Ownership needs to be unpacked to get to a sufficient understanding of it.
It's being too easily conflated with associated physiological reactions that feel like familiarity, attachment, security, reliance, desire (as has been mentioned), the fight/flight response, proximity etc. - and with all the very real and immediate, human feelings, instincts, emotions and reflexes that accompany what's really going on - even beyond just humans in fact, to animals and beyond even that.
The problem is that all the absolutely valid ingredients that you can think of to cook up ownership can be completely present, even all in combination with one another, toward something
you do not own.
One might be sufficient to the other, but not
necessary.
It's only half the intellectual job to think up all these different scenarios that feel like ownership throughout various kinds of lifeforms and what their natures might be.
You have to actively try and intellectually challenge what you think seems to hold true about the world, otherwise you're just feeding your own intuitions and wishful thinking (which is known as "Confirmation Bias").
How can anyone fail to understand the difference between having and owning? This is the very core of e.g. sharing: give something you "own" to someone for however long, and they "have" it. Do they ever own it? Yes/no? It's
not that simple.
And this is the whole point: how you can have all your computer equipment at work, tools, desk, office etc. - all
your stuff
you need to do
your job. As an employee,
you don't own any of that. You can "take ownership" of your "role" in the sense that you "act like" it was all actually yours and all a product of your own authentic decisions independent of anybody else and all that bad faith mentality that you're encouraged to role-play and pretend to the extent that the vast majority seem to genuinely internalise for the benefit of whoever bought your time, skills and effort.
By the same token, you can want a mate that you don't have, you can have a mate that you don't own, you could even own a mate that you don't want - none of this matches up, but you need to put in this intellectual work to unravel the ideology or you're forever taking it for granted, keeping it alive, and adopting the tribal narrative of others instead of thinking for "your"self.
And I say "your"self, when not only could "having"/"wanting"/"owning" etc. not apply to the body/mind/spirit/whatever satisfies "habeas corpus" (as it historically didn't for slaves and whatnot), it's not even clear what the notion of "you" as a self means in the first place!
Preference either way could even be the
universal consensus, but to act like ownership is some kind of "clearcut physiological given" is complete philosophical ignorance. The matter is based on a question of "what is" objectively, not "what we might prefer" subjectively.
Sub specie aeternitatis ownership means nothing, and even if we all would prefer it to mean something to us, we have to construct it out of what actually "is" us in some way or other that we would prefer at the time.
All this presumptuous sass...
Fixed Cross wrote:Felix - ill keep that in mind when I visit your house. Ill just kick you out to liberate you from your ego.
Hell, - why not give it to me now? Sign over your so called "property" to me please.
Why? Because I ask. You have no valid reason to hold on to it.
Same goes for all deniers of ownership - I request you all hand all your so called "possessions" over to me or to other people who can use it. If you refuse on grounds of wanting to keep it, you prove that property is real, at least your property is real.
...simply assumes that if others question the fundamental legitimacy of "ownership", they'll still somehow unquestioningly afford a sense of ownership specially reserved for
you after such a transaction.... just not for them.
That's a complete non-sequitur.
It doesn't mean they're not still questioning their own ownership when they consider or even follow through with the scenario, it
especially doesn't mean they're only questioning your ownership and not theirs - they question ALL ownership. Let's "hand it over to you"... -
what does that mean to a person who questions ownership? An implicit expectation of force to back up the decision? It's one social contract of potentially many. Sure, it's based on real feelings, but organised arrangements we make up based on these very real feelings are whatever we decide them to be, depending on whatever grounds we feel justify our collective reactions to our very real feelings.
Good thread - I like the reasonable questions and the way the arguments were presented without any loaded implications, inbuilt biases and clear agenda that you sometimes put into your content.