RestoringGuy

There is an interval, however short, that the owner is dead and wills are yet-to-be-executed. It will take a few seconds to even know the owner has died. Unless the heir is standing there wrapping their arms around the property during the owner's last breath, this new "owner" must rely on a piece of paper. It's an artifact, a memory, or some other manufactured tool of culture. There is always some process to claim the property, that contract is now like the Bible. We are told to believe in it -- to obey it. Now I will say how this morality is faulty. I understand "the event of death shifts ownership", but only the paper might say that, the dead person does not. I think there's some agreement consciousness is needed (a rock cannot own another rock). However the dead body, having once written the will, is no longer a conscious entity -- so morally it's a rock. To use its signature as a form of ownership proof -- well how is that different that using a rock (or the Bible) as a form of proof? I guess you must sort it out only some time after death, and explain somehow why it's immoral to reject what the piece of paper says -- why people who did not sign it are somehow bound by it. Imagine the so-called "new owner" steps up two minutes (or maybe two decades) after death and says something like "I have this paper that proves the owner transfered the property!" Well I can say "no, you are trying to retroactively stake a claim -- for a brief time there was no owner, there was no property, I was here first -- what you have is paper, no better than a contrary one I just wrote up?" And this moment is where the dead must be believed to have an eternal soul -- they possess some kind of moral holding spot. Their little "will" artifact is to be accepted by faith alone.

It does not make sense to me to discuss the morality of treatment of a dead person's body, while not discussing the artificial ghost-body we give them using estates, inheritance, wills, trusts, etc. The signature (audio recording, systems of consent, or whatever you want to call it) means only that a living person agreed. What is the first-principle foundation reason to care after they're dead? Why is their stuff (the body too) not once again a state of nature? The contract too, just paper. To me it seems when a person is dead we can either treat the signature/consent as a dead artifact having no moral weight, or we can say it has moral weight and invent an origin of ongoing morality (ie. a spirit lives on through words, like the Bible). Even the words I write now probably have no worthwhile meaning to you, unless I am able to respond, explain, etc. all of the things, proving I am presently conscious and not just an ancient echo from some dead guy. I mean you are not obligated to accept something just because it's written down. I think truth has to resonate as an inescapable conclusion which a consciousness is capable of defending.

Some good observations. The scientific method, if valid before a person knows it, would seem to apply to everyone including the first person to understand it, especially if UPB is asserted. By extension, before humans evolved, the scientific method was valid but remained undiscovered. Otherwise if validity kicks in at some specific time, we are making understanding a key ingredient. In other words, if we discard the notion that understanding is a prerequisite for validity, then understanding should be unnecessary for even the first person to get the idea. The scientific method was essentially valid yet unknown even during the dinosaurs I would imagine. For animals, my thinking is this: whether or not an animal thinks or knows UPB presently is inconsequential. A man in a deep sleep may be incapable of holding UPB presently in his mind. Yet it's his future ability, the capacity to wake up and evaluate behaviors is supposedly what makes UPB relevant. One may be quick to say, "but animals cannot do this and never will". I believe that kind of thinking disregards evolution and the indeterminacy of the world. At one time human ancestors were rodents, presumably with no future ability to grasp UPB. But apparently their descendants could do so because we are here now. So everybody endorsing the idea that animals have no rights, I believe are Creationists. I say that because there is complete failure to address the transitional problem of "human UPB and animal non-UPB" . On the one hand, a system is regarded as having no potential for understanding (the mammals long ago), and another system is regarded as having potential (sleeping man), yet both arrive at the same result (awake humans, here we are), it's just over different timescales. If there is capacity for transition to take place, even over a long time scale, I think there is a good argument that animals have rights even if they somehow aren't quite as good as ours.

I'll just say pondering what is and isn't liked, and quickly connecting it to right and wrong, is also incomprehensible, an idea without backup. Everybody does it though.

