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dubsdeedubs · 7 years ago

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A Thousand Natural Shocks [15/16]

[A/N: I BET YOU THOUGHT YOU SAW THE LAST OF ME

split the last chapter into two bc i figure yall would like a six thousand word thing NOW as opposed to a 15 thousand word monster god knows when. long story short, i finished school for the term, i have a job for summer (in boston!) and i’m ready to WRITE]

[AO3]

Near the end of 1972, about halfway through earning his first doctorate, Stanford Pines experienced an Epiphany.

Though slightly less graceful and Romantic than having an apple fall upon his head, or even reciting Goethe while gazing upon the rays of a setting sun (as always, Tesla never did anything by halves), the effect on the young scientist proved no less than electrifying. Certainly no less dramatic, judging by the foot-wide spray radius of the resulting half-mug of coffee shattered onto the floor.

A particularly difficult proof had been the catalyst; specifically, a problem that had been built on such theoretical ground that the soon-to-be Dr. Pines had to navigate several levels of hypotheticals and complete nonsense - that albeit did have some meaning with three textbooks' worth of context and a state-of-the-art graphing calculator 'borrowed' from a university laboratory - to even seriously approach the question itself.

A study of the relation of objects and velocity in zero-gravity conditions outside the known universe, which in fact had nothing to do with his field of study at all. Or any field of study relevant to humanity for the next hundred years, for that matter.

(Questioning why the man had spent forty-three sleepless hours validating a concept that had nothing at all to do with practicality and usefulness would show no less than a deep, fundamental misunderstanding of the person Stanford Pines was.)

Ford lifted a hand, felt his own face slowly, contemplatively… and was suddenly, unhappily aware that he did not remember the last time he had taken a shower. Still staring at the wall with unfocused eyes, he opened his mouth, somehow managing not to recoil from the immediate stench of his own Terrible Hygiene Decisions, and spoke out loud to the audience of himself and one snoring roommate.

- It is important to note, however, that words are rarely enough to express a particularly complex idea,. Case in point, Ford's thought process had already finished the marathon when his sentence had just begun to leave his mouth, and in fact, was contemplating whether to jog back to the starting line for the complimentary juicebox.

He thought: space is enormous, space is complex, to an extent that it is necessary to accept that space is of a scale beyond all human comprehension. It follows then that most, if not all of the rules that governs it - if any existed, which was also up for debate - would not make any logical human sense. Perhaps, it was here at the edges of the universe that dimension boundaries blurred, that the divide between mind and body weakened, that reality itself gave a Great Big Shrug.

Then, perhaps -

"Space," Ford said slowly, softly, with the hesitant tone of a man who saw himself approaching a terrible, unknowable truth, "is big."

A tear welled at the corner of his left eye.

Stanford was Not Wrong. But had his roommate been awake and therefore, had thrown a pillow at Ford's head, there was no creature in the history of existence that would have blamed him. At least two would have bought him a drink for the trouble.

Unfortunately, the magnitude of Ford's breakthrough was undercut somewhat by his sudden loss of consciousness and short-term memory about forty-three seconds afterwards, after an attempt to walk straight through the nearest wall. While he would live on despite reaching this critical mass of awful life choices, the fact that his human mind had erased all of the night's events in a desperate attempt at survival would turn out to be a missed opportunity.

Had he remembered, then more than thirty years later, hanging slack-limbed and dangling in a dark place that was both completely in his head and somewhere on the fringes of a distant galaxy, Stanford would have felt greatly validated in having proved his theory correct firsthand.

...Though perhaps, with the deep, leaden exhaustion that pooled in his gut and dragged at his every limb with near physical weight, the less things his overworked mind had to deal with, the better.

Not that there were many thoughts to be had in the first place. There were only two things that Ford was aware of. One, the nothingness he could 'see' - that was, the closest approximation in English to a much more esoteric concept - spreading out before him for miles in every direction.

Then, there was what he couldn't see but could feel nonetheless: the burning weight of a gaze magnified by a hundred, thousand times, coming from everywhere and nowhere at once. A mystery, one that would normally call out to Stanford Pines with a force greater than a siren's song.

But Ford was tired, too tired for anything that involved any kind of active consciousness. He had been on some kind of journey, one that had been long and difficult but ended too soon all the same. He had wanted more - more time, more chances, more of… something. Someone.

But that didn't matter now. He had finished. He was over, he was complete.

He could rest now.

And he did, because time had no meaning where he was now. He knew without knowing how that with a blink there would come a minute and leave a millennium. For the first in a very, very long time, there were no voices to be heard in his head, not even his own. There was no desire to think, to probe, to question. This was an ending, his ending, and because it was good and he was happy he should stay like this forever -

Ford!

- but.

It took every bit of strength he had for Ford to lift his head.

The darkness opened their many eyes.

He was surrounded from every side, every angle. He was within, somewhere deep inside the innards of some colossal existence, part of the bigger whole. But despite the cool slide of substance over his exposed skin and the eerie green brightness of the light that had illuminated his surroundings, he felt calm, safe.

He was protected here, he knew. He was theirs, after all.

And They Were His.

Distantly, Ford could see the glint of stars.

Ford, wake up already, would ya?

He could feel a pressure, a solid and physical hold that he could feel first on his chest and then tightly around his torso. It was different, incredibly so, from the distant knowing, existing, of the here and now.

C'mon, he heard, coming quick and fervently desperate, Sixer, please -

It wasn't a voice, not one that could be measured by soundwaves and governed by physical laws. He felt it more than he heard it, the superficial annoyance, the raw panic underneath, the bone-deep gnaw of familiarity that came with a nickname that had meant such different things to him over the course of his lifetime.

"Stanley."

The pinpricks of light around him shuttered,

blinked,

and

Ford opened his eyes, cautiously and slowly, with the dim confusion of someone who didn't remember closing them in the first place. He squinted groggily through a pounding pain in his head that felt somewhat like a particularly bad migraine, or if he had been momentarily been blinded by some kind of thousand-watt camera flash.

...Something had happened.

Well. Yes. Clearly, he thought irritably just a moment afterwards. It was just incredibly difficult to think while being rather roughly shaken, which did the very opposite of help his headache or sort out his jumbled thoughts.

Ford let out a long, pained groan, too dazed to form coherent words, and flung - flopped, mostly - his arm upwards. He hit something solid - and sentient, he thought, when he immediately heard a surprised yelp.

The jolting movement stopped abruptly. A moment later, he heard his brother's voice, hoarse and uncertain, somewhere on the edge of his narrow line of sight.

"You… you good there, Sixer? Genius brain of yours still - tickin' on okay?"

Stan sounded concerned, but Ford couldn't imagine what for. In lieu of an answer, he pushed himself back up, eyes still clenched shut in a vain attempt to lessen the throbbing pain in his head. A hand on his shoulder steadied him, and another handed him a familiar pair of glasses.

"I'm fine, Stanley," he said, with far more certainty than he actually felt. The cool stale air and the unyielding chillness of the metal underneath his fingers meant he was in his basement laboratory, but not much else about his current circumstances were obvious.

Ford's glasses creaked alarmingly as he unfolded them open but did not break, which, he thought distantly and somewhat ridiculously, meant the reinforcements he had had done several months back in Astucía V had been a good call after all. He fumbled them on, opened his eyes -

He hissed and slapped a six-fingered hand over his eyes, uncomfortably aware that the noise he had just made was more likely to have come from a startled alleycat than a grown man.

Just a bit too much of Stanley.

"I gotta say," his brother said hesitantly, an expression of careful concern on his craggy face. "You… don't look anything close to fine right now. Heck." Stan let out a shaky breath of laughter, and gave Ford an unreadable look that he almost didn't catch through his fingers. "...Just the fact that we're having this talk right now makes me think that you're still bit scrambled up over what just happened, and -."

"Your pants," Ford blurted.

There was a brief, shocked silence. Stan opened his mouth, closed it again. "...Uh. What about my pants?"

"Your pants," he repeated, suddenly unsure of how and why he had ended up in this specific, current conversation, "are not on you."

In fact, there was not much of anything on his brother at all. Not the cheap suit he had been wearing like a uniform for the past several weeks, not the musty old fez usually perched on his gray hair.

(though of course Stan wouldn't be wearing that fez, he didn't have it anymore, which Ford knew because -

because - ?)

Which begged a question. Many questions really.

Starting with what happened in the past week why can't I remember any of it to why do I feel like someone just tried to force their way into my head with a wooden spoon, and most likely ending with why are you sitting naked on the floor of my private lab.

Typical concerns.

His brother opened his mouth slowly, as if he had only just realized the fact himself. Judging by how Stan glanced down at his own nude form with a look of dawning comprehension and inexplicable relief, was probably more or less accurate.

"Oh," Stan said blankly. "Well. I mean, yeah. It sure does looks like it."

He snorted, a sudden chuff of air through his nostrils. "Geez, Ford. That's it? That's all you're going to say to me, after everything that's happened?"

"Is…" Ford paused, reconsidering. He put his hand back down, suddenly feeling very foolish for his earlier dramatic reaction. He had grown up with his brother, after all. Why, had he been expecting to see something more when he opened his eyes than a gut and a truly frightening amount of body hair?

"Is there something that I should be asking you about?"

Stan's immediate, stunned silence was reply enough. Then, Ford realized unhappily, there was just one possibility, really. The only thing in the world they still both cared deeply about.

"Did - did Dipper and Mabel call? Are they facing some kind of trouble?"

"T-the kids?" Stanley repeated, utterly bewildered. "Oy, shouldn't I be the one askin' you that? They called you. Not - not me."

"They - did?" He replied weakly. "I can't… recall."

His brother looked at him for a long moment. Somewhere along the way, his shocked stare had evolved into a hard look of leaden understanding.

"...Y'know what, don't worry 'bout it," Stan said finally, voice hollow. He suddenly looked very drained and small, huddled without clothing in the dim light of the laboratory. "It doesn't matter."

There was something unsaid, something Ford was missing without knowing what. "What - what were we doing down here?" He asked hesitantly.

"...Dunno," Stan said blandly, not meeting his eyes. "Maybe we sleepwalked."

It was a clear lie, even by his brother's bottom standards. Ford bristled. "This isn't the time for jokes, Stan. If you're attempting to lie, at least put even a smidgen of effort into it!" He paused, tried to figure out a way to ask his question without sounding like a confused old man, and failed.

