant societies to drive a wedge between the two ideas.

As it stands, you've not done that. Does this demonstrate that the wedge you're driving between market and state is unimaginable? No. Does it mean that there can't be social forms with markets but no states or states with no markets? No. What it does suggest strongly is that you have to imagine something completely different from all common examples of states and market economies to drive a wedge between them.

A consequence of this difference is that reading the real world in terms of whatever notion of state and market you have is a category error; it's simply not relevant to the intertwined nature of states and markets that we have today. You can't have your cake and eat it too.

I'm willing to entertain that your notions of state and market are merely stipulative, insofar as they don't correspond to social form similar in any relevant respect to what we have now, and what we came out of. This doesn't limit your imagination, just the applicability of your ideas to how things are.

I am not taking issue with the fact that it might sometimes be appropriate to engage in macro-level analysis. But I am not talking about methodology here, I am talking about ontology. Collective action designates the reality that individuals may act in concert with one another, towards some common end. It does not mean that there is a subsistent entity, such as you and I are, called a ‘collective’, which acts by the power of its own agency. That is poetry only. — Virgo Avalytikh

This is an invalid argument.
(1) X depends upon Y for its existence.
(2) Therefore Y does not have its own behaviour.

The causal structure of Y is simply depends in some sense on that of X. Atoms have novel behaviours from particles, compounds and molecules have novel behaviour from that of atoms, chains of chemical reactions have novel behaviour from that of compounds and molecules and so on. If you apply your argument in the general case, it would preclude the existence of compounds because they depend upon their constituent atoms. It would also miss a lot; chemistry and particle physics study different things. This is all there is to emergence as I am using it:

Y is emergent from X if:
(A) Y depends upon X for its existence.
(B) Y has its own behaviour which individuals of X lack.

Some examples of emergence in this sense, in addition to the previous ones: people negotiating (you can't negotiate with just one person), wars (This would never happen "New story just coming in, Chad declares war on America is equivalent to a Chad government official having a sudden desire to kill all American tourists due to an obnoxious tourist over the age of 40 wearing a cap backwards").

You seem not to be clear on this point, so I will spend more words on it.

That’s fine. To be sure, there are things that are proper to a part that are not proper to the whole, and vice versa. My heart pumps blood around my body, I do not. I stand in a field, my heart does not. The problem is that the kinds of things that are predicated of a human collective are not proper to it, but are really proper to individuals. Any kind of purposeful action, desire, intent, any kind of activity or psychological state at all, are predicated of a collective improperly, because they are proper to persons, and collectives are not persons. ‘The country is in mourning’, etc. — Virgo Avalytikh

The examples you gave seek to demonstrate that some properties of parts do not transfer to their wholes, not that wholes have no behaviours of their own. We could even be in the situation that no properties of parts transferred to their wholes, and still have properties of wholes which parts lack. EG, no properties of the subatomic particles of a wasp suffice to explain the shape a wasp have. Subatomic particles just don't have stable shapes in any sense. Adding to the list: wasps don't have electric charge, spin, quantised properties...

We can tell similar stories for people's jobs. No properties of subatomic particles determine what a manager does on a day to day basis. Managers allocate tasks to people (among other things). On your view this would be impossible, because subatomic particles can't allocate tasks to other subatomic particles.

They key concepts here are aggregation and interaction/arrangement. Properties of (interactions of people) are not properties of people. Properties of (interactions of atoms) are not properties of atoms.

When someone writes "Will America declare war on Iran?" what this means is that will the political authorities of America mandate violence on an institutional level against the people of Iran. Then this strongly suggests* that American soldiers will take action against the individuals of Iran. As we've seen, not even the president of the United States has the sole, unchecked ability to mandate "America will go to war with Iran", there is no representative individual who solely suffices to explain the situation, only individuals interacting and producing some output (a negotiation which results in a declaration of war with Iran) would go some way to explain the situation.



So all of that talk is at once shorthand (no one who says "America declares war on Iran because America is angry with Iran" would impute a collective consciousness to America) and a recognition that aggregates can behave in new ways from their parts, due to the parts relating. Negotiations are relations, social organisations are relations. Laws are enforceable claims on people's conduct deriving from an (often clumsy and corrupt) negotiations of ruling bodies, forming a system of interaction unfolding forward in time between the actions of lawyers in interpreting the codes, the applicability of the codes changing over time with interpretation and circumstance, new laws being introduced through political action, laws being changed through political action. And so on.

You can't even talk about firms and private property[/i[ without some construction like this going on in the background. Firms are aggregates of people with their own behaviours and properties!

It just doesn’t ring true that firms are coercive institutions because they tell their workers that they must ‘work or starve’. When a State demands ‘your money of your freedom’, as it does when it taxes you, the State itself is the source of this destructive dilemma. — Virgo Avalytikh

And a firm has no responsibility for firing workers attempting to unionise to stick up for their interests? Weird huh?

‘Artificial scarcity’ also has a precise technical definition, and I don’t believe you are using it accurately. A resource is ‘artificially scarce’ if it is non-rivalrous and excludable. This means that my exploiting the resource does not deprive anybody else from exploiting it, and yet it is still possible to prevent people from having access to it. — Virgo Avalytikh

Ok. A landlord buys houses to rent in a community. Anyone (not really, systems are usually prejudiced) who can afford the rent can go in. Those who can't afford the rent can't use it. Under this definition, food can never be artificially scarce precisely because consuming food is "rivalrous" (you can't eat the same food twice). This definition is entirely independent of access and distribution of resources.

