Is ownership a claim to a geometrical three-dimensional space (a specific longitude, latitude and altitude)?
Though it may be superficial, has anyone ever explored the notion of property ownership outside of our three dimensional space?
Like four-dimensional ownership (i.e., time)?
I don’t know enough (ok, I don’t know anything) about other dimensions to really get the ball rolling on this one, I have to admit.
Awesome questions. I am really embarrassed that I cannot answer this. This looks like a good project to study over the weekend.
this video may help for the thought experiment (here)
Obviously, as noted, there’s a temporal component. But what does it mean to be outside space-time? Ontologically, it’s meaningless.
I know many individuals hate thought experiments of this nature, but I tend to enjoy them
What if we expand on the theme?
Duration is what can be most easily used to describe the forth dimension. Yet, since we live in moment by moment in the third dimension time seems like a straight line. Therefore, if there is no true frame of reference for time (otherwise known as time does not truly exist) where does this leave property ownership?
Now, my thoughts are this.
In order to have ownership you must have space (as in distance between two objects). For example, think of ownership within a neutron star whereas all atoms are stripped of their electrons and protons. There could be no ownership because there is no space to separate the neutrons
Distance of time however is not needed because ownership can exist within a moment of time. Thus, time (as it exists in a continuum) itself is irrelevant to ownership
Yet isn’t instantaneous time still 3-dimensional?
My thoughts are this.
If space is what’s needed for ownership, and space increases as a function of dimensions, then as dimensions increases space approaches infinity and thus ownership approaches infinity
But when you own something, you own it for a specific period of time. We exist in spacetime, so it is relevant.
property:
my advice when trying to identify it; its scarce, is what you are looking at scarce?. (not in the everyday sense, but in the economic)
Is true. Yet we are not referencing the existence of ownership or duration of ownership but instead defining ownership. And ownership can be defined with reference to instantaneous time, or in other words a moment
Now, can ownership exist without volume?
In case this post becomes lost in the abyss of forms. If anyone furthers the question or wishes to further it contact me
Moment = time.
As for ownership without volume–that would be 2D. We don’t live there.
I always thought of ownership as relating to material objects, not the space they reside in. Especially considering that such spatial positions are enitrely relative and inconstant (though material objects are not perfectly stable, compared to the fabric of space they’re pretty eternal).
What are the dimensions to a share of microsoft, radio frequency, or labour service?
Though true that radio waves, like light waves have zero mass and thus is composed only of energy this doesn’t infringe on ownership since we own the source of the waves. If I own a flash light, I control the light though the source but I wouldn’t claim that I own the light wave since it is merely energy. The same would hold true for a sound wave and thus we own the source of our voice but not the wave.
A share of a corporation is harder to reference. For example, can we even prove the legitimacy of a corporation as an entity of its own liability? Depending on this a corporate stock may be an abstraction. However, a stock is simply a claim to ownership of which ownership was transferred via prior homesteading. So the question than becomes, what is the dimensions of a contract (which is what a stock essentially is).
Not sure I understand labor service.
Obviously yes if you count time as a dimension. Beyond that, no, as there isn’t any point.
Property based on euclidean geometry was introduced in the 19th century. Prior to that in customary law, property boundaries were delimited by naturally occurring features. If you look at the morphology of land in Europe and America east of Ohio, it is very natural and organic, often with very intricate, complicated borders and regional limits. The American west, on the other hand, was centrally planned on a very rigid grid.
It is a matter of opinion which property system works best.
Would you explain a bit more about your first sentence please?
The case of imperial territory claims in Africa after the Berlin Treaty ought to be of great interest to Austrian revisionists. Western rail grants in the couple decades preceding this period of the Long Depression have also been ignored best I know.
Okay. Until the 19th century, the system used for property boundaries in customary law was called metes and bounds, which is a flexible, contextual form of property delimitation based on agreed-upon property markers such as rivers, roads, landmarks, and so on. These features, given the nature of the environment, tend to move over time. After the revolutionary war, the new American government decided to fund itself by selling land west of the original colonies in blocks defined by the Land Ordinance of 1785, a method of subdividing property based on a Cartesian plan to which the features of the landscape were irrelevant, which eventually formed the basis for America’s rectangular Public Land Survey System.
It was America’s first instance of large-scale economic planning.