I think the problem of counterfeiting is the same as the problem of less-than-expected goods. If I am sold a television that fails to show a picture after some period of time all the while the same showroom model continues to work, then in my perception the unit I received was counterfeit relative to the store model (just as you may receive a counterfeit bill/coin/commodity meant to be seen as fully functional, but when you go to use it the effect is undesired). Product manufacturers on the other hand have co-opted the concept of counterfeiting, replacing the idea of function with authenticity of mere place-of-origin. If a handbag is counterfeit it usually means the maker is not who you expect, regardless how well the product performs. Even if it functionally superior, it's counterfeit. On the other hand, I would not think of a gold coin as counterfeit if it were made of 100% real gold but merely the designer was fake. I think there is a concept of counterfeit-brand and counterfeit-function. The function idea is like the faulty television. When it comes to currency there is mainly a need to care if currency received works without future objections, not who makes it or how or why. You could take anything, consider its atoms and ask "at exactly which atom (from 1 to 10^26 or whatever) is this counterfeit item considered to exist?" Through a chain of institutional design, don't look at this, don't listen to that, it's not your job, ignorance is maintained and that's why I think product defects and counterfeiting are quite the same. Maybe just a matter of degree. Stopping counterfeiting seems qualitatively the same as stopping bad goods.

No it isn't consent. That was my point, liking it isn't consent either unless you decide whose opinion is more worthy to listen to. That seems to require principle or property to give preference to which consent is real. I'll use your definitions. Do not ask that I define the words you're using. I only demand you use each definition of yours consistently. But you can decide what definition you want.

Think it through. Effect of your action also requires a definition. I was talking about principles, not property conventions.

It seems to wrong to suggest ethics isn't about force. As an example, I did not consent for you to write those sentences. But ethically you don't need my consent, you're not using force. If a non-aggresssion principle is used, the aggressor is wrong not just by non-consent but also by physical imposition. Without a distinction of force, saying "some people like to be smacked" is exactly the same as saying "some people like to smack others" because their liking to smack is consent. Obviously you can say the victim did not like it, but now you must consider which person is on the receiving end of force. That seems to be the only way to tell which people you need consent from.

For stealing it could be only part of the story. While I hold my calculator, a thief must impose on me, damaging my hand however gently to free the calculator from my grasp. But when I leave it and walk away, and I'll use words more literally, it's me who's doing the imposing. The technology of calculators doesn't make it owned, it's just storytelling, the idea of mutual gain, and a fiction that my absent self is somehow still there possessing it. That's why I think at least absentee-ownership is a contract, not a principle like NAP, because force is being replaced by indirect ideas. It's done outside the thief's consent. In other words, I rig another person's reality in my absence so when I return my calculator probably won't be gone, and I use this social narrative to defend my imposition. We are attacking freedom of the thief, instead of trying to reverse the polarity of what it means to use force. Otherwise there will be the problem that physical force goes away whenever an attacker decides it's time to call the attack an external defense of their ideas.

The isolation is what I call a boundary, things must be inside and outside. To meaningfully say something "is a cup" seems to require implicitly defining what are non-cups. Eventually you can find a physical rule, a cup is that which can do X, now it no longer requires an instance or example. Once X is decided, "cup" is maybe just a jargon handle, same as the letter X, a short representative of some bigger action. Anything constructed or 3d printed that does X would seem to be a cup. In general X might be distinguished by other methods besides recognizing it first-hand. Imagine you're running a coin-sorter machine, and now extend that idea to the many things around us, trees, etc. In a way things are being mechanically sorted relative to your concepts, of course leaving room for uncertain results. I don't mean our naming of a concept does any controlling. The real concept is just a physical reference point, and the name of that concept is the mental reference point, an abbreviation. I think a concept which is "only in the mind" fails to even be a concept because even saying "the mind" supposes some particular container-mind is an instance of a mind, and now we're just using concept of "mind" to draw boundaries around all concept-makers. This seems to just postpone reality, and bury it a level. Physical conditions that distinguish a mind from a non-mind would fix the problem, almost nobody seems to be disputing that initial step. So we seem to be allowed a physical requirement applied to concept of the mind, if for no other reason than to get things started. So why not skip that mysterious step, and make all concepts essentially physical in nature? Suppose there's a vast periodic table of concepts with unconstructed instances. Not like Plato's ideal forms, but instead with their potential for instances as a metric. A concept is real just as oxygen is real, even when it may by chance be physically absent from some volume of space. The concept is just physical parameters based on predictions, internal cycles, interaction with other potential things, inside or outside the mind, inside or outside past instances. Once some instance achieves your goal, the instance is truly new. The concept was simply valid all along and instances are just testing grounds. Abstract without concrete just means there's BS around the corner.