"...Stanley, what's going on?"

"I'm. I'm not sure how ta explain." His brother grimaced. "And maybe... maybe you don't remember it for good reason."

There was much unsaid, but Ford got the sense that the conversation had hit its last wall, at least where Stan was concerned. Still, he wasn't quite yet willing to let go of the mystery in front of him.

"While I was unconscious," he said haltingly, blinking through the clouded thoughts and muddled memories that haunted his every attempt to remember, "I thought, maybe, that I saw - some type of, creature, entity, a green light -"

Stan jerked. "Don't," he snapped, in a way that made Ford flinch despite himself. "...Sorry," he said after a long moment. "I just. Don't…. don't think 'bout what you saw. Not too hard. Let's just -"

His brother took a deep breath, let it back out. "Let's just let them go."

"Them -?"

The dead serious look in his brother's eye killed any questions Ford had felt compelled to ask.

"Alright," he said carefully instead, mentally filing the topic away for a less... volatile time. "I… shall."

His brother nodded, then drew himself up with a grim look, slow and hesitant, movements carefully deliberate other than his subtle shivering from the cold.

But then, just as it seemed he had made it, his knee (distorted) bent the wrong way. Stan crumpled to the ground almost immediately with a grunt of pain, large frame folding like a house of cards. Ford jolted at the familiar sound.

Familiar?

"New knees," Stan hissed inexplicably. He pushed flat against the ground, hefting himself up in slow, careful jerks. "Hell. New everything. Ford, can ya give me a hand? Just for this one bit."

He wasn't listening. There had been something there, then in that split-second of pain and dropped guard. As if a glint of residue light from the machinery had came and caught a moment too long in his brother's eye -

Oh, Ford thought stupidly, and it dawned on him like sun through the clouds.

The rest was autopilot. He moved forwards the final few steps and knelt down to catch Stan's look of pure confusion, saw his brother's mouth open in confused, kneejerk protest, and thought, with the most adamant certainty he had felt for a very long time, Stanley must be so, so cold -

Ford shrugged off his worn coat in one fluid motion and pulled the weathered warm cloth around his brother like a shield. There was a kind of reassuring certainty in the way it settled and pooled around him, as if it was tethering him to the ground with its comforting weight.

In ways his coat frankly shouldn't, logically. It had been a close fit on Ford himself, and despite the muscles gained from decades of space travel and the differences that came with the many years passed, he was still obviously of a smaller built than his barrel-chested, big-gutted brother. The old coat should not have covered Stan completely, let alone have practically enveloped him in the way that it did.

But then again, logic and logistics rarely had a place in the old tales. Ford should've known they wouldn't have much weight here.

He clung onto his brother in an embrace that was not returned, partly because Stan hadn't been given much time to react, mostly because Ford was near certain that he had inadvertently trapped his brother's arms against his body in that initial covering of not-quite-mantle. He had no complaints nonetheless.

The warm weight of his brother under his arms felt like an ending.

Stan shifted against him. "Ford?" His voice came in barely a whisper.

"Stanley," Ford said wetly, partly as an address, partly as a confirmation. "If you ever attempt another ridiculous, utterly pointless sacrifice in our lifetime, I will singlehandedly paint that Stanmobile of yours the brightest yellow I can find."

His brother jerked in his grasp in any unholy mixture of a twitch and a shudder. "You wouldn't dare."

"I would. And you know what else?" He continued, relishing every word. "I will sell it at a quarter of the market value. To a teenager."

"Over my dead bo - urk!" Stan wheezed as Ford tightened his grip even more. "...Huh. Too soon?"

He almost did not dignify the question with a response. "Yes."

His brother said nothing for a long moment. "I… I guess this means you do remember, after all," he said finally, hesitantly. "For a moment there, I thought ya wouldn't. I figured that -"

Stan broke off with a deathly wheeze. "Sixer, if you don't let me take a breath in the next five seconds -"

Ford let go immediately, even took a step back from the realization that he had been holding on just - a little bit too forcefully. "I didn't realize," he tried, watching his brother gulp in air as if his life had depended on it. "I was just -"

"Don't worry 'bout it. I'm fine," his brother interrupted, putting a hand up to halt Ford from babbling further. He thumped himself on the back and winced, sounding just like the old man he was supposed to be. "Whew. My nerd brother got strong. You spend a year in the cow throwing dimension or somethin'?"

That gave Ford pause. "There's - a cow throwing dimension?"

"Yeah. 'Course. There's some real weird places out there, deep in the multiverse. Even before they got there." His brother scratched his nose thoughtfully. "Don't get me started on the one without depth perception. Though, that was funny in a 'Three Dupes' kinda way, sure. Would make a great TV channel. Just wouldn't wanna live there."

"...No," Ford said slowly, "I don't imagine I would either."

They stood there for a long and awkward moment, perched over the smoldering remnants of a conversation that had only ever been a distraction from much harder topics lurking under the surface. Stan shuffled a bit and clung onto his brother's coat as if it was tethering him to reality, sneaking wary glances at his brother whenever he thought he wasn't looking.

Ford, on the other hand, stood silent and hesitant, unsure of how to broach a subject. The subject, as it was.

"You were going to let me forget," he said instead.

That, at least was somewhat familiar ground - accusations, arguments. Anger. But despite himself, he couldn't muster up the usual fire. It was as if he was reading off lines off a sheet, fully aware how they should sound but utterly unable to put himself into a mindset that now felt so utterly alien to his own.

"...Yeah," Stan admitted, voice carefully neutral. He avoided his gaze adamantly. "I would have."

Words swirled around in his mind, questions and demands, but none of them felt real or right for the moment. There was only one thing he could ask - "Why?"

Because so much had happened since the moment Dipper and Mabel had left town. Because he had learned and experienced things that had forced him to reconsider the views and beliefs he had clung onto throughout his life, because he himself had changed so greatly that he could barely recognize his past self.

Because if Stan had just let him forget, because if he hadn't seen the green glint in his brother's eye and the pieces hadn't all came back together, he would've just -

"Wasn't worth it." Stan looked up at him, gaze level. "Normal human isn't made to look into certain parts of the universe and come out with all their mental bits intact. And - " He grimaced. "Ya already know what happened to the last guy who saw me like that. So, I figured ya couldn't remember for a reason."

He let out a breath. "And I… just decided to take the hint."

"It wasn't just your choice to make," Ford said quietly. "I didn't -"

"Well, it wasn't all yours either, alright?" Stan snapped, a surprising explosion of sound that made Ford flinch. "And it wasn't like I could just ask you then for permission to drive you insane -"

"Stan, that's not what I meant."

Stan stopped at that, and sucked in a deep breath, clearly surprised by his own vehemence. "...I know it wasn't a great choice, Sixer," he admitted. "But as far as I could tell then, that was the only one I had." Until you just - came around. ...Just typical, y'know? How you end up side-stepping my entire moral conundrum just like that."

Stan paused, grimaced, clearly attempting to phrase a difficult question. "...What was it, in the end?" He asked at last. "That made you remember?"

"I saw your eyes," Ford said without thinking.

Immediately, an expression of pure horror burst into existence on his brother's face as his hands flew up to scrabble at the soft skin of his face.

"Stan, Stanley!" He exclaimed, grabbing his brother's hands to keep them still, to stop him from hurting himself. "That's not what I meant, your eyes are perfectly normal! They just - caught in the light, I suppose, and I was reminded of -"

"Oh," Stan said blankly. His fingers unclenched. He pulled his hands carefully out of Ford's slackened grip and lowered them slowly, awkwardly tangled with each other, to chest level. "Yeah. I, uh. I knew that."

Another silence fell on the two of them. And - wasn't that just perfectly ironic, that the two of them finally escaped the constant arguments and bickering by just not talking at all?

"Stan," Ford said at last, as steadily as he could. He needed to know, nearly as much as he didn't want to. "Are you alright? Honestly alright?"

"Sure I am," his brother replied with exaggerated nonchalance. "Look, you might be a sci-fi adventure hero or whatever, but all things considered, you're not that strong -"

"You know perfectly well that I'm not talking about that," Ford said, cutting despite himself. He put his hands behind his back to hide the way they were trembling. He had quite enough of diversions. "There were -" he paused, trying to find words that would not come to describe the things he had seen in and around his brother. "...You were coming apart in front of me. Before."

Stan winced and pulled Ford's coat tighter around himself. "It's fine, Sixer."

"No," he said frostily. "No, it really isn't. I saw you disintegrating, crumbling away -"

"...Don't ya think that's a little bit too dramatic - ?" Stan tried.

" - and all I knew," Ford continued, tone biting, "as I saw my own brother disappear into Gods knew where, was that there was nothing I could do but watch."

Stan shut up, clearly realizing correctly that his brother had no patience left for self-deprecating jokes and digressions from the topic at hand.

He took full advantage of the silence. "I was out of my depth," Ford admitted. "Every resource I had at my disposal, every bit of knowledge I had collected in years and decades traversing the multiverse, and yet I was utterly useless to help my own twin. I didn't - I didn't know what to do."

Ford paused, unsure how to explain how devastating of a fact that was to him. Him, Stanford Pines, the man who had the facts and a dozen university degrees under his belt, at a complete loss. He… might not have made the best choices in his own life, but knowledge was something he prided himself on possessing. It was how he defined himself. He - he had needed it.

And without that...

"I - still don't know," Ford said at last. "I don't understand how we're both alive. I don't know why you're corporeal again." He paused. "...Why you lost all your clothing. I can't be sure that this isn't some kind of - complex hallucination, and that I'll be waking up to actual reality in a few minutes. I…"

He trailed off. Had to swallow down something leaden to continue.

"I don't even know if you can stay."

Stan jerked at that. "Of fucking course I'm here to stay!" He exclaimed, his eyes wide. "Moses, Ford, I wouldn't just be sitting around here wasting time if - alright, look at this," he said, brandishing a single hairy arm in front of Ford's eyes. "This is one hundred percent human here, yeah? Nothing else. No more - green eyes, no weird cosmic… stuff. What you see is what you get."

He glanced down and grimaced. "...Ugh. Just wish I coulda thought myself up a smaller gut."