Two stories:

A village starves to death. They have no access to food. Food was scarce. They could not distribute food because there was no food.

Someone is homeless. There are enough homes for all homeless people. Homes were scarce. The homeless person had no access to a house. Homes could not be distributed to homeless people because...

Scarcity is better defined as insufficient access to a good for a purpose or group. How a social form distributes goods (partially) determines who has access to what.

Artificial scarcity - if a good is scarce not because of being unavailable (like water in a draught), but because of how access and distribution work and are constrained in a social form.

Everything (as far as I can think of) that occupies a physical location is scarce. — Virgo Avalytikh

Fuck me, air is scarce**? I'll start stockpiling.

I may make predications about what a market might look like in the absence of the State (I strongly suspect that there would be currency, for example), but it is not my place to dictate what the aggregation of peaceful activity between persons ought to look like. That would be quite illiberal of me, and therefore contrary to my own principles. — Virgo Avalytikh

In the complete absence of a state, I don't think currency would function as it does. The social construction of legal tender requires an institution to enforce; there are probably better ways of doing this than with what you imagine as a state, but without there being a social institution with lots of power to enforce the norms in which currency operates, I don't see a way of preserving currency (and thus integrated networks of producers and economies).

If there is some way that a market might work, such that it is dependent upon the existence of the State in order to work that way, then obviously it would not work in that way in the absence of the State. But I don’t see this as particularly problematic. It’s true that the markets of our acquaintance are intimitely involved with the State, but that does not imply that a market is eo ipso dependent upon the existence of a State – which it is not. — Virgo Avalytikh

The historical record weighs quite heavily against this; economies that rely on currencies have (always to my knowledge) regulative bodies (states/governments/social institutions) that deal with the currency and the legal structure surrounding production, property rights and individual rights. While this doesn't make it impossible that a market cannot operate without a state, it makes it implausible that such coincidences of markets will not occur.

What you imagine as a market, how you characterise it, is laying very free and unspecified in the background, without logical guarantee that its necessary social properties do not entail the presence of regulative bodies.

Does IP mean intellectual property? If so, I would point out that ideas – the stuff of intellectual property – are non-scarce resources, and treating them as though they need to be rationed is a Statist phenomenon. Patents are, in effect, government-granted monopoly licences, not free-market phenomena. Also, exclusive extraction rights – rights bestowed by whom? Again, this sounds like we are talking about a State franchise. As I mentioned, the State is the pre-eminent bestower of monopoly privilege. — Virgo Avalytikh

Aye, IP being intellectual property. It's an extension of property law to ideas. Companies aggressively pursue patents and use them to enforce exclusive rights. This is much less often done for the products of state backed (through grants and levies) institutions like universities and research groups; consider the iPhone, whose components and technology, besides the interface, were all produced through public funding (that is, through social institutions involved with a state), were public access, and all Apple did was write an interface and integrate the components, but they have plenty of intellectual property associated with their phone. This is a clear case, as is common, of a company exploiting material in the commons for private gain.

When you envision extraction rights as bestowed by the state, and that extraction rights in your stateless imaginings do not have exclusive ownership, what do you imagine actually happens? Two oil companies have equal designs on an oil field, the oil field is public property; the transition from public property to making private property on it (granting access rights) ultimately is consistent with the laws of the state (in ideal circumstances), but without that transition; it could only be private property. The two oil companies both really want it, what happens?

Another thing you are eliding is a market's natural tendency towards the concentration of wealth and power. If a business succeeds, it gets more money, if it gets more money, it gets easier to make more money; to employ workers and buy infrastructure to capitalise on investments, to use its money as leverage in lobbying, bribery and lawmaking. You place too much emphasis on the centralisation of power achieved by the state as a (albeit shoddy) democratic social institution, and far too little on the concentration of power that occurs in the usual anti-democratic hierarchical structure of firms (as ensured by who owns (the majority share in) the company).

In the real world, the people at the top of these hierarchies influence culture and politics much more than their fellow people. They have so much power apportioned to them by the behaviour of markets alone! Moreover, when there were less restrictions in place (placed by states) on what firms could do with their workers, 5 year olds were working 14 hour days breathing in smoke. There are places where this kind of thing still happens.

If I understand you, you are arguing that a service-provider is (softly) coercive, if it is practically difficult to patronise a competitor. I suppose the problematic issue is the vagueness of ‘soft coercion’. Either the firm is invading your property, or it isn’t. If you believe that you have an unconditional claim to, e.g., oil, then the firm is violating your property rights by neglecting to furnish you with it. — Virgo Avalytikh

You artificially limit the operation of power by constraining it to violating a property right! Hierarchical structures like firms have all kinds of internal power relations, and large ones have both huge power over their workers (obey or starve, mitigated by workers' rights law, from the state) and huge political and cultural clout. We recognise the arches of MacDonalds more readily than flags, babies form brand preferences from TV exposure before they can talk.

If, more plausibly, you do not have an unconditional claim to the oil, then your having to pay the price they want for it is not coercive. Since one cannot have an unconditional right to a scarce resource (for this would imply that everyone be able to exploit endlessly a resource which literally cannot be exploited endlessly), private firms, I suggest, are straightforwardly non-coercive.

An aside: in terms of basic necessities, most resources are not scarce now. Global production is sufficient to feed, clothe and shelter literally everyone on the planet - way more than that even. The problem is currently one of access; getting people to the resources. Markets in this regard create a global situation of artificial scarcity. As a particularly striking example; if one has insufficient income, one cannot afford rent or a mortgage. This despite (in the UK and US at least) there being more empty homes than homeless people. Monetary access thresholds for goods always create scarcity when there are sufficient resources to satisfy needs.

