It was something that I heard mentioned at one point and it has bothered me ever since. It’s like how do we rationalize owning any part of reality? What right or claim do we really have to anything and how can we say that something is “mine”?
I think there are some schools of thought that refer to the concept of ownership as a form of self deception. I remember Buddhism saying something about it.
Thats how you stop people from taking your stuff.
Force. If I pick up someone’s property and start walking off with it, that guy can call the cops and have them point guns at me until I say “whoopsie, I forgot that society has a longstanding agreement where we’re all on the same page about acting like this thing right here is your property.” Or he can point a gun at me and shoot me for picking up his property and walking off with it, and when the cops arrive they’ll pat him on the back and say “yeah, that guy had a whoopsie, huh? There’s a deal in place, and he acted like that wasn’t your property, and you reacted appropriately.”
Lennon and McCartney
I’m glad I don’t live in your town with your police force. Cuz you cannot use deadly force to protect property in my town.
You own something because you can keep people from taking it or if they do they can be made to give it back. That’s all there is to it. Ownership is not a physical property, it’s just convention.
I guess I’m trying to get at the concept of it. Say that this is “mine” but it is based on little more than just your say so and the ability to fend off challenges to the claim. But is it something that exists only in our head and isn’t recognized objectively? I know that animals do exhibit some sense of ownership so it isn’t fiction, maybe it’s something inherent to life?
Some call it self deception but I don’t really see grounds for believing that. They say how can one own a piece of reality, but my question is how can they not? Based on your answer the “i say so and what are you going to do about it” seem to be the “how”.
I don’t hear any objections from reality about pieces of it owning other pieces of it. Granted we are part of reality, but I don’t see how that would nullify the point of owning other parts of it. Perhaps from some Buddhist perspective of “oneness” maybe, but even that is a stretch.
I’m just trying to analyze the other side so I know how to counter it. Granted we are all part of reality and “made of star stuff” according to Degrass Tyson, but from looking at nature similarity does not always mean getting along (plenty of animals of the same species fight each other). Plus the whole “we are parts of reality too” seems to water things down too much and avoids the question. It’s like saying we are all humans yet we still fight.
The desire to own may be inherent to life, but otherwise it is just an artificial construct. There is no physical test to determine if you own something. You own something if you can keep it or others believe you own it. People may delude themselves about what ownership is, but it is nothing more than what I’ve said, and certainly no deep philosophical mystery. It may be interesting to look at what people believe ownership is, but that is not the same thing as ownership itself.
The economy is dependent on property rights.
Also nobody truly owns it, but we have built a society that says so and so owns XYZ. Without that, the economy falls apart. Once so and so dies, what they own gets passed on.
Also monopolization of resources is a necessary component of mating and survival. That is why animals are territorial. Their territory is where the food is, where the mates are and where challengers are not allowed.
We’ve been territorial long before we were even close to being human. Its not going away.
Property is a societal construct. Your property rights don’t exist in your head; they exist in everybody else’s. You own something if, and only if, other people recognise that you have exclusive rights in it which they are bound to respect.
And the nature and extent of those other rights is also determined by other people, and may vary from place to place and from time to time. At one time or in one place, ownership of blackacre may include the right to use blackacre in any way you please, and to leave it in your will to anyone you place, but at another time or place your right to exploit blackacre may be severely limited by planning or land use codes, and your freedom of testamentary disposition by laws conferring inheritance rights on your spouse or children.
Not all societies have the same concept of ownership that Western society does.
But, since you (presumably) live in a Western society, you just need to accept the rules as they currently are.
Replace “own” with "has control of’, and does it make more sense? Maybe I don’t own this banana, but I can have control of it. Unless someone changes that, I will decide if it get eaten, or dropped on the ground, or turned into banana bread.
I suppose so.
I read up on Buddhism and on their perspective ownership is more of a myth than the reality. That one deludes oneself into thinking anything is theirs (or that there is a self of person owning the thing). Since their idea is no subject or no object then that “one ness” bit explains why they think so.