"But how do you know that, Stanley?" Ford demanded, tamping down on the smallest flutterings of hope in his chest. These were not answers, not yet. Just - blind reassurances, vague promises, and he had quite enough of those over the past few days. "How is this - even possible? Just before this, you told me your - your original body was gone, that all you had was -"

The wriggling star stuff, the gaping rip in reality, how his brother's skin had ripped to show empty space underneath.

"- that. How can you be back, how can you be human, if -"

"The deal, Sixer."

The words were said simply and matter-of-fact, but it cut through Ford's protests like a hot knife through warm butter. "What?" He said at last, after a moment of confused silence.

Stan gave him a pained smile. "Yeah. Just typical, huh? It's... always about the deal, in the end."

"I don't understand," Ford said slowly. "Your deal was to bring me back to this dimension, and you fulfilled that weeks ago. My presence here should be proof enough of that. What does that have to do with any of our present concerns?"

"Well, it was to get my brother back, to be specific. But yeah. Simple. Straightforward. Least," Stan said with a shrug, "that's what I thought when I made it. And in my defense, I wasn't in the best state of mind at the time, what with crashing straight off the mortal coil and all, but."

He shook his head disbelievingly, a helpless grin on his face. "The wording. The wording."

"The… wording?"

"It was pretty damn vague, wasn't it?" Stanley exclaimed, and the glint of excitement in his eyes reminded Ford suddenly of how his brother had always loved playing with words and meanings. It… was a comfort, seeing how that hadn't changed. Even if he had ended up using the ability to scam summer tourists instead of becoming a truly fearsome lawyer.

"Think 'bout it. Even after I fixed that portal, got it activated and brought you back home… I still didn't get my brother back, did I?"

"...Actually," Ford said slowly, "I would venture to say that that's exactly what it means."

"Aaaand that's why I'm the con artist and you're not, Sixer. See," Stan waved a hand wildly, as if gesturing to an invisible whiteboard with circled words and highlighted passages. "I brought Stanford Filbrick Pines back to this dimension. You. But getting my brother back - cuz in the way I really meant it, it wasn't just physically -"

He paused, as if genuinely waiting for the drama of it all - "That didn't happen 'til much later."

Stan gave Ford a meaningful look. "Couple weeks and about an hour or so later, if I had to really guess."

It took Stanford an embarrassingly long minute for the pieces to click. Remembering what exactly had happened a couple weeks and an hour or so after his return from the portal (which… was right now, wasn't it? Give or take a few hours. It had been a couple weeks and he had returned in the late afternoon and, oh) required substantial effort after the amount of rattling his brain had gone through.

But once he did -

i'm here. you did it. now fulfill your end of the bargain and

- the realization came quickly.

His eyes widened despite himself. "No. No."

"Hah." There was not much humor in that single bark of laughter. Stan looked away, an unreadable expression on his face. "...Yeah."

"That's - absolutely ridiculous!" Ford exclaimed, flabbergasted despite himself. "That's just semantics!"

"It always is with these things, Sixer."

But he was too caught up in the middle of an indignant rant to reply. "Not to mention, it's utterly pointless! I mean, surely, you must have already known that you had me back in every meaning of the word there is, the moment I stepped through that portal, you didn't need me to tell you that I -"

The uncomfortable look on Stan's face stopped him short.

"...You - didn't know," Ford finished lamely.

"What can I say, Sixer?" His brother sighed. "Punching me in the face didn't exactly - help with that.. Or tellin' me that you were kicking me out the moment summer was over. Those just… kind of gave out a certain impression, y'know what I mean?"

Ford opened his mouth, already preparing an indignant defense… and closed it.

If nothing else, he had learned in his time back on Earth not just when to admit that he was wrong, but how to do it. This was a conversation to be had somewhere other than the basement they had just almost died in, sometime when they weren't tired to the bone and struggling to keep themselves upright.

Perhaps it was a conversation never to be had at all in terms of words and arguments. One that would do, would've done, much better with actions and apologies.

Regardless, not here. Not now.

"I have to admit," Ford said evenly, "this all sounds very… sadistic. Like... some kind of cosmic joke. A poor one, at that. Didn't you make your deal with yourself?"

He paused, realizing he had no desire to delve into that specific tangle of identity issues and questions of existence now. " ...Ah, more or less. Did - did neither of you know the rules behind the bargain?"

"Well," his brother said, scratching his head. "I get why you ask. But you hafta keep in mind that ol' Six-Sights wasn't exactly an experienced con-whatever back then either. Baby eldritch consciousness' first soul-stealin' deal. That kinda thing."

"What I'm saying is. They... didn't really know what they were getting into, I didn't really know what I was getting into, and… there we went." Stan helpfully illustrated the magnitude of the ensuing disaster by wiggling his fingers of both hands widely. "Complete and utter disaster, classic end of the world kind'f stuff. Though... it could've gone much worse than it did. Much, much worse."

Stan lowered his voice to an aside. "And, ta tell ya the truth, I'm pretty sure the rules existed a paygrade or a twenty above us. Both of us. Six-Sights and I - we were just hopping along to some cosmic playbook."

"But surely, there must be something out that decided how this all works?" Ford exclaimed, aghast. "Some kind of creature that created them in the first place?"

"Well, whatever it is, it strikes me as something that smiles a whole lot. Plays a lotta cards." His brother paused in deep thought. "....Amphibious."

"Amphibious," Ford repeated blankly, a tiny spark of memory from his multiversal adventures nagging at him briefly before dying without much fanfare. Just a coincidence. "Amphibious?"

Stan smiled ruefully. "...Whatever it is, at least its got a soft spot for the misfits. The universe isn't usually too kind to a force of nature with a conscience, or a useless knucklehead who can't even scrub barnacles off a ship bottom."

Ford twitched.

"'Specially when the two are the one and the -"

"Don't."

Stan turned his head slowly to stare at the hand gripping his shoulder, bloodlessly tight. It takes Ford a moment too long to realize it's his own, that he had moved without even realizing it himself. It's an immediate reaction, that's what he will explain it to himself afterwards. Instinct.

"...Don't say that about yourself," Ford said haltingly. "You're not useless. Not by any measure. And -"

He doesn't know what to say for a long second, cursing his inability to speak even somewhat intelligently about his own thoughts and emotions. But what else was there to say? Just the idea of valuing his brother in those terms of worth and purpose felt unfamiliar and ridiculous.

(But he had, hadn't he?

He dispelled those thoughts with a grimace. That had been… long, long ago. A lifetime, by any standard. He had all of this one to prove himself wrong.)

Stan looked to Ford's face, then to his hand, then back again, clearly at a bit of a loss for words.

"Y'know," his brother said conversationally, an extra slight roughness at the edge of his voice. "I feel like I should be lookin' for a hidden spy camera. 'S like… like I'm waiting for that mindless reality TV guy to jump out of the floor screaming at the top of his lungs."

"There's - really no need to worry?" Ford offered, slightly confused with the direction the conversation had gone. "There are no hidden spy cameras in my laboratory. I've checked quite thoroughly."

"I didn't mean it seriously, Sixer -"

"...Other than the set gifted to me from the shadow government, of course."

Stan gives him a Look. "Y'know what," he said finally. "I'm not even gonna ask."

"But," Ford tried again, honestly feeling just a bit put out. "You do understand what I just -"

"No. Yeah. I do. It's just…" Stan dragged a hand down his face, obscuring his suddenly quiet voice in a way that Ford could barely hear what he was saying. "...Just, hard to believe. I mean I do," he added at the stricken look on Ford's face. "...Mostly. I need some… time, yeah. What can I say, a whole lot's happenin' and I'm just an old, old man -"

"We're the same age, Stanley."

"Well," his brother revised with a shrug, "then we're both old men, so I say we both need some sit-down time that isn't on a cold metal surface."

He paused, a faraway look in his eyes. "Y'know what sounds real good? That old armchair of mine, in front 'f the TV. Hugs my butt. Would hug yours too, I'm sure. Same butt."

"That's not how that works," Ford protested, before he could stop himself. "...Even if all of our physical features were identical at birth - which is already a false premise, considering we have a certain major difference - after my decades of running from the galactic police and your decades of…" He paused. "...Sitting on your couch watching melodramatic avian detective reruns -"

Stan scoffed. "Just cuz you don't appreciate a finely crafted children's show with multi-generational appeal -"

"My point is, Stanley. We do not have the same butt." Ford paused, then said with the straightest face he could muster, "Mine is clearly superior."

Stan gaped at him, and he really shouldn't feel as triumphant as he did about shocking his brother into speechlessness, not when he was fifty-eight years old.

That thought lasted for about two seconds before Ford decided that no, that was exactly why that had felt so good.

"You nerd," his brother said finally, disbelievingly. "Fine, y'know what? Great. Perfect. We'll go upstairs and you can plop your 'superior' wrinkly ass right in front of that TV. Watch all the ridiculous sci-fi series ya want. You've earned it."

Ford perked up at that. "Ridiculous sci-fi TV, you say?"

Stan rolled his eyes in familiar exasperation and reached up to peel Ford's hand from his shoulder. The moment his hand took hold of his, he froze. His expression was unreadable as he felt across the palm of the glove, and when he turned his hand into visibility, Ford could see why.

The surface of his glove had been utterly destroyed, torn and melted in equal intervals, especially impressive considering Ford had gotten them tailored with both fire-proof and knife-proof material. Bubbles of congealed vlastik, supposedly indestructible by the vast majority of forces in the universe, lined the edges of his hand.

And yet, the exposed skin of his hand was untouched. Literally, it seemed, because it was the soft, raw pink of newly regrown flesh - uncallused, unscarred, unrecognizable.

It matched perfectly the shade and hue of Stan's own extended hand and wrist, which presumably continued to the rest of his body. It does not take long for Ford to understand.

"Stan," he started, and his brother flinched immediately.

"...This isn't a conversation I'm having right now," Stan said loudly, as if he could block out the possibility by sheer force of will. "Nope, nope, nope."

Ford looked again at the new, new skin on his hand. What existed before had been dead, destroyed beyond all recovery. It had become a blank slate now, missing decades worth of history written down in healed white scars and telltale calluses. They… hadn't been the best memories, but they had made him him.

"I never wanted you to give up so much for me," he said quietly.