In addition, your characterisation of power is tautological. Private firms can't be coercive if they only act upon things they have purchased the right for; whose powers flow from their private property. This is because it is impossible in this model of power to leverage anything except for a property right.

Our sticking point seems to be an ontological one: whether collectives of persons have their own inherent agency, above and beyond the agency of the individual persons which comprise them. Quite simply, individuals are persons; groups are not. Sometimes, we might speak of groups as though they were an organism with their own inherent capacity to act, but this is non-literal. The Greeks called this linguistic phenomenon synecdoche, the improper predication of a property of a part to the whole. We do this in sport, when we say ‘Portugal has scored a goal’ when in fact it is not true that a country has kicked a ball into a net. Or we might say of a woman that she is ‘blonde’, when in fact it is only a principal part, her hair, that is blonde (her entire body is not simply and unqualifiedly blonde). And we do this with human collectives, too: ‘Germany is in talks with Spain’ (this might be two people talking in a room), ‘The country is mourning the death of its monarch’ (persons mourn, countries do not). — Virgo Avalytikh

Take the example of a law. Establishing a law of a country is not a predication of the aggregate on the basis of its individuals, it is an intervention which may only ever be applied to an aggregate of people; citizens, immigrants, business owners etc. IE with a logical gloss, is a relation of an aggregate to another aggregate, and can only be thought in those terms. Most of our "rights and freedoms", even constitutional ones, apply to denizens of a country in the aggregate. Person of type X has status Y (citizen has this rights, Schengen zone passport member can do this... Firm must do this...).
When someone changes or introduces a law, it affects the aggregate. If someone changes the corporate tax rate in a country, it effects firms, then it effects people. The causal arrows go law change -> firm change -> individual change. You simply can't interpret this kind of thing without appealing to emergent properties of aggregates, and the ability of aggregates to act on aggregates.

When the EU introduced sweeping changes on tax transparency, it effected all firms that trade within the EU. The causal arrows are (EU political change) -> (EU firm changes) -> (Firm member changes). Also (EU political change) -> (Stock value change). Complex systems, and socio-economic ones are among the most rich, always have these aggregation properties and emergent phenomena; the law is produced by a negotiating aggregate and effects an aggregate. Political policies do the same. Economic policies do the same.

The examples you provide are not counter-instances to this ontological insight. Certainly, multiple persons might act jointly, and their actions might affect lots of other persons. But this does not imply that a collective is a subsistent entity in its own right. To illustrate, my scrabble club has 4 members (one day we will take over the world), but every Wednesday we engage in collective, collaborate activity with one another (playing scrabble). So we may say, ‘That scrabble club is playing scrabble’. And this is true, in a sense. But the thing we designate as a ‘scrabble club’ is not some fifth thing, subsisting, acting, desiring, intending, over and above the four members. — Virgo Avalytikh

Check this paper out for a thorough demonstration that aggregate properties (macro behaviour/macroeconomic properties) are relatively insensitive to broad classes of individual behaviour (read: microeconomics underdetermines macroeconomics). Emergence in general is a thing.

In similar vocabulary to what you used, interacting parts can have wholes which have properties (and activities) which those parts don't have. Gas molecules don't have pressure. Only aggregates of gas molecules do. Gas molecules don't have temperatures; only aggregates of gas molecules do.

Perhaps I would; but, then again, this is not really an argument. — Virgo Avalytikh

I think you parsed the example I gave as an emotional appeal, which it was in part, but it shows that the interests of the company can greatly diverge from the interests of their workers. Their workers would prefer not to toil until injury, or in the past (in the UK) have children the age of 5 work 14 hour shifts and get black lung. Replace black lung for bleeding hands and perpetual pain and you go to the sweatshops.

A coffee company does an opportunity cost calculation, closes and sells a shop that was actually profitable because it wasn't profitable enough, and it was predicted that the reinvestment of capital into another new branch would make more money. These workers were immediately out of a job, even if their interests were aligned with the success of their coffee shop, it's clear that the interests of the company conflicted with the interests of the workers' continuing to work there in a job they were happy with.

This is before you start to consider so called "externalities" like climate change and tobacco's influence on health. Stakeholders often care very much about things like having breathable air (choking smogs in industrial London or the current ones in Beijing), knowing whether their purchases are slowly killing them and a living wage, ability to spend a lot of time with their families. Firms don't always (read: usually have to be forced tooth and nail to) care about these things, and sometimes benefit from the immiseration of their workers. If there's no social safety net, firing creates destitution, which makes the uh... labour market very liquid, eh? In these circumstances, it doesn't matter so much how you treat your workers because you'll find someone who will do the work because they need to.

"Work here in terrible conditions or have your family starve" is not in any worker's interests. A rational utility maximiser (being tongue in cheek; we don't behave like that at all) would organise with their co workers and make a union, funny that these get beaten down and undermined as much as possible. "Have a global climate and production policy that non-negligibly risks ecological and humanitarian catastrophes" is in no one's best interests; no stakeholder's. But for the firms who profit from such replaceable labour or by maximising their short term profit rates? Yeah, works for them.

I'm not entirely certain what you mean by 'kinds' of markets. I understand a 'market' to be a process, in which the participants are buyers and sellers of goods and services. I understand markets to be 'free' just in case the exchanges take place by way of peaceful voluntarism rather than by threat or use of force (as in the case of theft, extortion, and so on). If the initiation of force and the invasion of private property are objectionable - and I believe that they are - then the non-existence of the State is a necessary (though not sufficient) condition of a free market. So the only way I can think to answer your question is that the kind of market which would exist in the State's absence is, I hope, a free one, in the sense that voluntary exchanges are not interrupted and invaded by an aggressor, however benevolent. — Virgo Avalytikh

Well, your characterisation of a market is quite limited there. You stipulate under what conditions a market is free, without considering what a market is!