I would like to mention that a confirmation process is taking place -- a filter on whatever kinds of things initially provide these decisions you describe. The computer needs some sort of generator of useful symbols, keyboard is just one way. On the other hand, maybe it is dice, a hot cup of tea, or directly to the wetware of the human brain. But the origin of that wetware should not matter, as long as the process is rapid enough. The rational process we want to identify, by my reckoning, is a combined result of (1) an ability to generate new symbol structures which cannot be algorithmically generated, and (2) a computational filter than weeds out meaningless data and allows rational data to remain in place as what we can call a consciousness. This second part does not seem out-of-reach of today's computers.What I mean to illustrate is that lacking either one of these seems to cause some rational failure. The algorithmically pure robot with no random "imagination" will fail to generate certain patterns, as it has certain limitations and a finite number of states. Cleverness of programming might make it able to recognize good pattern if it ever sees one, but the same machine may simply lack the ability to produce a good pattern that it can subsequently evaluate. That machine is irrational on the basis of being too boring. We can call it a limited machine.On the other hand, so-called wetware without good enough pattern recognition will generate new results, but it can fail to be rational on the basis that false/useless/unproven patterns might be accepted just a readily as true/useful/proven patterns. I can get any rational solution or answer by drawing Scrabble pieces, but it will take a long time and allow for constant gibberish. If followed by a machine, such a process is irrational on the extreme basis of being symbolically too clumsy. It is not "limited" it is too unlimited! Now consider suitable random hardware plugged in a USB port, followed by algorithmic software to evaluate/filter such data such that it can answer a question or solve a problem with the correct mixture of these two approaches. Done right I argue this can happen with equal adaptive power of human free will. This process allows for responsibility to prefer what is right while also requiring an imaginative generator that no deterministic algorithm can provide. This may not be wetware of the brain, but it is something I would label "mechanical and asymmetrically indeterminate".

I do not see the shame in conversing with a cleverly constructed robot. The cleverness may exceed your expectations. The common free will position seems overly negative toward technology and AI. While it may be the case that a pure algorithm has no free will (a position I agree with), that in itself does not estabilsh machine impossibility with regard to free will. It may be the case that computers that you and I know will execute their zeros and ones with near perfection. As you say, they know no meaning. But they do fail and make computational mistakes at some extremely small rate. Much like evolution and genetic mutation eventually generating the human brain through a process of rare events, there is no law of physics that seems to prohibit us from building a machine with free will. I do not adhere to compatibilism and such play on words. But by exploiting errors in a physical process where symbols get manipulated, simulation is not the only option. Atoms or bits, it should not matter although the process they follow does matter. The meaning generated from a random process can be real, because intellectual challenges might be solved by "errors" that win out. It would seem to me that a machine might purposely allow non-algorithmic mistakes in its symbol manipulation, and take advantage of certain kinds of detectable errors that will be better than any algorithm might generate. It is merely the attempt at self-improvement allowed for by extreme trial-and-error instead of simple straight-line processing. That kind of robot might have a capacity for free will. It could be a clever enough construction to find a refined answer that you cannot predict it will find. You also cannot predict non-living matter in a puddle 4 billion years ago in a swamp would eventually grow into humans. So it would seem there is some leeway in what random patterns can do to make free will possible.