"It doesn't matter what you wanted, alright?" Stan snapped, an outburst that seemed to surprise both of them. "...It was what I wanted. Isn't -"

He faltered. "Isn't that enough?"

There was nothing Ford could say to that. For a single moment that felt like years, they stood, eyes locked and bodies tensed, neither willing to take that final step and break their delicate silence.

Then his brother sagged. "My balls are gonna fall right off if I hafta stay down here for another minute," he muttered.

The unexpected vulgarity of the statement killed all tension in the room near immediately. Ford winced, aghast. "Stanley."

"Look. We'll talk." Stan looked at him, a pained expression on his face. "I just - I really need pants for this conversation, alright?"

#gravity falls #gravity falls fic #atns #its been so long i forgot how to tag lol #my fic

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sagebodisattva · 7 years ago

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The Theory of Everything - Master Equation of the Universe REVEALED!

"A theory of everything (ToE), final theory, ultimate theory, or master theory is a hypothetical single, all-encompassing, coherent theoretical framework of physics that fully explains and links together all physical aspects of the universe. Finding a theory of everything is one of the major unsolved problems in physics. Over the past few centuries, two theoretical frameworks have been developed that, as a whole, most closely resemble a theory of everything. These two theories upon which all modern physics rests are general relativity (GR) and quantum field theory (QFT). General relativity is a theoretical framework that only focuses on gravity for understanding the universe in regions of both large-scale and high-mass: stars, galaxies, clusters of galaxies, etc. On the other hand, quantum field theory is a theoretical framework that only focuses on three non-gravitational forces for understanding the universe in regions of both small scale and low mass: sub-atomic particles, atoms, molecules, etc. Quantum field theory successfully implemented the Standard Model and unified the interactions (so-called Grand Unified Theory) between the three non-gravitational forces: weak, strong, and electromagnetic force.

Through years of research, physicists have experimentally confirmed with tremendous accuracy virtually every prediction made by these two theories when in their appropriate domains of applicability. In accordance with their findings, scientists also learned that general relativity and quantum field theory, as they are currently formulated, are mutually incompatible – they cannot both be right. Since the usual domains of applicability of general relativity and quantum field theory are so different, most situations require that only one of the two theories be used. As it turns out, this incompatibility between general relativity and quantum field theory is apparently only an issue in regions of extremely small-scale and high-mass, such as those that exist within a black hole or during the beginning stages of the universe (i.e., the moment immediately following the Big Bang). To resolve this conflict, a theoretical framework revealing a deeper underlying reality, unifying gravity with the other three interactions, must be discovered to harmoniously integrate the realms of general relativity and quantum field theory into a seamless whole: a single theory that, in principle, is capable of describing all phenomena. In pursuit of this goal, quantum gravity has become an area of active research.

Eventually a single explanatory framework, called "string theory", emerged that intends to be the ultimate theory of the universe. String theory posits that at the beginning of the universe (up to 10−43 seconds after the Big Bang), the four fundamental forces were once a single fundamental force. According to string theory, every particle in the universe, at its most microscopic level (Planck length), consists of varying combinations of vibrating strings (or strands) with preferred patterns of vibration. String theory further claims that it is through these specific oscillatory patterns of strings that a particle of unique mass and force charge is created (that is to say, the electron is a type of string that vibrates one way, while the up-quark is a type of string vibrating another way, and so forth)."

Of course, the pursuit to find a single unifying theory that is capable of describing all phenomena will remain elusive to mankind for so long as he keeps on the materialist blinders and continually ignores the deeper implications of quantum mechanics. For so long as he dismisses these implications, relegating them to quantum quackery, and maintains his tunnel vision for objectivity and externalism, he is simply not pursuing the truth of reality. Yes, REALITY. It's not even a question of a universe. It's a question of reality; of which, the universe is just a feature. I mean, really... How ignorant and short sighted do you have to be to focus your scientific inquires solely on visual phenomena and completely ignore that which gives visual phenomena context? Talk about putting the cart before the horse! Or, even worse, to take it for granted as some inconsequential default given that plays no part in the reality equation? It's simply foolish.

And so now, "string theory", is the best they could come up with, in establishing a single explanatory framework... and don't get me wrong, it's a decent theory. Perhaps the best one to date... but it's still WRONG, as it continues to make the same ole mistake. String theory talks about what happened right after the big bang, when the so called "universe", was seconds old... when all four of the so called "forces", were a single fundamental force! Then goes on to posit that every particle in the universe is composed of combinations of vibrating strings at the microscopic level, which vibrate according to preferred patterns! And from this, particles of unique mass and force charge are created! GASP! Wow! That's sure a whole lot of complex materials out there doing lots of inexplicably strange things! It feels like we are getting closer to the truth, doesn't it?? I dunno, does it? Or are these just conceptual models crafted from abstractions, that are based on limited perceptions of experience, that are often filtered through a prosthetic technology, attempting to describe events that mankind has never even seen with his own eyes?

"Yes, but our telescopes and microscopes allow the inductive and deductive logical reasoning required to make inferences and attributions about the universe!"

Yes, of course.. and that's nice. But it has nothing to do with the truth. This is something you're gonna have to face up to sooner or later, and the sooner you face up to it, the better off you'll be: Material science doesn't deal in the truth. Sorry. In fact, material science is dead... they just don't know it yet... at least as it pertains to the discovery of the truth of reality.

"Yeah, but material science deals in facts!"

And, so what? Facts are not the truth. Can you prove the fact of the fact is a fact? I don't think you can. And even if you tried, your conclusion is still going to heavily involve YOU as the main key ingredient in substantiating any such proof, despite your denial of this, and your dismissal of the subject as extraneous. Facts are, at best, temporary provisional circumstances. They are situational stock. Visual arrangements in the limited scope of sense perception illusion. So, if you are interested in describing illusion, then yeah, stick with material science... but don't do so and pretend that you are in pursuit of the truth. If you are actually interested in the truth, you will make the scientific inquiry with the approach of idealism... and if so, THEN you might actually begin to get somewhere with your exploratory investigations. But until then, you are just dicking around with abstractions about illusory objects that have nothing to do with the fundamentals of reality.

So, with this in mind, it's obvious why the theory of everything has been so elusive to mankind. All this time man has pursued it, he has been approaching it with a false premise. No wonder he isn't getting anywhere!

"But we've discovered quarks!"

It goes even deeper then that! If I told you that it goes on forever, and never has an end, would you keep voluntarily tumbling down that rabbit hole? You feel like you don't have a choice, and feel you must do so to uphold the integrity of science and knowledge, but that's only because you don't understand that it's an illusion, hence you are holding a false premise, thus you are taking the completely wrong approach, despite it feeling so right. Like the thirsty guy who keeps on walking down the highway towards the water on the horizon, unable to recognize that what he is pursuing is merely a mirage.

"So what about an underlying mathematical pattern that accounts for all phenomena?"

After everything I've just said, if you are still asking that question, then you have seemingly missed the point... but, if you feel you really need a master equation to sleep better at night, then I will finally tell you the ancient top secret elusive mathematical equation of the universe that physicists have long sought over the course of many years. This is the big reveal folks. This is full disclosure.

The reason the master equation has always evaded the scientist's grasp, is because said scientist's have been applying themselves to the problem with the wrong approach. All this time, they were trying to put a square peg into a round hole. To unravel the master equation involves a higher form of mathematics; a "meta math", if you will, to give full clarity to the enigmatic solution. This is a form of math far beyond linear algebra, vector calculus, differentials, probabilities, number theory or real analysis. This is an area of math that could best be described as mathematical metaphysics. A kind of metaphysical math that can only be applied when approaching mathematics from the meta perspective. This is the math of math.

And so, without further ado, here is the Meta Sage's theory of everything. The master equation of the universe REVEALED!

0 + 1 - 1 = 0.

And I'm dead serious. This is no joke. Zero, plus one, minus one, equals zero...

And I know many of you may be screaming, or groaning, or face palming, but that's because you still don't get it. You still have not broken the externalization mindset conditioning. But you'll see, if this has to stand the test of time, so be it. This is the record of my claim. And you'll see, years from now, long after I'm dead and gone, they'll find out that I was right. But that's because physics has a worm's eye view, while metaphysics flies higher then an eagle.

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s-c-i-guy · 7 years ago

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Where Gravity Is Weak and Naked Singularities Are Verboten

Recent calculations tie together two conjectures about gravity, potentially revealing new truths about its elusive quantum nature.

Physicists have wondered for decades whether infinitely dense points known as singularities can ever exist outside black holes, which would expose the mysteries of quantum gravity for all to see. Singularities — snags in the otherwise smooth fabric of space and time where Albert Einstein’s classical gravity theory breaks down and the unknown quantum theory of gravity is needed — seem to always come cloaked in darkness, hiding from view behind the event horizons of black holes. The British physicist and mathematician Sir Roger Penrose conjectured in 1969 that visible or “naked” singularities are actually forbidden from forming in nature, in a kind of cosmic censorship. But why should quantum gravity censor itself?

Now, new theoretical calculations provide a possible explanation for why naked singularities do not exist — in a particular model universe, at least. The findings indicate that a second, newer conjecture about gravity, if it is true, reinforces Penrose’s cosmic censorship conjecture by preventing naked singularities from forming in this model universe. Some experts say the mutually supportive relationship between the two conjectures increases the chances that both are correct. And while this would mean singularities do stay frustratingly hidden, it would also reveal an important feature of the quantum gravity theory that eludes us.

“It’s pleasing that there’s a connection” between the two conjectures, said John Preskill of the California Institute of Technology, who in 1991 bet Stephen Hawking that the cosmic censorship conjecture would fail (though he actually thinks it’s probably true).

The new work, reported in May in Physical Review Letters by Jorge Santos and his student Toby Crisford at the University of Cambridge and relying on a key insight by Cumrun Vafa of Harvard University, unexpectedly ties cosmic censorship to the 2006 weak gravity conjecture, which asserts that gravity must always be the weakest force in any viable universe, as it is in ours. (Gravity is by far the weakest of the four fundamental forces; two electrons electrically repel each other 1 million trillion trillion trillion times more strongly than they gravitationally attract each other.) Santos and Crisford were able to simulate the formation of a naked singularity in a four-dimensional universe with a different space-time geometry than ours. But they found that if another force exists in that universe that affects particles more strongly than gravity, the singularity becomes cloaked in a black hole. In other words, where a perverse pinprick would otherwise form in the space-time fabric, naked for all the world to see, the relative weakness of gravity prevents it.

