Ramifications I

[I am getting close to the end of my pieces of writing that I consider worth posting. A lot more stuff just lives in my head, popping up at odd moments, turned this way and that over and over. I do this in part because it’s fun and in part because I can’t help it. –ed]

I was driving through an affluent-looking neighborhood recently letting a train of thought wind through my head. It was one that comes to me now and then. But this time it was unusually forceful, and stubbornly muscled its way into the foreground.

This thought is about ownership. The ability to conceive of and understand ownership is certainly hard-wired into our brains on a deep and instinctive level. It is crucial to our ability to form cooperative groups and, ultimately, societies. The reasons are obvious: having rules about property rights ensures that a person can work hard on making and improving a thing (a weapon, a tool, a dwelling, a tract of land) with the confidence that they will reap most of the benefits.

Still, for the pure materialist, “ownership” does not exist outside of human brains. As I drive past a series of large, well-kept houses I recognize that the people inside believe that it is right, natural, and proper for them to be there. They either “own” the home or have been invited in by someone who does. Physically, this is signified by some squiggles on some pieces of paper and the patterns in certain electronic storage media. It’s not much evidence and is meaningless without a human brain to interpret and embody it.

I could stop my car, walk up to a house, break in, and take whatever I wanted. Nothing is happening beyond the repositioning of items in space. The physical relationship of the “owner” to their “property” is no different than mine. Any state or status of, say, a little sculpture on the coffee table beyond position, form, composition, etc. exists solely in our minds. Possession of the house itself and the “rights” so signified are just ideas we all share without questioning them.

Our world is so very, very different from the way we see and understand it. I see a street full of nice houses, and envision “owners” inside of them, enjoying their dwellings. Outside of my head there is no material difference between their relationship to the houses and my own. I can enter them just as they do. They have doors which facilitate entry, and keys needed to use those doors, but the location of the keys has no material significance beyond making entry easier for whoever can access them.

We are like dogs inside an invisible fence. Move too far in any direction and we get a shock from our collars. We have been taught where the fence is. We know the boundaries. We can predict the consequences of crossing those boundaries, of disobeying the elaborate set of rules that nature and nurture have carved into our brains. The fence seems very real to us. In large part this is because it seems very real to everyone around us as well. And we are aware that some individuals have been trained to use physical force and imprisonment to enforce the rules.

Everything I see is filigreed with meaning and significance. I could not function without constantly interpreting the world. But this significance is imaginary. It has no physical existence and cannot be measured. It only exists inside my head.