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But it isn’t scarce in a physical sense.

Take someone’s reputation. That isn’t a ‘scarce’ thing yet it’s a good thing there are laws against defamation.

Duplicate of #1346.

Imagine living on a flat planet that extends infinitely in all directions.

Land is not scarce on this planet.

You build a house, mixing your labor with an acre of land. Someone comes and takes your land, saying you have no cause for complaint since land isn’t scarce.

See how scarcity isn’t necessary for something to be property?

It’s right for the law to address and prevent the arbitrary, and that’s about more than just property. See #1345.

But the law against murder isn’t a dumb law even though it doesn’t refer to someone’s body being scarce property.

If current law isn’t based on what you claim it’s based on then that does make it less true.

Ridiculous definition of murder. Classic libertarian thought bending over backwards to reduce everything to property rights. Please cite a legal text where the definition of murder invokes scarce property.

I do expect innovation to suffer from current copyright infringement, yes. Just add up all the infringed copies being shared times the average price, that’s the damage being done and it discourages creators from creating more.

But digital money isn’t physically scarce like someone’s body. Your argument rests on physical property being special in some way.

Laws (against murder and other crimes) don’t reduce to physical property.

Libertarians often think that the purpose of the law is ONLY to define and enforce property rights. In reality, the purpose of the law is to prevent and address the arbitrary in social life.

It’s true that it would be arbitrary if anyone could just take your property against your will, but that doesn’t mean it’s the only kind of arbitrariness the law should prevent/address.

One can steal value without stealing physical property (as happens when you transfer someone’s digital money without their consent).

‘Lawbreakers get away with it all the time so it’s fine.’ How is that an argument?

‘To stop someone from murdering you you have to infringe on his private property by claiming an exclusive right on prohibiting his use of his privately owned gun to shoot you’ How is that different?

Copyright encourages creativity because the most creative work is done by the original work’s creator, and copyright protects that creation. Without that incentive, many original creators wouldn’t publish their creations in the first place.

Another way copyright promotes creativity is that it doesn’t allow creations that aren’t sufficiently creative.

People can still publish fan fiction as long as they get the copyright holder’s permission.

This idea isn’t marked as a criticism but presumably should be. (Though it need not be marked as a criticism anymore if it’s going to split up into multiple separate submissions as per #1324.)

This idea contains at least two claims and one question:

1. Copyright stifles creativity.
2. Fan fiction does not damage creators.
3. “Where is copyright good?”

It’s unwise to submit multiple ideas at once as they each become susceptible to ‘bulk criticism’. That can unduly weaken your own position.

Try submitting the ideas again, separately.

Not a lawyer but I believe such fan fiction would be considered a derivative work.

Copyright protects original creators’ exclusive right to create derivative works. So, selling your Star Wars fan fiction without permission from the copyright holders would be copyright infringement.

See this article.

I know.

I’m not quite sure, but it sounds like you are reverting your stance on having misread #696. Does that mean #1192 should be marked as a criticism after all?

But we don’t don't know if consciousness can emerge as a byproduct of computation […]

We do know that. From the laws of physics. From BoI ch. 6:

[E]xpecting a computer to be able to do whatever neurons can is not a metaphor: it is a known and proven property of the laws of physics as best we know them.

@knut-sondre-saebo, you write in the explanation for this revision:

I think the the law of excluded middle is more a property or constraint of existence, rather than a cause. Since we can treat universe as being something as a given, the reason it can't be something else is because the law of excluded middle constrains it to be what it is.

Revision explanations are meant to be short, eg ‘Fixed typo’ or ‘Clarified x’. Since the quote above contradicts #521, it might be worth submitting it as a criticism of #521, or as a separate idea. It doesn’t really work as a revision because revisions are for incremental changes, not for introducing contradictions.

There is a similar (identical?) theory put forward by Marc Lewis in The Biology of Desire. He explains addiction as the process of "reciprocal narrowing". The process of reciprocal narrowing does not remove conflicting desires, but instead reinforces a pattern of dealing with conflict through a progressively narrower, habitual response (substance, action, mental dissociation). Addiction, therefore, as you suggested, is a process of managing the "conflict between two or more preferences within the mind."

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