Santos and Crisford are running simulations now to test whether cosmic censorship is saved at exactly the limit where gravity becomes the weakest force in the model universe, as initial calculations suggest. Such an alliance with the better-established cosmic censorship conjecture would reflect very well on the weak gravity conjecture. And if weak gravity is right, it points to a deep relationship between gravity and the other quantum forces, potentially lending support to string theory over a rival theory called loop quantum gravity. The “unification” of the forces happens naturally in string theory, where gravity is one vibrational mode of strings and forces like electromagnetism are other modes. But unification is less obvious in loop quantum gravity, where space-time is quantized in tiny volumetric packets that bear no direct connection to the other particles and forces. “If the weak gravity conjecture is right, loop quantum gravity is definitely wrong,” said Nima Arkani-Hamed, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study who co-discovered the weak gravity conjecture.

The new work “does tell us about quantum gravity,” said Gary Horowitz, a theoretical physicist at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

The Naked Singularities

In 1991, Preskill and Kip Thorne, both theoretical physicists at Caltech, visited Stephen Hawking at Cambridge. Hawking had spent decades exploring the possibilities packed into the Einstein equation, which defines how space-time bends in the presence of matter, giving rise to gravity. Like Penrose and everyone else, he had yet to find a mechanism by which a naked singularity could form in a universe like ours. Always, singularities lay at the centers of black holes — sinkholes in space-time that are so steep that no light can climb out. He told his visitors that he believed in cosmic censorship. Preskill and Thorne, both experts in quantum gravity and black holes (Thorne was one of three physicists who founded the black-hole-detecting LIGO experiment), said they felt it might be possible to detect naked singularities and quantum gravity effects. “There was a long pause,” Preskill recalled. “Then Stephen said, ‘You want to bet?’”

The bet had to be settled on a technicality and renegotiated in 1997, after the first ambiguous exception cropped up. Matt Choptuik, a physicist at the University of British Columbia who uses numerical simulations to study Einstein’s theory, showed that a naked singularity can form in a four-dimensional universe like ours when you perfectly fine-tune its initial conditions. Nudge the initial data by any amount, and you lose it — a black hole forms around the singularity, censoring the scene. This exceptional case doesn’t disprove cosmic censorship as Penrose meant it, because it doesn’t suggest naked singularities might actually form. Nonetheless, Hawking conceded the original bet and paid his debt per the stipulations, “with clothing to cover the winner’s nakedness.” He embarrassed Preskill by making him wear a T-shirt featuring a nearly-naked lady while giving a talk to 1,000 people at Caltech. The clothing was supposed to be “embroidered with a suitable concessionary message,” but Hawking’s read like a challenge: “Nature Abhors a Naked Singularity.”

The physicists posted a new bet online, with language to clarify that only non-exceptional counterexamples to cosmic censorship would count. And this time, they agreed, “The clothing is to be embroidered with a suitable, truly concessionary message.”

The wager still stands 20 years later, but not without coming under threat. In 2010, the physicists Frans Pretorius and Luis Lehner discovered a mechanism for producing naked singularities in hypothetical universes with five or more dimensions. And in their May paper, Santos and Crisford reported a naked singularity in a classical universe with four space-time dimensions, like our own, but with a radically different geometry. This latest one is “in between the ‘technical’ counterexample of the 1990s and a true counterexample,” Horowitz said. Preskill agrees that it doesn’t settle the bet. But it does change the story.

The Tin Can Universe

The new discovery began to unfold in 2014, when Horowitz, Santos and Benson Way found that naked singularities could exist in a pretend 4-D universe called “anti-de Sitter” (AdS) space whose space-time geometry is shaped like a tin can. This universe has a boundary — the can’s side — which makes it a convenient testing ground for ideas about quantum gravity: Physicists can treat bendy space-time in the can’s interior like a hologram that projects off of the can’s surface, where there is no gravity. In universes like our own, which is closer to a “de Sitter” (dS) geometry, the only boundary is the infinite future, essentially the end of time. Timeless infinity doesn’t make a very good surface for projecting a hologram of a living, breathing universe.

Despite their differences, the interiors of both AdS and dS universes obey Einstein’s classical gravity theory — everywhere outside singularities, that is. If cosmic censorship holds in one of the two arenas, some experts say you might expect it to hold up in both.

Horowitz, Santos and Way were studying what happens when an electric field and a gravitational field coexist in an AdS universe. Their calculations suggested that cranking up the energy of the electric field on the surface of the tin can universe will cause space-time to curve more and more sharply around a corresponding point inside, eventually forming a naked singularity. In their recent paper, Santos and Crisford verified the earlier calculations with numerical simulations.

But why would naked singularities exist in 5-D and in 4-D when you change the geometry, but never in a flat 4-D universe like ours? “It’s like, what the heck!” Santos said. “It’s so weird you should work on it, right? There has to be something here.”

Weak Gravity to the Rescue

In 2015, Horowitz mentioned the evidence for a naked singularity in 4-D AdS space to Cumrun Vafa, a Harvard string theorist and quantum gravity theorist who stopped by Horowitz’s office. Vafa had been working to rule out large swaths of the 10500 different possible universes that string theory naively allows. He did this by identifying “swamplands”: failed universes that are too logically inconsistent to exist. By understanding patterns of land and swamp, he hoped to get an overall picture of quantum gravity.

Working with Arkani-Hamed, Luboš Motl and Alberto Nicolis in 2006, Vafa proposed the weak gravity conjecture as a swamplands test. The researchers found that universes only seemed to make sense when particles were affected by gravity less than they were by at least one other force. Dial down the other forces of nature too much, and violations of causality and other problems arise. “Things were going wrong just when you started violating gravity as the weakest force,” Arkani-Hamed said. The weak-gravity requirement drowns huge regions of the quantum gravity landscape in swamplands.

Jorge Santos (left) and Toby Crisford of the University of Cambridge have found an unexpected link between two conjectures about gravity.

Weak gravity and cosmic censorship seem to describe different things, but in chatting with Horowitz that day in 2015, Vafa realized that they might be linked. Horowitz had explained Santos and Crisford’s simulated naked singularity: When the researchers cranked up the strength of the electric field on the boundary of their tin-can universe, they assumed that the interior was classical — perfectly smooth, with no particles quantum mechanically fluctuating in and out of existence. But Vafa reasoned that, if such particles existed, and if, in accordance with the weak gravity conjecture, they were more strongly coupled to the electric field than to gravity, then cranking up the electric field on the AdS boundary would cause sufficient numbers of particles to arise in the corresponding region in the interior to gravitationally collapse the region into a black hole, preventing the naked singularity.

Subsequent calculations by Santos and Crisford supported Vafa’s hunch; the simulations they’re running now could verify that naked singularities become cloaked in black holes right at the point where gravity becomes the weakest force. “We don’t know exactly why, but it seems to be true,” Vafa said. “These two reinforce each other.”

Quantum Gravity

The full implications of the new work, and of the two conjectures, will take time to sink in. Cosmic censorship imposes an odd disconnect between quantum gravity at the centers of black holes and classical gravity throughout the rest of the universe. Weak gravity appears to bridge the gap, linking quantum gravity to the other quantum forces that govern particles in the universe, and possibly favoring a stringy approach over a loopy one. Preskill said, “I think it’s something you would put on your list of arguments or reasons for believing in unification of the forces.”

However, Lee Smolin of the Perimeter Institute, one of the developers of loop quantum gravity, has pushed back, arguing that if weak gravity is true, there might be a loopy reason for it. And he contends that there is a path to unification of the forces within his theory — a path that would need to be pursued all the more vigorously if the weak gravity conjecture holds.

Given the apparent absence of naked singularities in our universe, physicists will take hints about quantum gravity wherever they can find them. They’re as lost now in the endless landscape of possible quantum gravity theories as they were in the 1990s, with no prospects for determining through experiments which underlying theory describes our world. “It is thus paramount to find generic properties that such quantum gravity theories must have in order to be viable,” Santos said, echoing the swamplands philosophy.

Weak gravity might be one such property — a necessary condition for quantum gravity’s consistency that spills out and affects the world beyond black holes. These may be some of the only clues available to help researchers feel their way into the darkness.

#quantum physics #general relativity #gravitational physics #quantum gravity

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robonomics · 6 years ago

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Is Property a Right or Physical?

Last week, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that ReDigi’s business format violated Copyright laws in Capitol Records, LLC. v. ReDigi Inc. The lawsuit was filed by music producing companies. Until hearing about this case, I never knew such a company existed, or what it did. But once I did, I began to wonder again, just like in my first week of property law class, what is property?

ReDigi’s* business model transfers digital music from one person’s hard drive to theirs for resale to another person after fully deleting the file from the original purchaser’s hard drive. According to ReDigi, their system fully got rid of the file from the original owner’s, and temporarily stored the file onto ReDigi’s "lockers” until a new person bought it from them, where ReDigi would transfer and fully delete any possession of it.** The court held that this was not actually a transfer of the property, but instead of a form of replication to make a copy from the original purchaser to the new buyer and ReDigi.

Here’s where I get confused. Property is by definition the right of ownership over something. There are several levels of property rights: ownership, title, possession, control, use, etc. So really property is a legal right of ownership of some form over something. Some call is a bundle of sticks- each stick a different attribute needed to form the bundle considered “property”. Physical objects are the easiest to understand when it comes to property rights. If it is physical, there can only be one tangible object to lay claim to. Its use, transfer, location, and existence is not up for debate because any action over it has a physical component or representation that is the actual property itself unattached to something else.

Not so much with intangible property. Ideas and information are not physical, even when they are put into physical form. Let’s get philosophical for a moment. A word is the representation of an idea. It can be shown physically on paper like in a book, or digitally like on a computer screen. But when you start to think about it further, it’s really just an idea. The digital representation of it on a screen is really just a projection of some algorithm reading a bunch of 1s and 0s in software code. In both instances, it’s still just representing the idea of the word itself. And when you continue to think about it, even the sound we make with our mouths is another physical expression of the idea that is the word, just that it comes out in a wave and can only be put into captured form when put on a recording devise. All of this is to say that a word is just an idea- something that is intangible even though there are physical ways of expressing it.