Markets can have lots of characteristics. They can function through direct barter between producers without currency, they can function almost entirely through currency and so on. The social organisation of the market says a lot about the social organisation of the society. You can reverse this; the social organisation of the society constrains what kind of markets make sense in it. In ours, with a division of labour and few primary producers, you need a general currency. In an economy that runs on infrastructure investment or there are purchases required or promoted that exceed the available funds of economic agents, there needs to be a credit system (as ahistorical as that description is). When you have more monetary value flowing around than all redeemable physical representatives, you need to move away from things like the gold standard to fiat and digital currencies etc etc.

If you're going to treat markets as independent of states, this is a bit bizarre if states are required for certain market organisations - especially the one we have now globally, no? Markets like ours need banks and laws governing the banks. Markets like ours need trade laws to interface with social institutions. State and market entwine, and have a revolving door staffing policy (at least in the UK and US), firms form alliances with dictators. More on this later...

I wonder why you leave access control to goods out of the definition of a free market? It's possible, and occurs often, that one simply does not have a choice over where you buy your stuff or get your services from; in the case of large corporate aggregates, or firms that control access to goods like broadband over large areas... This is a soft power of coercion (access control) that a large firms can and do often have now. Such firms get power by the market consolidating money in the hands of those who are successful and shining out competitors when there are access controls in place (EG, a company owns an IP on a necessary invention or has exclusive extraction rights on a natural resource). They need a lot of money to own the IP or the infrastructure required, which makes wealth concentrate more. A person can't just start a new competitor company; "Yes, gas is too expensive, I'll start my own oil rig!".

It's extremely likely that there would be companies with such power without enforceable regulatory principles; there are already regulations in place and companies skirt them as much as possible.

First - and I do not offer this as a rebuttal, but merely as a principle to bear in mind - we must never fall into the trap of thinking that 'States', 'firms', 'corporations' or 'markets' subsist. These are aggregations of individual persons, and it is only these persons who are the real actors, the conscious agents. Neither States nor firms have their own inherent agency. — Virgo Avalytikh

This is extremely strange, as corporations and states have their own independent agency. A politician can sign a treaty for a country which effects all citizens, a state can limit the workday hours for all workers. Picking up the thread of markets being social forms that emerge from aggregates of people; more generally, aggregates of economic agents have both emergent effects and create institutions which act on the aggregate level; legal systems, healthcare rights, tax breaks, citizenship rights, immigration controls...

The individual agents that make up institutions can exercise the powers those institutions are endowed with. Like, say, the global tobacco lobby, establishing the UK foreign territories as a global tax haven, starting wars, doing... everything people do together. Social institutions play a vital role in the analysis of anything economic; markets are social institutions, aggregates of people make institutions like lobbying groups and firms, which can have powers (and interests!) different from the interests of those in the social institutions!

Firms exist (in whatever sense they may be said to exist) on the same continuum of peaceful voluntarism as other behaviours which people ought to have the right to engage in. — Virgo Avalytikh

This is just wrong; real companies can and do have institutional powers not reducible to the individual powers of their agents (only an aggregate can have laws). Real companies have both a legal existence separate from their individuals (see that giant building in the Cayman Islands which is the site of >90 international companies' home bases), resource access that empowers them beyond the level of their individuals, and vectors of power that allow them to leverage the resources they have to their ends (lobbying, bribery, trade deals, ownership rights on IP etc).

Also in the real world, people must work otherwise we don't eat. In general, this involves selling one's labour to a company in exchange for a wage. Obeying the dictates of the company becomes a necessity for getting food in your mouth and a roof over your head. Anyone who's ever had a performance review has felt the sheer power that firms have over their lives; they are not innocent, and cannot be understood as just a group of individuals; the manager who has to enforce an enforced redundancy decision is also just doing their job. The upper management are just doing their thing to increase the profits of the company and keep it going. Companies have a real existence and interests separate from their workers, separate from their shareholders and especially different from their stakeholders and staff (global oil, petrochemical and industrial agriculture vs climate change anyone? Tobacco companies vs the terrible impacts of smoking on health?)

So, there is some truth in the above statement, in that those who are in a position to benefit from illicit government privileges have every reason to do so. But I cannot see how firms in general are at war with me. I benefit from the goods and services which they sell me, and they benefit from my patronage. Unless I believe that the goods and services which I purchase are such that I should be furnished with them unconditionally - and I see no reason why that should be the case - there is no war to speak of, here. — Virgo Avalytikh

You might think differently if you were on another end of the supply chain; maybe if your workplace had installed suicide nets and window bars to make sure that anyone thinking of throwing themselves out of the window to escape the terror of their day to day factory experience you would see that malevolence towards your staff is fully consistent with the bottom line of your target demographic. The government interferes and demands the company installs the nets, truly a humanitarian intervention.

Gonna leave this here.

Edit: lots of the meat is in part 2.

@Virgo Avalytikh

General question: what kind of markets do you think can exist without governments, and why?

