Power

What Maw said.

Ownership is what you are prepared to fight for; whether physically, verbally or through the legal system.

Ownership is perceiving an object or event as a conceptual extension of the ‘self’.

Many animals have developed a capacity to be aware of, connect and collaborate with other four-dimensional ‘beings’ or events in the environment, and become as familiar with them as with their own bodies. They learn to reflexively associate certain change patterns in these others with a necessary threat-related response in themselves. Those familiar events include their home, their territory, food/water sources or members of their social group.

Some animals extend the association still further by marking their territory, chemically signifying this subjective familiarity in a more ‘objective’ way. Like humans offering sacrifices to the gods, they only know how they’d respond to the warning, and actually have no information about the threat they’re trying to deter.

Humans have developed a variety of ways to signify and objectify this same familiarity (and associated fear of loss) as a deterrent to others - from a line drawn in the sand to branding, symbols, colour codes, jewellery, walls, name plates, etc.

As humans, we have convinced ourselves that we can hypothetically avoid all experiences of loss in this way, and therefore reduce suffering. We own a dog to protect our property to protect our home to protect our family to protect our genes...

What we fail to recognise, however, is that loss and lack are necessary experiences of life: even if I own everything, I will still experience lack because I am not what I own, and I will not avoid loss because everything is a finite event, including me. I am a dissipative structure in a state of inequilibrium, continually absorbing and discarding parts of myself - it is the only way I am still alive. I am necessarily less than the universe.

The state.

In my world, which is quite small I must confess, the following laws hold true:

1. Owners have boners
2. The owned are things that can be boned

I think the whole concept of ownership can be reduced to these two basic laws.

Willingness to take whatever by murder or die trying to keep it from being taken away has always, in the last analysis, made some thing mine.

"Ownership" (i.e. title, deed, contract) is just a contrivance of legal convention enforced by the threat of State sanction or violence purportedly in order to minimize the usual murdering & dying otherwise needed to establish claims. That's the Hobbesian meta "homō hominī lupus", ain't it? From piracy to property simply by fiat of a (bribed) Caesar's Legions ... Pax legem talionis. (calling @Ciceronianus the White :fire: )

Willingness to take whatever by murder or die trying to keep it from being taken away has always, in the last analysis, made some thing mine. — 180 Proof

I think I might've mistaken one meaning of "possess" for another here. Does the following not make sense:

1. Owners have boners
2. The owned are things that can be boned — TheMadFool

I'd like your comment. Thanks

To own something just is to have rights over it.

What qualifies you for rights to something is your undisputed habitual use and possession of it.

Power — Maw

Agreed.

Property rights only exist when the powers-that-be recognize them. If they refuse to enforce such property rights, then you do not have them.

There is currently only one exception: you own cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin because you know their secret, regardless of what the powers-that-be believe or enforce.

Since it is not possible to prove that someone knows a secret -- he can trivially deny that -- cryptocurrencies fall outside the range of political enforcement.

Power — Maw

Power to defend what you've acquired. A limited government is necessary to ensure that you acquired it legally - meaning: without infringing on the rights of others.

If those others could not defend their rights to the property in question, then how is it that they had any such rights to begin with, on this account of power = ownership?

"Possession is nine tenths of the law".

If those others could not defend their rights to the property in question, then how is it that they had any such rights to begin with, on this account of power = ownership? — Pfhorrest

Did you read the rest of my post? They defend their property by being part of a society with a limited govt that defends those rights.

I read it yeah. It sounded like you were saying that defending your acquisitions is what makes them yours, and that a state is needed to make sure you don’t acquire things from other people that you have no right to — but that raises the question of why those others have a right to them instead of you (that a state is needed to defend), if they’re not able to defend them themselves, that being the criterion given for what makes something yours.

If you’re saying instead that whatever the state will defend for you is what is yours, that’s very different from the original criterion. It’s still might makes right, sure, but it acknowledges that where a state exists it has all the might, and so all the rights (on such an account), and whoever it decides owns something thus becomes the fact of ownership, a far cry from the “defend it yourself” criterion implied originally.

Noah Harrari (book: "Sapiens") would probably say that ownership is a concept developed by animals (as opposed to plants) that helped early animals try to more likely get the chance to mate. Noah Harrari believes that humans thrive over other animals because we develop fictions that enable millions of us to work together to overcome our environment.

Considering my philosophy is combined with religion, i believe his view points are very interesting but based on calculated risk, i reject many of his beliefs because i don't think they are expedient in helping me avoid the worse case scenario.

Ownership is what you are prepared to fight for; whether physically, verbally or through the legal system. — A Seagull

I personally believe it's all together, if you're only willing to fight for something verbally and not physically, then you're not worthy of your opinion nor possession.

and I am part of the state. I then defend my stuff by participating in a limited state. The state doesn't own anything except the power to defend what others own.