This is where the difficult part lies with determining property rights for intangibles. The right attaches primarily to the idea, and not the physical expression of that idea. The ReDigi case, however, is doing just the opposite. It transferred the right over information manifested in it’s physical form as if that’s where the intangible property right lies.

The problem with this case is that it didn’t rule on the fact that ReDigi’s software doesn’t actually completely rid buyers from the ability to make copies after they transfer the song to ReDigi. It operated under the fact scenario that ReDidgi’s product makes replications, with the assumption that previous owners possession of the product was completely extinguished in the transfer process. Let’s assume a product was made where full deletion of the original purchaser’s product was possible. The law in this case bars such a system from operating. Pretend a company comes into being similar to iTunes where they sell original copies of music under licensing agreements from music producers, but they also allow users to sell the titles back to them after they’re done and the files never leave the company’s system- a form of undownloadable/uncopyable (?) streaming or something to prevent the removal of music from the seller’s platform. To emphasize this hypothetical situation, the music cannot be copied anywhere else and just stays on the system. This case bars the user from selling the music back to the system second hand like they could if they sold a used physical book or CD. Even though they have a right of ownership over a single song based on their purchase, this case says that unless you attach it to a physical object that is for sale, you have no right to sell it again.

This is where I struggle with rights over intangibles. The law wants to give them copyright protection, but because of the ease of replication from thieves, it then prevents those who are legitimately in a situation to make a second hand sale from doing so. The more intangible a product or service, the less property rights a buyer has over what they own. Even worse, I assume the companies making intangible products create contracts that will over time further and further erode what a person can do with it. The prominence of the sharing or lending economy is growing more and more. I guarantee the original creator’s rights will get stronger.

The weird part is that courts know what to do if say the owner decides to stream the music after they buy it to let millions of other listen to it for a cheaper price than the original producer. You need a licensing agreement for that. Radio stations have been using this business model since your grandparents time. Under a licensing scenario, the property right isn’t transferring to the listener when received, just its physical representation. In this case, however, there is no licensing agreement needed, because a person isn’t just temporarily transferring the physical representation of the file (sound). Instead they are extinguishing any claim of right over it to a secondary market. The ability to make copies or stream the property ceases (theoretically) once the first purchaser sells the song to a secondary market. To be clear, the right no longer exists- i.e. property no longer exists.

All of this assumes the ability to retain the property goes away. If it doesn’t, you get into the hard problem with defining property, and why its a lot like a bundle of sticks.You might not have the right of dominion and control over a music file legally, but you may have possession of it illegally, and therefore the ability to use it. You can see why the concept of property is difficult. Even I’m getting lost as I try to logically write this babbling nonsense.

Since we’re on the subject, I’d like to say that property right protections got stronger over time as Congress deemed it important that inventors have longer dominion over their creations. I don’t necessarily agree with this, however. Why does Disney get to control Mickey Mouse for 75 years while a person who invented the cell phone get a couple decades? Why does an author get their whole life + 50 years? Why is their family so fucking special? Economists agree that property rights are essential to the proper functioning of an economy, but also universally agree that monopoly hurts it. Exclusive property rights for a temporary period of time supposedly encourages innovation, but how is innovation encouraged when you just need to make one good thing to carry you through the rest of your life? When reading history, grants of monopoly were determined to be wrong (see East India Trading Co. and other markets for goods). Why is it that the inventions or innovative ideas in certain markets get to last so long? And further, why is it that some get to control property long after they sell it while others do not? Why do some forms of property get to hold ownership over their altered posterity, like genetically modified seeds creating new plants with a non-genetically modified plant, while others do not, like parodied music? It’s not always just a matter of the nature of the product or market it operates in. At this point I’m just rambling. I think temporary monopolies awarded for innovation can be a good incentive (lots of debate on whether this is true or not), but in some places “temporary” was forgotten. It is more fitting to call it protectionist. I imagine that Disney will lobby hard to extend their exclusive property rights when Mickey Mouse comes up for expiration in the next couple years (I’ve heard there is a possibility extending the protection period to 125 years, if I remember correctly).

Anyways, this long post was written over two separate sittings (The Innocent Man documentary on Netflix got in the way) so it probably doesn’t make a lot of sense. Meh. The point is defining property is not easy, and from the looks of it, this court may have unfairly limited future innovation from creating a functioning secondary market in intangibles that doesn’t require a physical place to attach to. I think it’s amusing how the court actually said a person could find a lucrative way of buying 100 or so songs, loading it onto an iPod, and then sell it in the secondary market, as if that means that the person didn’t also keep the song on their hard drive. Sure, a secondary market could exist like that, but people aren’t going to want to shop for music on Craigslist like this- an alternative secondary market that is efficient could potentially exist if this case didn’t prevent it. The court seemed a bit ignorant to both technology and the fundamentals of what property is best described at its core- a right.

Side Note: ReDigi’s also claimed that their system was fair use, but was completely wrong. The court got it right on this front. Fair use implies some type of change in what the product is before selling it to others, like making a parody or using it for educational purposes. ReDigi’s system was nothing more than reselling the exact same product on the secondary market (or as the court found, just making an illegal replication). ReDigi claimed that their fair use was the creation of the secondary market. While creating a market is an innovative and separate creation, I don’t think it falls into the sphere of changing the files it sold or doing something that involved actually using the product for ancillary purposes other than straight up resell. ReDigi’s secondary market is not an instance of fair use.

*It is unclear if they are still in business for some other enterprise or not at the moment

**The case actually described how this was not truly the case. If a person bought a song from iTunes and uploaded it to their iCloud account, even after ReDigi’s software searched the owner’s computer for the file, it could not access their iCloud account to delete it. The original owner would still be able to access the file on their iCloud, while being able to sell the file to an ignorant ReDigi. Also, if someone copied the song onto a disk or other device not connected to the person’s computer hard drive, ReDigi’s software had no way of dealing with it. To me, this is the best grounds on which the court should have relied for why ReDigi’s business model was in violation of copyright laws.

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pricelessmomentblog · 8 years ago

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The Essential Education: If You Had Ten Years to Learn Anything, What Would You Do?

I can remember years ago having a discussion with someone about the purpose of college. I was arguing that university often doesn’t do a good job of preparing young people for the world of work, and my friend was arguing that I was missing the point. College isn’t about economic preparedness, but about educating people for life. Higher education shouldn’t be subjugated to the needs of the capitalist machinery.

I think this is mostly a fantasy. Like it or not, most people go to school for to improve their economic and social standings. High-minded ideals on the virtues of a broad liberal arts education are mostly lip service.

However, this debate got me thinking. Assuming you were to fulfill that high-minded goal of education, how would you do it?

I find it doubtful that the traditional university curriculum would be the best way to do that. Probably the best way wouldn’t involve an institution at all, but be something you undertook on your own.

What Would Be in Your Ideal Ten-Year Self-Education Quest?

So in this I’d like to engage in a speculative fantasy. If you had ten years, with the ability to support yourself on a modest stipend, how would you give yourself the best self-education in the world?

Admittedly, few people could put in ten years full-time, without working to support themselves. In that sense, this is a purely hypothetical exercise. However, I often find it useful to start with an ideal scenario first, and then make compromises to fit reality, than to start by immediately dismissing things out of practical concerns. Even if a ten year full-time self-education journey weren’t possible for most, perhaps it could be stretched through part-time study or sabbatacals over one’s entire lifetime.

Additionally, I’m going to focus on education purely for the sake of learning. The economic merits of skills and knowledge play no role in their importance. This doesn’t mean you can’t learn economically valuable skills, just that there’s no primacy given to learning accounting over art or finance over philosophy just because the former are more economically valuable.

Specialization, is similarly discountable. I want a broad-based education, deep enough to appreciate the richness of a subject, but not to devote every moment to a single skill just to become competitive in it.

Again, this isn’t to say that those motives aren’t important—they certainly are. But rather that it might be fun to imagine what you would learn if they weren’t important.

Think of this as the educational equivalent to the what-would-you-do-with-a-million-dollars speculation we often engage in to think about what are interests would be if we didn’t have to worry about money.

My Ten-Year Education Plan

Given this freedom to speculate, here’s what my ten year allocation of time would be, with explanations:

1. Three years lived abroad, in different languages and cultures.

The first thing I’d add is the very thing I find conspicuously absent in most liberal arts educations: living in a different culture. Travel, moreso than reading books, is truly a mind-expander. Especially if that travel is done with the intention of immersing in a culture and not spectating it as a tourist.

In my three-year journey, I’d spend two full years in a stable location to maximize language acquisition and deep experiences. Preferrably one year in Europe and one year in Asia. South America or Africa would also be reasonable substitutes, based on your own level of interest. This could hypothetically be one year in Germany and one year in India, or one year in Spain and one year in Japan.

The third year of living abroad would be shorter stays over more regions. The goal here would be to get the breadth of seeing a lot more places to miss the inevitable gaps that occur from a more concentrated exposure to a specific country.

I wouldn’t do these three years in a row, but spread out over the decade. Long-term travel is one of the most exhausting aspects of self-education and one of the most dependent on enthusiasm to successfully execute. Feeling burned out by new sights is the easiest way to kill an immersive experience.

2. One year of philosophy.

I think the best approach here would be to take a number of survey courses, followed by some deep investigation into a few of the classics. Understanding Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason or Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is probably a wasted effort if the context is not properly supplied.

Six months covering general courses in metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, philosophy of mind, logic, etc. would be a good basis for selecting which specific works you want to study in more depth.

I would also spend at least a third of the time focusing on non-Western philosophy. This is often missing in a lot of philosophy curricula because the traditions are often not directly comparable. However, studying Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism and other non-Western sources gives a greater sense of how the format of Western philosophy both assisted its development but also constrained it in subtle ways by accepting certain forms of argument but not others.

3. Six months of religion.

This could be seen as extension of philosophy, but it’s important enough that I think it deserves a separate space. One year here could be spent on all the major world religions. Even if you’re an atheist like me, I think this is hugely important because of the incredible force religion has had in shaping cultures and history.