Quite simply, it is in the interests of the State in toto to maintain and grow the power of the State in toto; it is plausible that the growth of the power and influence of the State involves the growth of all three branches of government. — Virgo Avalytikh

The same analysis would hold for firms. As does this apt (though repurposed) description of firms attempting to obtain and keep market control:

t will always be in the interests of the larger and more influential political party (firm) to exercise the powers granted by the constitution, and to ignore its limitations as far as is possible. Meanwhile, the weaker and less influential party (firm) will have the opposite incentives, to hold the larger party to obey its restrictions, and to resist and question every exercise of power, whether legitimate or not. The larger party will seek to ignore and flout its restrictions, and the weaker party will seek to uphold them. What will the outcome be? ‘In a contest so unequal,’ says Calhoun, ‘the result would not be doubtful.’ The larger and more powerful party (firm) will tend to be successful in enforcing its own interpretation of the limits placed upon it, and so, over time, there is an inevitable tendency towards a ‘liberalising’ (in a pejorative sense) of the constitution’s interpretation (regulatory principles), and thence to totalitarianism (removal of regulatory principles' efficacy, no democratic influence over aggregate corporate behaviour). — Virgo Avalytikh

And the latter description of the state also applies to a firm which already has disproportionate influence:

A private firm must continually satisfy its consumers in order to survive; the profit-and-loss system encourages the firm to be hyper-sensitive to the degree to which it effectively satisfies consumer preferences. If a large firm has a commercially poor week or month, it must ask itself what it must do immediately so as to reclaim its customers, who are at liberty to shop elsewhere upon the turn of a dime. The State (approaching monopoly firm), on the other hand, hardly faces such constraints. — Virgo Avalytikh

The war you so aptly characterise between the people and the state is actually fought between the people and state + firms. Money and power go hand in hand; money can transform into political influence, having a very successful firm incentivises exercising what influence you have to get more money; and thereby more power. In that regard, regulatory capture is a shadowy compromise firms make with (market) states through collective action (lobbying, bribery, propaganda, owning school curricula, etc). That is, they do this so that they do not suffer the effects of regulations, and make political action that puts more regulations in place, or allows the regulations which are in place to be more readily enforced, less likely. The ideal situation for the megacorp's profits is no regulation at all. Unfortunately, the regulations are there to protect people (albeit minimally) from firms' behaviour; if your bottom line is profit as a firm, your bottom line isn't the prosperity of those who work for you or buy your products - at least, you can't go from one to another logically without an explanatory circumstance.

I think a lot of the things you've written are insightful, but going for a misconceived target. You wanna criticise undemocratic centralisation of influence, power and wealth? You also have to take your aim at the market and the self interested behaviour of firms.

A heuristic I'd follow is about domain expertise. If someone establishes that they are to be trusted about some topic, that need not be transferred to some other topic or about the relationship of the other topic to the original topic. If someone says absolute howlers about some topic, says they are entailed by their trusted knowledge of some other topic, certainly don't transfer trust.

An unfortunate thing there is that unless you know some amount about a domain, it is difficult to verify whether someone is competent in that domain. With "real life" experts you can rely somewhat on verifying credentials, on the internet you mostly just have their word to go on.

Specifically with math and science on here, if someone says (item in math or science topic X) entails (item in philosophy topic Y), and the explanation/support of the entailment consists of natural language with vague statements regarding every day objects, pre-theoretical intuitions, and things which look incredibly difficult to formalise, I just assume that the person doesn't know what they're talking about in at least one of the topics. I'll double down on this intuition if the person ends up explaining in a loop or going off topic when pressed on the connection.

Some examples:

Popular forum one: (measurement problem in quantum mechanics) entails (subjective idealism) because "observer" dependence.

Another enduring forum one: (special relativity "paradoxes" of intuition) entails (physics is wrong).

Final (somewhat less) popular forum one: (Popper's falsification criterion) entails (anthropology and linguistics are not sciences).

Popular academic one:

(game theory model of rational agents) entails (real markets are a perfect solution to good distribution) - the social scientists/anthropologists/historians and economists with an empirical focus have been protesting for years, the theory keeps on going.

In this scenario, when someone who is good in the first domain, the one which is fed into the entailment first, they will distort the second domain in accordance with their perspective of the first. If someone is a domain expert/domain competent they should generally be able to throw some literature your way devoted the entailment (the domain connection) if it is indeed as obvious as it is portrayed.

It is possible to be knowledgeable about both domains and mostly conjectural about the domain connection between them. In my view, posts in this situation can make for interesting reads, especially when they can provide you with references, and acknowledge the speculative nature of the relationship gracefully. I learned a lot from @apokrisis by chewing on their leg in this manner.

Better now?

The first step is to introduce the relevant symbols for ZFC. It inherits the language and inference rules for first order logic, but it needs to be augmented with a relation symbol $\in$, which denotes a set being a member of another set. EG

$1 \in \{1,2\}$

says "1 is a member of the set containing 1 and 2". The bracket notation means "the set consisting of the elements inside the brackets { }"

It also needs a symbol for the empty set, the set containing no elements. This is $\emptyset$. With the previous membership relation, the emptyset can be characterised as:

$\emptyset = \forall x \{x \notin \emptyset \}$

Which says the empty set is the name for the set with no elements - for all sets x, x is not in the empty set. $\notin$ is the negation of $\in$. EG $3 \notin \{1,2\}$ since 3 is not an element of the set {1,2}.

This makes the signature of ZFC $\{X, \in, \emptyset \}$. The existence of the empty set can be entailed by other axioms, so it doesn't really need to be thrown into the signature as a constant, but I'll do it anyway. We could also include a symbol for equality of sets $=$, but since I've left that out of the previous discussions I'll leave it out here too.* Furthermore, we're going to postpone discussion of precisely what "X" is, but suffice now to say that it's a collection of (names of) all the sets.