There’s also a bit about how can reality own itself, ie one bit of reality owning another bit but both bits are part of the whole. But something about that seems off to me, like it assumes reality is some conscious living creature
I was thinking you could buy it through a realitor.
Society, parents and the authorities (educational, political, religious, etc.) set the reality that people usually dwell in. They set rules and standards, which gives a sense of order and security. The basic goal is to gain control of and to use your own mind to design and create your own reality by, among other things, questioning authority, and be comfortable without those artificial rules and standards imposed by others and ‘surf the waves of chaos’. While this is in the person’s best interest, it is not in the best interest of the authorities and thus not encouraged, or even spoke about, nor does our language contain proper words for it making it hard to even explain or conceptualize, and that is by design of the authorities to prevent people from gaining control fo their own minds. A paraphrase from Timothy Leary.
This seems to define how to own it, design it, use your own mind, question everything you even know and be open to make changes. It will be your design out of the chaos which you will own. Timothy Leary and for that matter Buddha goes further in that reality is thus just a fabrication, a concept of the mind as reality is without order, without form, chaotic, both existing and non-exisiting.
Defining reality on a societal level is akin to a religion, akin to a way of defining God, it is a group think project in it’s current form, where elders teach children how to think, to program them to this form. Our world is coming together, unifying these many ‘religions of reality’ however different cultures still hold different views of reality, and their languages were formed to express their realities which causes confusion and misinterpretations as words that may be ‘equivalent’ from one culture to another on paper may have different aspects of meaning, reflecting the different realities the cultures have existed in.
↑ ↑ ↑ This… Get grabby and you may meet the person with a big stick. 
It starts with labor. I own my own labor, because I control it. I decide whether or not to produce anything, what I produce, how I produce it, etc. Then I trade my labor for the products of the labor of others, and thereby gain control over it, and transfer control of the products of my labor to them. Therefore I own what I own, by right of the fact that I traded for it.
Regards,
Shodan
I think you are getting a little off topic.
Personally I think Leary is a nutbar who took psychedelics far too seriously. Buddha even though I want to respect him just shows what happens when one grows up in isolation. But reality does have form, it does have order, the chaos just appears to be chaos to those who don’t know better. Also something either exists or it doesn’t it cannot be both. Plus his philosophy falls apart if reincarnation and enlightenment aren’t true, mostly reincarnation. I think that was just made up to prevent suicide, karma too.
I also tend to have many problems with the buddhist philosophy as you would have to have major cognitive dissonance to try to square compassion and love with no-self and their other concepts. But it is a religion like any other.
Also it’s sort of a good thing that you have people teaching customs and rules, we know that humans that grow up isolated from society (referring to feral children) don’t fare very well.
Well, except that depends on their being a societal concept of “ownership” which extends to the right to transfer ownership.
We can easily imagine a society which accepts that you “own” this boomerang, because you made it. Nobody else can take it and use it, except by your permission. But if you give the boomerang to someone else, he doesn’t “own” it, because he didn’t make it.
Or you can imagine variations on this. You can transfer “ownership” to someone to whom you are related, but not to someone to whom you are not. Or you can transfer “ownership” to a member of your own community, but not another community.
Ownership is a bundle of rights, but the content of the bundle is societally determined. It’s not a given that owners must include a right of free alienation; that’s a societally-determined question.
And this isn’t just an abstract philosophical point. Until quite recently, in western societies, it was common for the owner of land not to have a right o alienation. He could, for instance, transfer his own interest in the land, but he couldn’t deprive his heirs (also societally-determined) of their interest.
What is reality? 
OTOH, I know what realty is. I rationalize owning a piece of that because me and my wife and the Firebug need a place to live, and I can do a lot more to make it a pleasant place to live if random strangers don’t feel they have the right to use my bit of real estate.