4. Six months on world history.

Following religious studies, I’d spend six months learning world history. Admittedly this section is shallower than I put for philosophy, mostly because history is often learned indirectly through learning about other subjects (such as science, religion or philosophy). However, six months should be long enough to have a gist of the general history of most areas of the world as well as modest depth into a few key threads of history.

5. Two years on math and hard sciences.

I say two years not because these subjects are necessarily more important than philosophy or religion, but because they’re difficult enough that some minimal investment is necessary to learn anything interesting.

I’d probably focus more on math, since having a good grip of math underlies understanding almost all the other hard sciences. Perhaps a year to master calculus, geometry, statistics and discrete math. Another year spent to get a good foundation in the basics of physics, chemistry, biology and computer science.

6. One year devoted to art.

I’d spend a year split between studying the history of art and practicing creating art itself. Probably a month each spent learning the basics of sculpting, drawing and painting, then three months on a more specialized aspect of artistic development, pulled from whatever interests developed in the initial survey.

For art history, I’d spend time studying art from books, but also traveling to museums and galleries to see the art in person. This phase of the project could probably overlap with the third year of travel.

7. Six months on music.

I’d spend six months to learn a musical instrument. Learn to read musical notation and possibly the basics of composition. I think this could possibly be stretched into a year to encompass more instruments or getting deeper into composing, although that would probably involve scaling back on one of the other categories (perhaps art history).

8. Six months on meditation.

I’d allocate six months to be spent on an introspective journey. This would probably be spread throughout the ten years, although perhaps culminating in 1-3 months of dedicated time to some sort of meditative activity.

The goal here would be to more deeply understand yourself from experience, as opposed to from ideas and theory, as would be covered in the more academic sections on philosophy, religion and biology. I also believe that this pursuit would cultivate many of the characteristics you want such as temperance, discipline, patience and equanimity, which are often unrelated to knowledge.

9. Six months on economics and psychology.

I’m spending a lot less time on these subjects than I’ve devoted to others. In part because I feel that they are a lot less certain than the hard sciences, but also more theoretically constrained than philosophy. With hard sciences you can be more confident in the empirical results. With philosophy, you can be more open to the fact that they are speculative. However, I think there’s a lot of merit in learning the basic, relatively uncontested ideas in both fields.

10. Six months on practical skills.

In six months, I’d want to spend it learning the assortment of practical skills you’d want to be a self-sufficient, highly-functioning individual. Carpentry, metalwork, sewing, home repair, basic electrical work and plumbing, first-aid, simple car maintenance and others. The goal here would be to have a minimal competency in a bunch of occasionally useful simple skills, but also to create the confidence that one could easily learn more specialized aspects of these skills should the need arise.

Evaluating My Ten-Year Plan

In the space of ten years, perhaps from twenty to thirty (or perhaps as a retiree, from fifty-five to sixty-five), you could become decently versed in math, science, philosophy, religion, history, economics, psychology and art. You would know how to paint, sculpt, draw, play an instrument, fix a car, build a chair and write a computer program. You would speak at least three languages, although possibly more depending on how you allocated your travel time.

Even in the span of ten years, a lot would still be missing. There’s no anthropology. No literature or film. No architecture or athletics. However, the foundation would still be solid enough to build almost anything off of that in the future.

How Realistic Is This Plan?

This plan, as per my original conditions, is wildly optimistic. It assumes you can focus exclusively on self-education for a decade, without needing to work, support a family or be tied down to a physical location. It also assumes an unrealistic commitment to the higher ideals of self-education, with incredible commitment over a lengthy period of time.

However difficult, I’ve seen similarly lengthed self-education projects work to some extent. Benny Lewis spent around a decade traveling learning languages. Many in academia have spent a similar amount of time focused on a doctoral path that didn’t necessarily translate into job prospects.

What’s different about this ten-year plan isn’t that it’s impossible, but that it’s so thoroughly unconventional, few people would embrace it as an alternative to the more conformist paths available.

Despite these difficulties, some variant of this plan is how I see my own self-education unfolding, albeit with less long-term structure and certainly not a full-time commitment. I’ve already finished much of the travel requirement, and my exposures to many of the topics haven’t reached what I could do in the time suggested above, but they might reach that in time.

What Would Your Plan Be?

I’ve spelled out my hypothetical ten-year education, now I want to know about yours. Tell me what you would do if you had ten years to devote yourself to learn only the things you feel are important to your betterment as a human being.

What would you add that is missing in my list? What would you remove to make room for it? Where do you think I’ve spent too much time? Too little?

Share your thoughts in the comments!

The Essential Education: If You Had Ten Years to Learn Anything, What Would You Do? syndicated from http://ift.tt/2kl7pJj

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matteorossini · 8 years ago

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A reprehensible witch hunt in academia: feminist philosopher equates the defenses of transgenderism and of transracialism—and gets crucified

Gender is widely agreed by the Left to be a social construct, not a biological reality. If that’s the case, why isn’t race? Why was someone like Rachel Dolezal, who was white but claimed to be black, vilified and fired from her job as the Spokane, Washington head of the NAACP, while a man who claims to be a woman (or vice versa) is defended and her courage lauded? The distinction has always baffled me, especially because race is also seen to be a social construct.

Those were the questions asked in an article recently published in the feminist philosophy journal Hypatia by Rebecca Tuvel, an assistant professor of philosophy at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. Her piece is called “In defense of transracialism“, and is free online (reference and link below). I have only skimmed the full piece, but it’s dissected by Jesse Singal at New York Magazine’s “Intelligencer column” “This is what a modern-day witch hunt looks like.” And indeed, merely for pointing out that the arguments used to support transgender rights are similar to those that could be used to support transracial rights, Tuvel has been excoriated by academics, and the journal asked to retract the article. She has received a ton of hate mail. It is truly a Leftist witch hunt—a purity test that Tuvel apparently failed big time.

First, the abstract and first footnote in Tuvel’s paper:

And her concluding paragraph:

Haslanger writes, “rather than worrying, ‘what is gender, really?’ or ‘what is race, really?’ I think we should begin by asking (both in the theoretical and political sense) what, if anything, we want them to be” (Haslanger 2012, 246). I have taken it as my task in this article to argue that a just society should reconsider what we owe individuals who claim a strongly felt sense of identification with another race, and accordingly what we want race to be. I hope to have shown that, insofar as similar arguments that render transgenderism acceptable extend to transracialism, we have reason to allow racial self-identification, coupled with racial social treatment, to play a greater role in the determination of race than has previously been recognized. I conclude that society should accept such an individual’s decision to change race the same way it should accept an individual’s decision to change sex.

For this she is being crucified in public by her fellow academics, who accused her of not only being transphobic (not true at all), but perpetrating tangible harm and even violence on both the black and trans communities (another lie).

Part of Singal’s analysis:

Tuvel structures her argument more or less as follows: (1) We accept the following premises about trans people and the rights and dignity to which they are entitled; (2) we also accept the following premises about identities and identity change in general; (3) therefore, the common arguments against transracialism fail, and we should accept that there’s little apparent logically coherent reason to deny the possibility of genuine transracialism.

Anyone who has read an academic philosophy paper will be familiar with this sort of argument. The goal, often, is to provoke a little — to probe what we think and why we think it, and to highlight logical inconsistencies that might help us better understand our values and thought processes. This sort of article is abstract and laden with hypotheticals — the idea is to pull up one level from the real world and force people to grapple with principles and claims on their own merits, rather than — in the case of Dolezal — baser instincts like disgust and outrage. This is what many philosophers do.

Tuvel’s article rebuts a number of the arguments against transracialism, and it’s clear, throughout, that Tuvel herself is firmly in support of trans people and trans rights. Her argument is not that being transracial is the same as being transgender — rather, it’s “that similar arguments that support transgenderism support transracialism,” as she puts it in an important endnote we’ll return to. It’s clear, from the way Tuvel sets things up, that she’s prodding us to more carefully examine why we feel the way we do about Dolezal, not to question trans rights or trans identities.

Usually, an article like this, abstract and argumentatively complex as it is, wouldn’t attract all that much attention outside of its own academic subculture. But that isn’t what happened here — instead, Tuvel is now bearing the brunt of a massive internet witch-hunt, abetted in part by Hypatia’s refusal to stand up for her. The journal has already apologized for the article, despite the fact that it was approved through its normal editorial process, and Tuvel’s peers are busily wrecking her reputation by sharing all sorts of false claims about the article that don’t bear the scrutiny of even a single close read.

The biggest vehicle of misinformation about Tuvel’s articles comes from the “open letter to Hypatia” that has done a great deal to help spark the controversy. That letter has racked up hundreds of signatories within the academic community — the top names listed are Elise Springer of Wesleyan University, Alexis Shotwell of Carleton University (who is listed as the point of contact), Dilek Huseyinzadegan of Emory University, Lori Gruen of Wesleyan, and Shannon Winnubst of Ohio State University. (Update: As of the morning of May 3, all the names had been removed from the letter. A note at the top of it reads “We have now closed signatories for this letter in order to send it to the Editor and Associate Editors of Hypatia.”)

In the letter, the authors ask that the article be retracted on the grounds that its “continued availability causes further harm” to marginalized people. The authors then list five main reasons they think the article is so dangerously flawed it should be unpublished. . .

Singal goes on to point out that four five of those reasons are based on a total misreading of Tuvel’s article, whose main point is given above and by Singal in his second and third paragraph. (The other criticism is trivial.) He then rebuts each of the “reasons,” and goes on to show how Tuvel is being ripped to shreds, unjustly, by academics. She has even been accused of “perpetrating violence” and “enacting harm”

The letter’s authors, presumably Leftists, are doing all they can do demonize Tuvel for–what? None of the objections recognize that the transgenderism and transracialism are both based on people feeling that they’re different from how their external appearance has led society to categorize them. One is based on genitalia, the other skin color. If a biological male feels that he is really a woman, why can’t a white person feel that they’re black? And regardless of which sex is “privileged,” people transition in both directions. But of course never underestimate Regressives’ tendency to reach a conclusion first (“white people have privilege and just can’t say they feel or are black”) and then find arguments to support it.

Singal concludes:

I could go on and on. This is a witch hunt. There has simply been an explosive amount of misinformation circulating online about what is and isn’t in Tuvel’s article, which few of her most vociferous critics appear to have even skimmed, based on their inability to accurately describe its contents. Because the right has seized on Rachel Dolezal as a target of gleeful ridicule, and as a means of making opportunistic arguments against the reality of the trans identity, a bunch of academics who really should know better are attributing to Tuvel arguments she never made, simply because she connected those two subjects in an academic article.