Free will seems to be discussed, in part, as knowing what is free will and how experimentally it is manifested. I found an interesting idea of three viewpoints described by P.C.W. Davies http://arxiv.org/abs/quantph/0703041 as follows: A. laws of physics -> matter -> information. B. laws of physics -> information -> matter. C. information -> laws of physics ->matter. The conventional view is A. Davies writes "Matter conforms to the given laws, while information is a derived, or secondary property having to do with certain special states of matter". For view B, "Nature is regarded as a vast information processing system, and particles of matter are treated as special states which, when interrogated by, say, a particle detector, extract or process the underlying quantum state information so as to yield particle-like results." Davies says "The attractions of scheme C is that, after all, the laws of physics are informational statements." My own thinking is that understanding these relationships could be important before trying to decide exactly what free will is or how to test for it.

I was meaning two effects, each being mutually exclusive, stemming from one-in-the-same cause. .

I think "you must eat" and "you must eat to live" are of the same logical character. Both seem to say you can't ever choose otherwise, as if it's absolutely pre-destined to be what you'll do. If I throw a large brick at a thin sheet of glass, I can say "the glass must break". But I say that only based on the certainty I have about how bricks and glass behave. There is a clear sense that "you must eat" could be assigned a truth value, just as "you must eat to live". If we see "you must eat to live" as somehow true by way of cause and effect, I discover I am not eating right now at this instant. Also, one can be kept alive for a long time by injecting the right nutrients. But aside from that loophole, there's some sense "you must eat" carries a meaning of inevitability (eventually you'll eat I predict), and "you must eat to live" (you'll eventually die otherwise, I predict). Those predictions could be wrong, but the sentences seem to have the same logical meaning that something is being predicted to happen.

I do not doubt the authenticity of the document any more than I doubt authenticity of the Holy Bible, as far as words having been written and perhaps what the names are of dead persons who once were able to write them. But I doubt that the words can be taken as "true" after the author is dead and their assertions cannot in any scientific way stand on their own. It's the authenticity of truth that is doubted. I don't consider estates unethical either, but defenders are on the same foundation as somebody who rejects them. For these two subgroups, good manners seems to be the distinction. One side can say it's disrespect of the dead to void the will, the other side can say it's disrespect of the living to give the dead a superior say.I don't think wills can be effective upon death. At a minimum, they are delayed by the time it takes to recognize a body as dead, read the will, and cast it into a belief system about whether the words convey some sort of truth about who owns what. The document can't self-execute, just as paradoxical sentences do not vanish from a page. I think there has to be a mental process involved to make it effective, and that mental process can choose to believe the words of the author, or interpret them as deranged and false. To contrast, a false outcome will not stand in science, because you can repeat experiments, ask questions, etc., and ultimately the words can be confirmed as true and not just confirmed as written by somebody.For a title transfer declared one year from now, is the author dead? I think it matters, because for an author rescinding it would seem like a loan default, but I don't believe the dead can default. In any case, I don't think it's right to give undue consideration to what is written, because with EULAs and numerous documents we are required to sign, there are contradictions, hidden agendas, etc. Documents and recordings of promises should only clarify what we once agreed to, only holding us "socially" responsible for transgressions, and not act as an auto-executing way to justify forcible rectifications. I think of the idea of "inalienable" rights, that there's some rights contracts cannot dissolve. Certainly I should be able to rescind a promise, or else "I promise never to keep promises after this one or even let this one be known to others when making future promises" would hold me hostage to being dishonest forever. I think made up words and sentences don't self-execute in a moral realm, but they only convey an conscious intention at later social cost.

I object when that gift is proven only by words of a dead and fictional consciousness. I agree with most of what you say, aside from some generalizations about possession and estates. The state is fictional, I just think estates are fictional also. Possession could be taken more than one way, but your question is like asking if yelling or breathing on somebody is force. Possession is what you physically have and protect. Like you said, you can have possession by borrowing or renting something. Whether it's "right" often becomes a mental process. Did the owner consent? A thief can have things in their possession, yet we do not call it property. By my words, the thief has wrongful possession. It does not cease to be possession because ethics does not hold. A bird can possess a worm. The body-ownership principle would still hold. But as for the worm, we reject it as bird-property, not because of failure to possess, but because the bird cannot agree with you or me on any notion of "rights". Neither can any dead people agree with me. The dead's words are cultural artifacts, as are poems about birds.