The first rule we'll need to talk about sets is a criterion for when they're equal - how can we tell whether two sets are actually the same set? This principle is encoded in the axiom of extensionality, which states "two sets are equal when and only when they share all and only the same elements", eg {1,2} = {1,2}, or {2-1,2}={1,2}, since they share all and only the same elements. {1,2} isn't equal to {1,2,3} even though all the elements of {1,2} are in {1,2,3} because {1,2,3} has the additional element 3 (which is not in {1,2}). Prosaically, a set is the same as another if the other contains no more, no less, and no different elements from the first.

Formally, the axiom can be written as:

$(A = B) \leftrightarrow (\forall x (x \in A \leftrightarrow x \in B))$

"For two given sets A and B, and for all sets x, a set A is equal to a set B when (if an x is in A when and only when it is also B)". "All and only the same elements" is what is formalised here.
The first bit says $A = B$ is logically equivalent to the rest... the $\forall x$ formalises the "All sets", the $(x \in A \leftrightarrow x \in B)$ formalises A having x as a member if B has it and vice versa. This posits what it means for two sets to be equal.

This also reminds me of Kripkean relative modality, where something can be be necessary inasmuch as it is true in all worlds accessible from a reference world, even if it's not true in absolutely every world. — Pfhorrest

I think that's the general picture involved with it, yeah. When you fix a starting point (of assumptions), you fix what is necessary for it (what can't fail to be true given the assumptions), what's consistent/possible with it (what can be true at the same time as the assumptions) and what's necessarily not for it (what can't be true at the same time as the assumptions).

Anyway, onto ZFC.

What's the purpose of ZFC? Well, historically, it arises at the time a foundation for mathematics was a popular research program. What it does is attempt to provide an axiomatic system in which all the usual theorems of mathematics are provable. How it does this is by showing that all these usual mathematical statements are secretly statements about sets; or rather, we can construct sets (in accordance with the axioms of ZFC) which interpret the theory of other structures (like continuous functions, arithmetic, fractions, etc).

How does ZFC achieve this? It forms an axiomatisation of sensible rules for combining, comparing and transforming collections of objects. One important property of all the rules is a notion of closure. Closure is a general mathematical property that says that "every way we can act on something in ways described by our stipulated rules produces something which obeys those rules". In the abstract, this maybe doesn't make much sense, but here are some examples:



When we add two numbers in {0,1,2,3,...}, we're guaranteed to get another number. This says that {0,1,2,3,...} is closed under addition.

When we multiply two numbers in {0,1,2,3,...}, we're guaranteed to get another number. This says {0,1,2,3,...} is closed under multiplication.

But when we divide a number by another in {0,1,2,3,...}, we might get a fraction, like 0.5, which is not a number in {0,1,2,3,...}, and so {0,1,2,3,...} is not closed under division.

The axioms of ZFC give us various things we can do to sets to produce other sets. That is to say, if we follow the axioms of ZFC, we will stay within the structure; we'll still be talking about sets. Axiomatising something generally requires that the structure is closed under its stipulated rules and if the structure is not closed, that's seen as a defect/opportunity to introduce further axioms and/or objects.

ZFC stipulates rules that we can use to make and transform sets and get other sets out in a way that is sufficiently flexible to interpret usual mathematical objects as objects of ZFC - as sets.

And I am going to maintain that if one is certain that one can flip an omelet, then one believes one can flip an omelet; and this despite one possibly never vocalising that belief. And I will maintain this because it is a performative contradiction to be certain of one's capacity and yet not believe. — Banno

This speaks about being certain of that which can be stated, not which can be done. I agree entirely here, but still think it is appropriate to associate certainty with know how in general, not just declarative knowledge.

Trivially, yes: "I flip the omelette". — Banno

This is a statement that you flip the omelette, not a description of how you flipped the omelette.

I suppose you want more detail. — Banno

A description, maybe. But the description is never the event it describes (it merely counts as it for some purpose).

But then the question becomes: how much detail will suffice?

It's pretty clear that the content of a description of how something is done must under-determine how it is done; for any given description of how something is done, one must know how to do each subtask entailed in the description that the description is split into. Precisely this inability to go on forever or with completely exhaustive detail is what ensures the description underdetermines the competence. This is the distinction between a description of how to tie a tie, a video of tying a tie, and the knowledge of how to tie a tie.

As an exercise, in trying to describe how to tie a tie, you have to split it up into subtasks and then associate each subtask with a description. The splitting occurs partly because the description is attempted, but it requires that there are subtask components of tying a tie to describe accurately in the first place. The words stop at some point, but do not terminate in the acquisition of the competence.

What is to count as sufficient? And the answer is: enough to be satisfied; if you are never satisfied, then that's not my problem.

Count as sufficient for what purposes? For teaching someone how to tie a tie? Words alone won't do. You're imagining a competence from the perspective of already having it, like "I flip the omelette", rather than learning how to use those words; how to make "I can flip an omelette" true - learning how to flip an omelette.

Is it appropriate to formalise an adjective in that way? As separate from the proposition it applies to? If G is "you are gentle" and M is "you murder", the conjunction "M & G" is "you are gentle and you murder" vs "you murder gently". Analogous to "X is a red apple" being independent (without additional assumptions) from "X is red" and "X is an apple" in propositional logic.

Does it change much if you formalise it as "ought( murder => murder gently)" as two separate propositions without introducing "gently" through a conjunction? Say M and MG, in that form "ought (M => MG)" so that ought M implies ought MG and then (not ought MG => not ought M) through transposition.