The Chronicle of Higher Education shows how the craven journal Hypatia apologized (you can see the journal’s reprehensible Facebook apology here, but I want to reproduce it because it so resembles the apologies of the accused during China’s Cultural Revolution:

From the Chronicle:

The article, ”In Defense of Transracialism,” by Rebecca Tuvel, an assistant professor of philosophy at Rhodes College, drew a significant backlash following its publication, in late March. The article discusses public perceptions of racial and gender transitions by comparing the former NAACP chapter head Rachel Dolezal’s desire to be seen as black with the celebrity Caitlyn Jenner’s public transition from male to female. [JAC: the article does far more than just draw a parallel!]

Since a backlash erupted on social media, more than 400 academics have signed an open letter to the editor of Hypatia calling for the article to be retracted. “Our concerns reach beyond mere scholarly disagreement; we can only conclude that there has been a failure in the review process, and one that painfully reflects a lack of engagement beyond white and cisgender privilege,” the letter says.

The journal’s Facebook apology responded to those concerns by saying that it would be looking closely at its editorial processes to make sure they are more inclusive of transfeminists and feminists of color, whom the journal said had been particularly harmed by the article. The journal also apologized for its initial response to the backlash, saying that an earlier Facebook post had “also caused harm, primarily by characterizing the outrage that met the article’s publication as mere ‘dialogue’ that the article was ‘sparking.’ We want to state clearly that we regret that the post was made.”

Tuvel has responded to the criticism (see here), apologizes for one or two items, like “deadnaming” Caitlyn Jenner (giving her pre-transition name), but ends in this way:

Calls for intellectual engagement are also being shut down because they “dignify” the article. If this is considered beyond the pale as a response to a controversial piece of writing, then critical thought is in danger. I have never been under the illusion that this article is immune from critique. But the last place one expects to find such calls for censorship rather than discussion is amongst philosophers.

Indeed. Philosopher Russell Blackford has been defending Tuvel on Twitter and criticizing the witch hunt in a series of tweets, calling attention to others’ defenses of Tuvel. I am proud to call him my friend. Read the following from bottom up, in chronological order:

And Yale’s Paul Bloom, Ceiling Cat bless him, has also defended Tuvel:

A bizarre and ugly attack by a group of philosophers directed toward a junior prof. https://t.co/gvbEr6rE2v

— Paul Bloom (@paulbloomatyale) May 2, 2017

Hypatia should be mocked and vilified for its cowardice, as should those academics who went after tuvel because her Gendankenartikel violated the Regressive Left’s norms of purity. These are not students attacking Tuvel—they are professional academics, and I have nothing but contempt for them. (Remember, today’s students are tomorrow’s professors.) I am appalled, but not surprised. I’ll end with Singal’s words:

. . . what’s disturbing here is how many hundreds of academics signed onto and helped spread utterly false claims about one of their colleagues, and the extent to which Hypatia, faced with such outrage, didn’t even bother trying to sift legitimate critiques from frankly made-up ones. A huge number of people who haven’t read Tuvel’s article now believe, on the basis of that trumped-up open letter and unfounded claims of “violence,” that it is so deeply transphobic it warranted an unusual apology from the journal that published it.

We should want academics to write about complicated, difficult, hot-button issues, including identity. Online pile-ons cannot, however righteous they feel, dictate journals’ publication policies and how they treat their authors and articles. It’s really disturbing to watch this sort of thing unfold in real time — there’s such a stark disconnect between what Tuvel wrote and what she is purported to have written. This whole episode should worry anybody who cares about academia’s ability to engage in difficult issues at a time when outrage can spread faster than ever before.

h/t: Grania

______

Tuvel. R. 2017. In defense of transracialism. Hypatia 32:263-278, DOI: 10.1111/hypa.12327

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mitigatedchaos · 8 years ago

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@remedialaction

I would argue that your use of the word meaningfully is a concession in and of itself, because property would exist, it merely would not be ever in contention under these circumstances. However, you’d still own yourself, and the results of your actions and the like, and should another person ever come into being, it would be then possible to determine ownership.

Except that no, it does not make sense within that context. There is no one to exclude, therefore the idea of property does not even apply.

Furthermore, since all matter within the system (if you insist on using this method as a crude hack) would belong to the original agent, it would imply that the first agent owned the second agent’s body, or at least literally everything they needed to survive, and could therefore coerce them virtually at will.

I disagree, property and self are intimately linked on a fundamental level, the very fact that you use possessive terms to indicate the person you are speaking to and attribute statements (really, actions) to is, again, a concession of this very fact.

It isn’t a concession, it’s a linguistic construct.

The principle of self-ownership is intrinsic, and its because of that fact that property, as a concept, exists.

It is not. In the one-agent system, the concept of direct physical control over bodily tissue would exist, but this is distinct from the concepts “ownership” and “property”.

How do we know this? Because you said the body-hijacker parasite doesn’t have a valid claim over your body. This is extra information which is not included in physical control of your body. If “property” and “direct physical control over body” are identical, then this extra information would be encoded into the universe and the parasite’s actions would be impossible, even though both you and I know it is physically possible to hijack nervous systems.

It is no less intrinsic, though; it follows naturally and necessarily from physical reality.

It does not. You have failed to produce an ought from your is. You can control your body. Why should you be able to?

In short, even if I was a pure materialist, I still can argue the necessary existence of property as a, well, property of reality.

You have not shown this. Property is not a property of reality. It does not exist in the same sense that minds do.

This is silly, because unless your end argument is that there is no such thing as an individual, following your argument here to its conclusion ends up hardly where you want.

Oh yes it does. Borders in some sense exist, but like the boundary between “chair” vs “stool” it’s more of a statistical effect describing a cluster that has real implications than a hard, solid line.

Individuality, too, is blurred rather than solid, more like a cluster of points than an opaque sphere. You argue that you have control, and therefore, absolute rights to property. You have no absolute control, and therefore, no absolute property, even if we run by the fiction of human rights.

Of course, you’re missing the point by attempting to appeal to outside exceptions or missing the actual core of the statement. My consciousness, and my conscious actions are my own, and only ever my own. You are attempting to obfuscate that.

Your actions are not purely your own. If they were then they could not be influenced by outside factors. And probably, weird stuff with minds will show up later in human history with transhumanism (could be 50 years, could be 10,000), so your moral system should be able to withstand that if it’s a true objective morality.

They influence your behavior but the behavior and actions ultimately are, again, your own. It is not an outside agent controlling you, it is an outside agent using means to manipulate you; they are not controlling you as one might a character in a video game.

Absolute responsibility is a crock. If they can manipulate you, then they have some share of control of you. If they literally have no impact whatsoever on your actions (a far cry considering just how potent some drugs can be), then it doesn’t even count as manipulation.

Such a hypothetical organism would not be able to do so any more than my seizing of your car makes it my car merely because I’m the one driving it. The organism would not have any claim to the body.

Why? It was your exclusive control that you said established the claim in the first place. Establishing exclusive control through a nervous system was the method by which the claims were established.

The simple fact is you do control yourself, and the results of your actions.

Let me know if you ever develop an executive functioning disorder, so we can talk about how that’s a bunch of baloney. You want absolute responsibility to be applied to agents. That requires absolute control. Absolute control doesn’t exist.

You acknowledge this as an implicit fact in your recognition of me as an independent entity, which you do each time you address me, and respond to my statements.

This implies a perfect binary of control is required. It is not.

The principle of self-ownership is logically necessary for us to even converse this way.

No, it is not. Distinctness from self precedes property, and is recognizable even in a single-agent system in which property is nonsensical.

Furthermore, you have still failed to derive the should for a principle of self-ownership which can make moral claims, independently from the fact that you have some level of control over your body.

To branch off, the funny thing is, even if it wasn’t the case, it would still be ideologically necessary to commit to supporting self-ownership and the right to property, because otherwise, you end up being arbitrary, and morality cannot be arbitrary, even if we were merely inventing it for the function of society.

Recognizing the personhood and utility of others, both of which precede property, is not arbitrary. The choice of property is arbitrary, which is part of why you have failed to convert your is to an ought.

either you have a right to keep all your property, or you can’t really argue that you have any property at all, and we fall into merely utilitarian claims and that’s hardly a road I think you want to fall down.

Oh ho, I do want to go down the road towards Utilitarianism, because Utilitarianism correctly recognizes that property is merely a tool to be exploited for the benefit of people, and both utility and personhood precede property.

To which the actual response, which I’ve stated, is that folks will invent new jobs that we never could have thought of now, and resolve the problem,

This is based on market faith. If machines are better than humans at literally everything, then there is no reason to ever hire humans. I’m not going to believe these jobs exist until their first instantiations are actually created.

to say nothing of the fact that this theoretical world of hyper-automation still needs consumers, and you seem to be running on this idea that production drives consumption, rather than the other way around.

This role is fulfilled by the owners of capital. Those without capital are the ones really in trouble there, as they need the capital owners’ property to exist, but the capital owners do not need them.

Given your supposed solution to this imagined crisis is essentially a rehash of socialist central planning, I feel more or less sound in dismissing it as an attempt to push that under a new guise,

The funny thing is that markets throughout the world manage to have some regulations like “don’t dump so much waste that the Cuyahoga river lights on fire” (where does that even fit into your framework, where someone could presumably claim water after it has evaporated?) which are “centrally planned”, and yet still produce enormous amounts of wealth. There’s a continuum, or perhaps some scale even more multidimensional than that, and the optimal point isn’t what you think it is.

yet that guise passed away already when your plan seemed to have very little to actually do with the supposed problem of this oncoming hyper-automation.

It’s actually a medium-term solution intended as a flexible response for the time period between “soon” and “all human economic labor whatsoever becomes obsolete.” There is the potential for a lot of unnecessary human suffering in there - much of which your system lacks the ability to morally condemn.

Long-term would probably be something like just cutting a check for some % of the output of the economy, but while an initial experiment in Canada was not a failure, there are reasons to believe such a policy is not suitable yet and should still be limited to much smaller experiments than a whole country.

#pihlosophy

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