Precisely why I said "if", to deny the supposition, not to support a bad conclusion. The mind cannot be disconnected from the contract while still considering the contract to be a moral agent. If one requires good faith to confirm a contract, and bad faith invalidates it, what status do the dead have in that regard? Their mental state is gone. Two big holes are: (1) it's words, yes, but "their" is only a cultural metaphor, there's no real "their words" or "their wishes" because words cannot belong to somebody who does not exist, and (2) signature yes, but it's cultural convention that dictates what the preceding words mean and how a signature might be semantically connected to other words on the page. Unlike objective truth, there's no way to reproduce the event and get a corresponding result in every alternative language. Culture seems to be the sole foundation of validation that inheritance relies on. Of course my answer is: I think if Steve is dead, the two-party agreement should be dead also. Nothing seems distorted, but I will try to understand the question. If candy is taken, somebody will care, and this involves different principles than contracts would. Why draw the analogy? There's the principles that (1) a store-owner makes candy exist, however indirectly, so stealing it leads to an unsustainable market for the thief, and primarily (2) the thief hypocritically will want to keep the candy by employing ethics to safeguard their pocket. If the storeowner is dead, those principles can logically fail. The dead do not continue to produce much besides decomposition byproducts, nor do they continue to try to keep material things. I guess we agree in the case the storeowner does not die, there's some immorality with the thief. Going back to John and Steve, what objective principle holds John in a state of obligation, aside from words demanded by a compost pile formerly known as Steve? Regarding absentee property being an attribute or component of something, why is that? There's nothing I can use that proves it. A number can be generated randomly, but I cannot say "random" is an attribute of some particular number. I mean, is 12 random, or is it non-random? Random describes a process, not the number itself. Property seems to describe a conscious process, not the object itself. It's only a useful fiction, calling it an attribute of the object and not the mind, because you communicate what you want to keep. Saying "I want to keep" is a process only abstractly connected to some distant thing. You are free to change your mind and want to sell things, but those wants don't outlive the mind. Like the Bible, we can make artifacts that say so, but that doesn't make it true. An heir wants it to be true. Draw a line and yell "My side, Your side". Some people give their estate to a dog, or to the church. I suppose I could write a will to give property to "the tallest person alive in 1 billion years", or "this shall remain forever ownerless". When I dead, I can't continue to assert it. Meanwhile what principle prohibits a claim to own such property?

I'll argue something different, and suggest agreements must come first. You're right concerning property in your possession. You maybe use the word Possession maybe in a different way than I do, and I am not essentially saying what you rephased because of this misunderstanding of the word "possess". Once you want me to respect a piece of paper without my agreement whatsoever, and it pertains to something you do not possess in reality, you go beyond first-principles and employ culture. I think the progression of enablement is: Life -> Consciousness -> Agreement -> Absentee Ownership. "Property comes first" I think is closer to the State in a nutshell, because the State claims to decide property rights without our consent. They start out with property being controllable by them, as opposed to finding mutual agreement. If I accept that property rights come before my agreement, the State can own the earth, having been here before I was, making us all conditionally-bound renters of not just property, but labor on property they conditioned by contract I did not consent to. I think inheritance is a similar idea running into similar contradiction, that inheritors try invent agreement from those who didn't.

Yes that seems like good reason to choose to institute some form of inheritance as opposed to none at all. But the causal argument of society is insufficient to mark it as ethically absolute in the same way non-aggression is applied. Sure it's reason refute the collectivist argument that everybody inherits everything equally. But not enough to prove (either causally or by way of direct non-aggression principles) that the dead's wishes are best for society and/or sustained by non-aggressive principles (we aggess against the dead or assumed rights an heir identifiable only by cultural convention). There's a moderately compelling argument for non-physical ownership of physical goods, based on logical inconsistency of a thief who wants to keep what is taken whenever they leave their house, but that does not seem to show the good's existence or the finder's good fortune is owed to a dead person anticipating hereditary ownership.