(A) If someone's a given sex when and only when they have most of the sexual characteristics associated with that sex, then we can't change sexes through surgery and medicine at the minute.

(B) If someone's a given sex when and only when they have exterior sex characteristics associated with that sex, then we can change sexes through surgery and medicine at the minute.

These are practically constrained by the powers of medicine. The "can't" and "can" in the above take their meaning from the powers/possibilities/capabilities of modern medicine.

If we take

If that's true, then it seems quite obvious that sex can be changed. For no physical object seems to have any of its features - apart from mere extension - invariably, and thus any physical object's properties can be changed. That which is square can be made spherical; that which is red can be made blue; that which is small can be made bigger, and that which is male can be made female. So, if sex is physically determined, that doesn't imply it can't be changed. Indeed, quite the opposite: if sex is physical 'of course' it can be changed (though we might differ on just what needs to be changed). — Bartricks

The argument in the OP reads like:
(1) All sexual characteristics are held contingently by bodies.
(2) That which is contingently held by a body may change.
(3) All sexual characteristics of bodies can change.
(4) Sex is defined by the presence of sexual characteristics.
(5) Since sexual characteristics are contingently held by bodies, they can be changed.
(6) Sex can be changed.

The modality of the "can" phrase is different in this argument; it refers not to practical possibility given current medicine, it instead refers to physical possibility. If it's physically possible that all sexual characteristics of a body may be changed, then sex may be changed. I think this argument turns on whether a body with a given natal sex could be as if it had the other natal sex through some physical/biochemical process in a manner consistent with how a body works (an analogue of "physically possible"'s usual meaning of being consistent with how nature works).

What would be practically required to change all sexual characteristics of a fully developed body? At least; genetic therapy changing chromosomes, hormone therapy changing all relevant body chemistry, surgery supplanting (the relevant) sexual organs with analogues. Rather a lot of the body's biochemistry has to be changed, including both cellular properties like chromosomes and macro properties like sexual organs and secondary sex characteristics. I think it's implausible that sex (in sense (A)) can (practically) be changed at the minute. unless we identified sex with sense (B). In which case, it obviously can be changed, as the procedures exist to change the relevant sex characteristics in an appropriate way (sex organ transformations, presence of facial hair etc etc).

No social system has fixed that problem so far. There is no substitute for finding the ladder and getting your ass up onto it. — frank

It's a general trend that income inequality and social immobility are linearly related.



The only substitute for finding the ladder is building public access stairs.

You claimed that some statements don't need justification.
Several posts down the road you presented a flawed definition of a theory of justification which is established in philosophy.
The next post you provided a personal definition of coherentism... that

So as long as a person's actions don't contradict their beliefs, their beliefs may be said to be epistemically coherent — Pantagruel

defines your view as someone is justified in believing something so long as believing it doesn't make them a hypocrite. While being a terrible portrayal of coherentism, it is good moral advice, and scarcely relevant to the claim that "there was a creator".

Coherence relations are justificatory relations between beliefs. They consist of (something close to) logical consistency (a logical property that two things can be true at the same time) + explanatory consistency (one claim supports or does not refute another). This is exactly the standard I've been using to argue that beliefs in a creator are unjustified; they entail contradictions and do not fit in with what we know, or are so vague and unspecified that they don't relate to anything at all!

So you are also an expert on epistemic coherentism now? — Pantagruel

No, not an expert. I don't need to be an expert to point out an obvious misconstrual of that type of position. If you would provide me with references that give a coherentist account of justification that make coherence with one's own beliefs to be sufficient for justification, I'd be grateful.

Epistemic coherentism — Pantagruel

Has lots of flavours. None I'm aware of which substitute in:

Beliefs are justified if they cohere with other beliefs a person holds — Pantagruel

persons for systems of belief which are held, negotiated and challenged socially. If you relativise it to persons in that way, justification of a claim is entailed just by a person having a system of beliefs which coheres with it in some sense. This makes justification a personal matter, rather than a social one.

It becomes justified to believe that one is Frodo Baggins if one believes that one's father is Bilbo Baggins; rather than listen to the rest of our socially distributed knowledge systems refuting it ("He's not Frodo, he's just high.").

By definition, belief is not knowledge. You are treating belief as if it were knowledge. — Pantagruel

No, a reasonably held belief has a justification for it. Arbitrary beliefs do not. A justification is not required for a belief to be a belief, but it is required for a belief to be reasonably held. X knows that P surely looks something like X reasonably believes that P!

historicity — Pantagruel

tradition — Pantagruel

intuition — Pantagruel

History, culture and intuition in general serve as belief promoters but not belief justifiers. They may cause us to have beliefs, but do not thereby justify holding those beliefs.

Who said it has to be justified? — Pantagruel

For claims like "there was a creator of the universe", which already play part in conceptual arguments and constrain empirical matters, the ability to justify them is presumed. If someone wants to behave as if they know there was a creator in such contexts, it's a performative contradiction (treating the claim cognitively until their ability to justify the claim ceases) and a conceptual error (knowledge claims need justifications) to suspend the need for justification.

If a statement need not be justified in principle (in any context), it is not known.

A belief is essentially a hypothesis. — Pantagruel

Hypotheses are implausible (and sometimes demonstrably false/wrong) when they contradict what we know, entail contradictions and require conceptual confusion and equivocation to articulate. I hypothesise that 1+1=3, but wait that's implausible. I hypothesise that the Earth is flat, or is that a matter of metaphysics? I believe that the universe is an egg and was hatched by the Great Chicken, it's fine to believe because justification is not required.

