Q&A: “Curt, What do you say about soul? And its relation to property?” – Mahmoud B.
[Y]our indisputable Property is that which you act to obtain without forcing involuntary transfers upon others. Meaning: without {violence,theft, fraud, suggestion, obscurantism, omission, indirection (externality), free riding, socializing losses and privatizing commons, conspiracy, conversion, immigration, war, conquest, and genocide.}
- You may act to construct your life.
- You may act to construct your kin.
- You may act to construct cooperative relations.
- You may act to construct your reputation.
- You may act to construct private property
- You may act to construct common physical property.
- You may act to construct normative property (by forging opportunity)
- You may act to construct institutional property (by bearing costs of such things as military service, jury duty, emergency services, and ‘policing’ the preservation of life and property.)
Your soul, if you believe in such things, and act as if you believe in such things, is, like reputation, something you must constantly bear costs to maintain.
As such since you have born costs for both physical and normative constructs, and have done so morally – without the imposition of costs upon others – they are by definition your property.
EXISTENCE
Now, the manner in which your soul may or may not exist is somewhat challenging, because it can only knowingly exist as an analogy: a form of anthropomorphization of the record of one’s actions recorded in memories of people, physical marks on reality, and the long term consequences of events in the physical world.
In this sense your ‘soul’ good or ill, does persist, just as the interaction of molecule of water affects all those around it. (the theory that water has memory is a useful analogy.)
So for those who wish to preserve the traditional behavior and traditional anthropomorphism in a manner that we can say may or may not be scientific, we can suggest that primitive man intuits his soul as his thoughts and actions, just as we intuit the persistence of our genes through reproduction.
To take it further, we can (and we will very likely never disprove this so it’s useful for religious folk), we can work with what is called quantum mysticism. That is, that your thoughts take place in physical space and time and affect the universe around you. So even your thoughts affect the universe.
The thing is, the concept of a soul (an accounting of your life) is a useful one. It seems to produce good outcomes.
[Y]ou should not take this argument as terribly firm support for monotheism, but as a purely normative exercise in the economically beneficial results of providing an intuitive means of behavioral accounting in which individuals can resist cooperating with others on matters of ill intent under the correct presumption that the consequences of thought and action are kaleidic and infinite, and that one cannot be forced for any reason into immoral actions (those that impose costs upon others property.) Not all of us are above 125 in intelligence, and we require such analogies for both pedagogical purposes and for use by those who cannot grasp either rational or scientific arguments. The same is true for ethics. We need virtue (imitative), rule, and outcome based ethics, because we have young and simple, adult but not wise, and wise and experienced people in the world. We are unequal. As unequals we need unequal tools.
I hope this helps you. As far as I know this argument will survive all current criticism. Existentially, your soul does exist as a record of your actions in the universe, and primitive man could not articulate such ideas. If you want to get into reincarnation then I cna’t help you. Neither can the Dali Lama. He knows it’s a great argument because it is untestable.
As you may see, I am trying to provide a means of reformation to the main religions while at the same time undermining those parts of religion that are false, lies, or harmful. But I am not hostile to religion: myth and ritual. Personal religion is a good thing (having been near death at least three times myself).
I hope that this answered your question.
Curt Doolittle
The Philosophy of Aristocracy
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev, Ukraine.