It's because I think respect of property in the moral sense requires some agreement, and there are times agreement has no meaning. It's consciousness that seems to give agreement any meaning. I do not know what an act of property transfer is aside from either physical grasp or some mutually agreed substitute. Basically I do not outright reject property being transferred via a will, but I reject it being identified as "property" much as the state cannot own the earth. A pile of compost might have once constituted a thinking being. Maybe a will is a tape recording or other artifact, but it's dead matter. It does not prove transfer takes place as somebody dies, because who is the pre-transfer owner? You have to refer to dead artifact, and then find out that person (as a rational agent) is simply not present. The compost pile's words may have residue of truth, but only the living can decide that. If they once wrote "2+2=4", we can carry out a testing process to distinguish the eternal truth from what's made-up. If they wrote "I transfer this", there's no way to check it by rational thought. Like the Bible, you can check that it was written, but you cannot check that what was written remains true today. I am not trying to make it difficult. In fact, I think accepting inheritance is making difficulty, because it seems to import the idea from statism without logical review. Anarchocaptialism rightly moves the moral ground from state institutions to individual rational ethics. But then it unquestioningly accepts that dead people still have a say, effectively keeping a state religion. If there's a contract between two people and one of them dies, there are two answers. (1) If the contract is between two people and no more, then yes I imagine they are morally absolved, at least reverting to a status as if a contract did not exist. (2) But if there's a third party on the contract, the two surviving parties might still be obligated to one another. You could set up a will to give your property to someone, but you should also have agreement with the finder of the stuff to ensure they will convey the goods as directed. That's agreement between the heir and the finder, and not you. For property, the idea that trusts or contracts possess truth in themselves, aside from living people using them simply as persuasion, is almost impossible to maintain. If the words are valid because they are signed, I could write a promise that pre-repudiates my future written promises and then take out a loan.

Inheritance still does not work, as contract or not. Suppose you find an eighty-thousand-year-old chiseled stone from an extinct race of hominids that allocates earth's resources in some definable way that literally pertains to whatever is still around (our species). Did this stone document self-execute before your species did? Maybe defenders of inheritance are saying eight-second-old wills get preference over the wills of various conquered ancestors.I use this thought experiment. If you write a mathematics proof, it can be verified mechanically. A theorem verifier, such as Isabelle, Mizar or other symbolic computation software can process mathematics proofs step-by-step and indicate they are valid. Some can even find new proofs. Even if humanity were about to become extinct, a computer could remain behind, still validating proofs on geothermal power. That computer should not behave differently with regard to mathematical truth than if we were still around with our mighty free will to guide it. By the same token, chemistry and physics and all of science (in principle) could be verified by automated experiments, filling test tubes, etc., much as a coffee machine might grind and brew coffee. Of all our written truths, in 1 billion years we would not expect the next sentient species to refute our mathematical or scientific truths after they dig them up from the ground, unless of course we genuinely made an error to begin with. The point being that consciousness does not influence reality except through the act of living and interacting with it. Our documents are not alive, they either convey testable truth or else they are dead fictional artifacts.But with this inheritance business, the life and interaction of the author are gone. For the document to sustain itself as "truth", like math and science it should have real meaning to the reader. As a lifeless artifact, a will might prove something, much as dinosaur bones or stone tablets prove something. To me, a will does not prove the principles of property exist after death, or even that property can transfer in some automated fashion like the spirit soaring to heaven. Until somebody reads and chooses to accept the will, finding reason to accept what it says by logical means, how is it different than the Bible?