Non-cognitive motivations make far more sense in most cases for belief in a creator or finding it plausible (well, more strongly, "seeing" the attraction). Questioning the claim's plausibility is felt to come along with questioning necessary human emotions, like hope and love and wonder.

Many people (myself included) have an inkling, an expectation, a hope, that there is more to life than meets the eye. — Pantagruel

Like this. As if wonder goes away with questions and explanations rather than promoting them in the first place.

Wow. You have a real issue with this, don't you? — Pantagruel

No, not at all.

Many people (myself included) have an inkling, an expectation, a hope, that there is more to life than meets the eye. The things that happen to people qua people don't resolve into scientific terms. Life is complex and multi-dimensional.

A non-cognitive explanation for holding a belief describes a cause for it but is not a justification.

Do you really think that what we know exceeds what we don't know?

No. What we know however limits what we can reasonably believe.

In the sense that it is a metaphysical claim, it doesn't. This is an idea whose origins predate science certainly, probably recorded history. It is an idea that has "historical content" (forgive me, I'm just finishing off R.G. Collingwood's "Philosophy of History" which talks a lot about the self-creation of the mind as historical knowledge). As such, I don't think, prima facie, it requires any more justification than that. As I said, I'm not really into doing a "deep-dive" at this time. — Pantagruel

Because something has been believed historically and had social institutions devoted to that belief does not entail it is well justified given what we know (even as part of a metaphysics). This is just as true for phlogiston, the theory of humours and homeopathy as it is for creator hypotheses and their associated worldviews.

Your claim to falsify "The universe was created" by appeal to the total body of knowledge is weak because it isn't possible to ascertain the total body of knowledge. — Pantagruel

"The universe was created" is either vague and unsupported or entails things which are implausible given what we know. Was it an agent? Before the advent of stable systems capable of supporting agency? No, "like that but not".

You're treating the claim "the universe was created" like it doesn't require any further explication - a description of how. Like a description of how is too much to ask. The reasons I don't believe it was created are because descriptions of how are implausible given what we know (for previously stated reasons; logically contradictory, equivocating, unsubstantiated, conceptually confused, inconsistent with little we do know about how the universe works), and if someone doesn't feel the need to say how, I have absolutely no reason to believe them.

The issue is usually approached like the legitimacy of a creator comes from a hole in knowledge (dark matter, how far our universe description goes back does not include "the first instants") OR conceptual confusion (alleged regresses, prime movers not needing their own causal explanation, necessary to exist because a stated conceptual problem is allegedly impossible to solve without them, bad interpretations of science or pseudoscience (woo lives here) ). Then "a creator exists' is stipulated to be the end of the matter; as if no more questions need to be asked; as if how they did it need not be stipulated along with that they did it for the account to make sense.

So again, if I say that I believe the universe was created (I don't make that claim) then my belief is reasonable. Unless I exhibit a whole lot of other beliefs that appear to be unreasonable, in which case it might be legitimate to question the reasonableness of my beliefs in general. — Pantagruel

This treats a person being reasonable as the same as a statement being reasonable. A reasonable person can have unreasoned or unreasonable beliefs; a person knowing how to reason in general does not entail that that person applies the competence in forming/supporting every belief they have. A better account stratifies the competences into domains, people know how to reason about some things but not others.

When it comes to creator hypotheses, people often short circuit; they stop asking questions about how because apparently they have established that, and apparently that's that. When you start asking how questions, the claims are shown to be the confused and unsubstantiated drivel that they are.

Anyway let's drop as it has become a question of the legitimacy of metaphysical claims in general which I'm not prepared to argue at this time. :) — Pantagruel

It's not about that at all, to me. Metaphysics in general is fine. It's simply because creator hypotheses are unsubstantiated on all of the details (and thus there's no reason to believe them), conceptually confused, entail logical inconsistencies or are implausible given what we know.

People who believe they have demonstrated the existence of a creator would sooner believe their conclusion than examine the conceptual content of their own writing (assumptions, inferences, interpretations); questions cease. Why not pursue the next one instead?

Do you mean with what you know? Or with what someone else told you that they know? If you think it possible to precisely and exhaustively describe the scope of human knowledge I'd say that's the most implausible thing I've heard yet. I know that claim is weak. The claim that the universe was created? I know neither the strength nor weakness of that claim can be established. It's a metaphysical claim. Are you saying that all metaphysical claims are unreasonable? Do Forms exist? Who knows? They are widely debated though. They're hypotheses. — Pantagruel

The fallibility, incompleteness and contingency of knowledge entails absolutely nothing about whether the universe was created by an agent or not. An attitude of epistemic humility is consistent with conservative speculation, accounts requiring an agent before the beginning of the universe are anything but. They are riddled with:

(1) Logical contradictions (x exists outside of existence)

(2) conceptual error ("before" time, causally precedent events are required for all events except the origin of causation, conceived as an event within the series it generates)

(3) Obfuscations (equivocating between what is well justified to believe and what is believed),

(4) Invalid arguments: fallibility of knowledge => reason for belief in any creator.

(5) outlandish generalisations (deriving simultaneously vague and unsubstantiated guesses about the origins of the universe from unknowns or the fallibility/contingency of knowledge or mystical experience)

(6) falsehoods combined with all of the above (eg what we know about the biological systems required for agency do not exist before the origin of atoms, causation as a linear series moving forward in a universal time being an approximation that only works for sufficiently large, slow and light objects).

Creator hypotheses tend to evaporate into the hot air they are when stated and analysed.