(The material in this podcast is based on the science of volition, and the narrators were created with the help of NotebookLM, 2025 version.)
Transcript
Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today, we’re diving into something, well, pretty ambitious. It’s called volitional science.
That’s right. It’s presented as a uh revolutionary social theory, not just philosophy, but aiming to be a practical road map, a road map for human survival. Actually, that’s the scale we’re talking about.
Exactly. It’s trying to build a real science of how human societies work or should work.
And the sources you brought draw on some serious traditions.
Yeah. It’s an interesting mix, I think: physical science precision meets classical liberalism and Austrian economics, people like Galambos, Mises, Hayek, are definitely key influences here.
Okay. So what’s the driving force, the why now, for this theory? They talk about a critical juncture.
Right. That’s central. The argument is humanity hit this crossroads back on July 16th, 1945.
The Trinity test, the first atomic bomb.
Precisely. Physical science gave us the power for instant self-destruction. We’ve got, what, over 12,000 nuclear warheads today still?
Yeah.
But the sources argued that social science completely failed. It just didn’t develop the knowledge or maybe the moral framework to stop us from using those weapons.
So, volitional science steps in with a mission.
Yeah. The mission is huge.
Develop a social system that’s robust enough to navigate away from self-destruction to move past what they call political barbarism.
Political barbarism. Wow. And move towards what?
Towards becoming a stable, eventually even a space-faring civilization.
Providing the intellectual toolkit for permanent, durable progress.
Okay, let’s unpack this. Yeah, if that’s the big goal, where do we even start?
The foundation must be defining what makes us human, right? The volitional being.
Absolutely. It all starts there. What separates humans from, well, everything else.
Is it just intelligence?
It’s a specific kind of intelligence.
Volitional intelligence.
It’s the ability to use reason to make intentional choices that aren’t just instinct.
Choices aimed at happiness.
Exactly. A unique subjective vision of happiness for each person. A tree, a rock, even a smart animal, they largely run on programming, on instinct. Humans have that conscious non-instinctual choice capability.
And the sources say we can actually see evidence of this. It’s not just abstract.
Yeah. Two key observable markers. First, tool making, but crucially, making better tools over generations. That shows knowledge is accumulating, right? Not just using the same stick forever.
Exactly. Yeah.
And second, symbolic language, recorded in durable media writing, carving, or digital code. Now this ensures conceptual knowledge ideas are also preserved, built upon, and passed down.
Okay. So we have volitional beings. To build a science, you need clear terms, semantic precision.
Absolutely critical. They point out how, in physics, terms like volt or meter eventually settle through a sort of voluntary market dynamic. Everyone agrees on the meaning, and volitional science wants that same rigor for social organization.
Yes. And they argue the only truly rigorous foundation for that is property. Everything revolves around property.
Property. Okay. Not just land and houses, I assume.
No, much broader. They define three very distinct categories. It’s core to the whole system.
Let’s take the first two, maybe the easier ones. P0 and P2, right? P0 is primordial property. That’s you, your physical body, your mind, your neurological system, the absolute foundation.
Okay. Self-ownership basically,
Essentially. Yes. Then P2 is secondary property. That’s the tangible stuff you create or acquire through action. Your car, your phone, the food you grow, things you can physically transfer to someone else via, you know, voluntary exchange.
Straightforward enough. But then there’s P1, primary property. And this is where it gets revolutionary.
This is the pivot point. P1 is the intangible stuff. Thoughts, ideas, theories, inventions, music, stories, products of the mind.
And the claim here is pretty wild. That P1 makes up what is it over 99% of all value.
That’s the assertion, 99+%. It sounds nuts at first, given how we usually think about wealth.
It really does. I mean, how do you even quantify that? Our whole system values the P2 stuff, the tangible things. Ideas are often treated as free or just temporarily protected.
Well, that’s exactly their point. The argument is that our current economic and legal systems are fundamentally backward because they don’t recognize the primary value of P1.
So, the value of a car isn’t just the metal and plastic.
It’s overwhelmingly the ideas, the P1 that went into metal energy, engine design, electronics, logistics. Everything. The P2 car is just the physical manifestation.
And they argue P1 ownership is different from P2 ownership.
Completely different. You can sell your car, P2, transfer it entirely. But you can’t really sell the authorship of an idea, P1. You can license it for use, sure, but the fact that you originated it, that link is perpetual. Like you can’t sell a book and pretend someone else wrote it.
Ah, okay. That makes sense. Authorship is inherent. So P0, P1, P2. That’s the structure.
That’s the framework for analyzing everything that follows.
Which brings us to the rules of the game. The morality, you said it rests on just two postulates.
Just two remarkably simple axioms in geometry. The first postulate is about motivation.
Why do we do anything?