It does not seem that witnesses are independent confirmation, they are observing the same event. If I confirm a chemistry experiment independently, I should not just witness the first experiment on video. What do they confirm anyway, just that it was signed by somebody who no longer exists? I am not understanding your point. Is it that signature was made by somebody who no longer exists, or that the words match the intent of the author who no longer exists? If it's the signature, the state has signatures. Our representatives speak for us just as a dead person speaks through a will, and there are witnesses who confirm they signed. I don't feel bound by them however. What's the signature got to do with the rest of the text? If it's the intent of the words that's being confirmed, God has intent according to biblical records, but of course I can't independently confirm their claims. Some people insist and swear God's real, and has intent to guide us through life. To accept it, should I have to accept such third-party confirmations, or should I require God to address me personally?

Yes that makes perfect sense when both parties are open and communicative. But as you travel and go into shops, it would seem the case that the owner can conceal their "wants" of how to do business. For example, if I want different service options, normally I have to ask for it in advance and have it pre-approved. But the shopkeeper feels free to exert their demands after an agreement to buy has been made. The salesman makes the pitch, I say "I'll take it", and out comes their additional requirements. Stand here, sign that, pickup over there. If it's unethical for me to drop money on the table and leave, I think if a shopkeeper makes any added demands (check out line, inventory, loyalty, etc.) that should also be classified as unethical to the same degree. It violates how I want to do business. Now certainly that can all be sorted out and communicated, just as I can send them an email "expect money on your table at 3pm". But I am talking about cases where it isn't communicated, the shopkeeper does not bother to negotiate this with me ahead of time, shouldn't it be treated as fraud and/or theft from the customer? That's where I get confused. Do the shopkeeper and customer have to negotiate before binding notice can be given? I am afraid the assumption that a DRO adopts is that the shopkeeper just has to post notice, but customer cannot because they have to ask deliberately and separately for each transaction. Customer cannot get away with a EULA website, or cannot wear a shirt that says "I'll pay you later without interest". So once commitments are made ("I'll buy it at our negotiated price"), the two parties are judged by different standards. Only one gets a cloak of institution ethics, and they can say you should've known.

I believe the individual is not present upon death. In finding minerals or goods in a state of nature, I think you might agree contracts do not apply. Once an item is non-property, a contract seems extremely fictional, a mental wish. If we can apply contracts without living individuals to sustain them, our ancestors can apply a contract to the entire earth to establish statism. They did improvements to the earth, making planet Earth a product of labor. But I would think no, they must be alive and ready to account for whatever contributions, and explain to me why I should agree with their terms. If a dead guy has a car, it is merely improved metal ore, glass, etc., and all the work and/or money investments needed to improve those raw materials (to make it a car) are not a result of labor of any presently sentient being, but artifacts of the past. Sure the guy was sentient, in the past tense. But I do not believe in the immortal soul. I think if a contract can be said to be self-proving or self-sustaining, absent the author, then the Holy Bible should be read the same way. The Bible is the word of God, etc., and it only needs to be judged on its own made up terms and by the standards of people who wrote it. Like the Bible, a contract of the dead cannot be independently confirmed. It's an artifact, and I don't think it's right to require all people who did not sign it to be ethically bound by it. Certainly not in a way that allows force for being impolite and disrespectful of the dead and their contracts. I know some people want inheritance to exist, but God not to exist. It does not make sense to me, because it involves being really selective about choosing when the dead are valid individuals. We use consciousness to distinguish many things. Consider animal rights, the reality of governments, corporations, religion, matters of nature, pollution, etc., and we can say these things do not have a living consciousness speaking on their behalf Those things, by most anarchocapitalist reckoning, do not ethically stand on their own. They're made up. They are subordinated to us on the basis that living people are the only things that are rational, the only things that can reason about ethics. A contract may describe how a dead person wants to allocate their property, but what does that prove without a rational author to stand in their own defense? And if we omit the need for the author to defend their work and the need for independent confirmation, why cannot these other self-proving things (religion, animals, etc.) be classified as ethical agents? As an atheist and anarchist, I speak for God and the animals! At that point my foundation does not seem right. As far as inescapable truth, you would be right to reject my claim that God speaks to us through the written word, just as I am right to reject inheritance.