Yes, but only up to a point. Sometimes discretion is the better part of valour.

If I am eating a banana in the jungle and a wild elephant intimates that he wants the banana, I might yell at him to back off but if he persists I would let him have the banana, it would not be worth getting physical with an elephant over a banana.

Can't argue that. My point is if there is something you truly want to own, specifically your freedom, then the person who can defend / attack the best ends up getting what they want.

Just because ownership can change doesn't mean that you never owned it.

Ownership also depends on the agreement of others.

But what determines what others own, if “ability to defend it” determines ownership and all defense is done collectively through the state? If the state (with your input, but not your exclusive input) decides not to defend your ownership of something and instead to defend someone else’s ownership of it, doesn’t that make it then rightfully theirs on this account of might makes right?

What does ‘power’ mean then?

This is an idea cut from another - not sure who said it exactly but the principle is simple enough. What we have the most control over we are in possession of. In this case we have a large degree of ‘ownership’ over our bodies but in reality we’ll grow old, become ill and die. In this sense all ‘ownership’ is necessarily limited.

My thoughts and actions are the primary source of my sense of ‘complete ownership’ - these are of course embodied so my body is entwined with the limits of my actions, and as a consequence also my thoughts.

Others senses of ‘ownership’ are based on social interactions and what is and isn’t mutually beneficial. I’m not sure what the two first replies of ‘power’ mean exactly but I guess to me ‘power’ in this framework means ‘efficiency of control’. I say this because someone with more limited control is not necessarily less ‘powerful’. In the sense of it’s not about what you’ve got it’s about what you do with it.

I’m just hoping their view of ‘power’ has more depth then a reduction to merely meaning ‘oppressive force’ - if ‘power’ meant that then we’d just call it ‘oppression’ not ‘power’. I hope their thoughts were more in line with mine?

Ownership can unambiguously exist only when it is defined and protected by the state through its laws. But let’s say the state dissolved itself or abolished all property laws by the stroke of a pen, would ownership then cease to exist? If so, then ownership is as artificial as the state and it’s meaningless to say (as Locke does) that the state was established to protect property since property didn’t exist before the state.

Outside of the state ownership only signifies a varying degree of association with a person, and the possessive pronoun is used to indicate such associations. My hand, my clothes, my car, my child, my wife, my country. If we disregard state laws and any preconceived ethics, there is no reason to assign ownership only to some of those items and not to all or none.

Your body parts are closer to you and therefore more yours than anything else. The clothes you are wearing are more yours than the ones in your closet. The house you are living in more than the one you are renting out.

Your wife may be closer to you than your car and therefore more yours. Does that mean that you own your wife? You may answer that you don’t have the right to control your wife, but aside from law and ethics there are no rights, so ownership can’t be evaluated in those terms.

It could perhaps be assessed according to degree of attachment you feel to an object. What would hurt you more, the loss of your car or your wife? The answer would be what is more yours.

In any case, “ownership” is a very elusive term, and outside of the state it’s not possible to define it. That means it doesn’t really exist, right?

There are many words that defy a clear definition, eg species, yet this does not mean that they are not useful terms.

It could perhaps be assessed according to degree of attachment you feel to an object. What would hurt you more, the loss of your car or your wife? The answer would be what is more yours. — Congau

An obvious yet an important point. The emotional weight attached to items (due to love, hate and/or habituation) plays strongly into our sense of ‘ownership’. This would still tie into my broad view as being ‘thought’, which then shows us the use of clarity of thought when understanding how far our reach extends in terms of ‘control’.

I think it is fair to say the more negative perception of ‘power’ extends from a need to feel like we have control. Attaching a sense of greater control to situations where we have little to no control will inevitably create distress - possibly culminating in delusion, aggression and hatred.

Interesting that you mention freedom. I have this theory that the more freedom you give away to others the more you get to keep for yourself.

In a sense it's about degrees of freedom, freedom in the broadest sense of the word.

An object once possessed gets locked to the possessor and loses its freedom. After all if it were public property it would have greater freedom by which I mean more possibilities.

An object's best economic state would be one with maximum freedom or possibilites. Thus we have thieves who take what is NOT theirs.

This forces the state to intervene and create an artificial structure of rules and regulations that prevents thieves and protects ownership.

Why is ownership more important than maximizing utility of objects?

It seems that we've made a choice between the options of maximum utility of an object where it is not owned by anyone and protection of ownership. There must be a good reason for this. I think it was Banno who started a thread on the tragedy of the commons. The group works best when they compete with each other and ownership is a part of the competitive landscape. I think it's the most important element of competition and thus of the health of an economy.