Property Rights From General Relativity?

[Will Torbald]

Do you really own your time? If you think in the classical description of time as an extrinsic and universal experience shared among everyone, you might wonder what is it that somebody means when they say that they own their time. For example, if I were to build a table, and then you were to steal it - we could say that you've retroactively enslaved me by appropriating the fruits of my labored time. Usually you would just argue that your time is yours axiomatically or rationalistically. That arguing about it would be using your time in the first place. But what is it about time that makes it, well, yours? Enter the theory of General Relativity.

 

Before Einstein, time was understood to be an objective feature of nature. It was a shared and collective experience amongst every person or thing. Clocks were universal. Time on Mars is the same time on Earth. But if something is universal and absolute amongst every person, how can any individual own it? Can you own electricity? You could own an electric generator and the electricity it produces, but you can't own "Electricity" as a universal concept and force of nature. Same with time, but we don't have time generators either, so time would have remained as an extrinsic factor of the world.

 

However, that didn't last long. It would be very complicated to explain it here, but GR changed everything. In GR, time is not an extrinsic absolute, but an intrinsic and relative experience for everyone and everything. Maybe you've heard or seen a recent movie by Christopher Nolan called Interstellar. In it, explorers travel near a black hole and experience a phenomenon called time dilation. The passage of time for one person flows differently for another given different physical conditions. Gravity can affect the flow of time, as well as space travel at high speeds. This effect has been measured to be a real thing that actually happens in the real world. It is used as a way to properly calibrate GPS satellites since time runs slightly differently in space where the force of gravity is weaker than on the surface of the Earth. But you might be wondering, what does it have to do with philosophy or property rights?

 

Since GR posits time as a uniquely personal experience for each observer, every person owns its own version of time itself. Your passage of time is different from mine. My clock will never be ticking at the same time as yours. Time is different on Mars than on Earth. This means that my time will forever be a personal, inextricable, inescapable, relative, subjective-yet-objectively-measurable experience. When I use my labor, energy, and time to homestead and create property, it really is my time. And my time only. When you steal from me your really are violating my time. In the end, a theory of property rights would need not only to be useful, but to be true as well. We understand that the mark of truth requires reason and evidence. It was nice to have reason for property rights. Now I think that we also have evidence.

[Mister Mister]

That's interesting, but it won't convince people who benefit from taxation that taxation is theft

[Lykourgos]

It may be "complex", but for anyone to accept this you would first have to do a lot of explaining. I'm pretty sure GR doesn't posit time as a "uniquely personal experience for each observer". GR posits spacetime, which exists independently from observers. As for the concept of time, it's a measurement of change and movement. What any of this has to do with ownership, I haven't a clue.

[Will Torbald]

That's interesting, but it won't convince people who benefit from taxation that taxation is theft

 

Party pooper. Before politics there's philosophy.

 

 

It may be "complex", but for anyone to accept this you would first have to do a lot of explaining. I'm pretty sure GR doesn't posit time as a "uniquely personal experience for each observer". GR posits spacetime, which exists independently from observers. As for the concept of time, it's a measurement of change and movement. What any of this has to do with ownership, I haven't a clue.

 

I'm pretty sure you're wrong about GR in the sense that spacetime, while it does exist, is a unique experience for each observer. That is why it's called Relativity, not Universality. My time and my experience in space is not an absolute, but a personal feature of my matter and energy. As on how this relates to ownership, refer to the argument of homesteading and how investing time into a raw material makes it yours. You are investing your unique time, not a shared universal time.

[Lykourgos]

I'm pretty sure you're wrong about GR in the sense that spacetime, while it does exist, is a unique experience for each observer. That is why it's called Relativity, not Universality. My time and my experience in space is not an absolute, but a personal feature of my matter and energy. As on how this relates to ownership, refer to the argument of homesteading and how investing time into a raw material makes it yours. You are investing your unique time, not a shared universal time.

 

Your "time" would be the same if you were dead or alive. I'm not a physicist, so I hate to try and correct someone's understanding of physics; however, I've never heard anyone say that in the theory of general relativity, perceiving events will make them change faster or slower. Your consciousness isn't important to energy and spacetime. It's the degree of energy and momentum in your vicinity that would change spacetime. The energy/momentum changes the curvature of spacetime, and the spacetime determines how things move. On a separate note, time is a property of change; if change didn't exist, then there would be no time.

 

If someone here is great with physics, then maybe they can come save the day. As for homesteading, I don't know what that argument is. I am interested in General Relativity, but I'm not strong in the subject. I just don't see how it applies to ownership.

[Will Torbald]

Your "time" would be the same if you were dead or alive. I'm not a physicist, so I hate to try and correct someone's understanding of physics; however, I've never heard anyone say that in the theory of general relativity, perceiving events will make them change faster or slower. Your consciousness isn't important to energy and spacetime.

 

That's not entirely true. How you perceive events depends on your relative position to those events. It is not the perception of events that makes spacetime change, but that each perception is unique within spacetime. There is no absolute perception of time, only unique observers each having their own personal clocks. If you don't know homesteading arguments you won't know how it relates to ownership, of course, so I can't help you from that level.