Simple. Volitional beings act to pursue greater happiness. We act because we’re dissatisfied with the current state and want to reach a subjectively better one. Happiness is unique to each individual.
Okay, that seems intuitive enough. What’s the second postulate?
This is the moral core. It states that all pursuits of happiness that do not involve coercion are equally valid.
Equally valid. So my way of pursuing happiness is just as legitimate as yours. Provided neither of us initiates coercion against the other. That’s the absolute line. This postulate is the foundation of what they call absolute morality.
Absolute morality, meaning the bare minimum rules needed for civilization.
Exactly. The minimal set required for society to survive and potentially thrive indefinitely.
And that boils down to one core rule.
Respect property. Full stop. Do not interfere with someone else’s property. P0, P1, or P2 ever. It’s an absolute prohibition on initiating interference.
Okay, hang on. Ever is strong. What about self-defense? If someone attacks my P0 in my body or tries to burn down my P2 house, surely I can interfere then.
Oh, good point. The sources are very careful here. The rule is about the initiation of interference or coercion. Self-defense isn’t initiation. It’s a response to initiated coercion.
So, defending yourself or your property is compatible with the rule.
Yes. Because it’s upholding your right to your own property, P0 P2, against someone else who broke the rule first by initiating coercion. The absolute is against starting the interference.
Got it. Initiation is the key distinction. That rule then creates a stark division in how people interact.
Fundamentally two ways. Coercion or markets.
Coercion being the foundation of, well, political states as we know them.
Yes. And the argument is that coercion is inherently destructive. They introduce something called the law of bureaucracy.
What does it?
It basically says coercion always destroys information. It suppresses knowledge, and it inevitably leads to results opposite to what was intended. Always.
How does it destroy information? That seems abstract.
Think about markets. Every voluntary purchase, every price agreed upon is a signal. It’s information about supply, demand, value, and preference. Millions, billions of signals creating this complex order.
Okay.
Coercion, like taxes, regulations, and central planning, overrides those signals. It substitutes a politician’s or bureaucrat’s limited knowledge and goals for that vast decentralized network of information.
So, you’re essentially blinding the system.
You’re replacing reality’s complexity with a simplistic top-down plan, which is almost guaranteed to be wrong or have unintended negative consequences. It destroys the knowledge embedded in free choices.
Whereas markets,
Markets are the opposite. They arise from noncoercive, voluntary interactions; they are adaptive evolutionary systems. And the claim is that they are the only social order capable of potentially unlimited, durable growth.
Strong claim. Is there evidence?
Well, the sources point to those stark historical examples, sometimes called the Orwellian experiments. West versus East Berlin, Hong Kong versus mainland China back then, South versus North Korea, right? Same people, same culture, split by line.
One side is heavily coercive socialist, the other at least partially market-based, more capitalist. And the difference in prosperity, freedom, even health. It emerged incredibly fast. A pretty dramatic illustration of the theory in action.
Okay, that contrast is compelling. But let’s loop back to P1, the ideas being 99% of value. If markets and non-coercion are key to growth, how do we fix the fact that the P1 creators, the scientists, the innovators, are, as the sources claim, basically not paid proportionally?
That’s the compensation gap. It’s the central economic problem science tries to solve. Why are the people creating the most fundamental value, the only producers, not properly compensated?
And the answer lies partly in the old tradition of the public domain, this idea that science should just be free, and partly, the state-run patent and copyright systems, which are seen as coercive, inadequate, and temporary fixes.
So volitional science proposes a different view of compensation.
Yes, compensation isn’t just payment for goods. Fundamentally, it’s an expression of gratitude. It’s the market acknowledging the value received from an innovator’s P1.
Gratitude.
Okay. And since P1 ownership, like authorship, is perpetual, then the compensation mechanism should also be perpetual. This leads to the concept of the natural estate.
A natural estate, what’s that?
Think of it like a perpetual trust set up for an innovator. Its purpose is to manage the licensing of their P1, their ideas, and receive the compensation the gratitude payments indefinitely, even long after the innovator has died.
So Isaac Newton, for example.
Here’s the classic example they use. Imagine if, since Principia Mathematica in 1687, every time calculus or his laws of motion were used in a commercial product or service, a tiny, nonzero royalty flowed back to the Newton Natural Estate.
Wow. The accumulated wealth would be astronomical.
Probably one of the largest financial entities on Earth. It just highlights the immense compounding value of foundational P1 over centuries.
But wouldn’t that cripple future innovation? If everyone has to pay royalties forever to Newton, Galileo, Archimedes, wouldn’t the cost become infinite?
Ah, that’s the crucial challenge they had to solve. How do you make perpetual compensation work without bankrupting progress?
And the answer is this automatic remoteness dilution. ARD.
It sounds complex, but the core idea is elegant. It’s the noncoercive licensing mechanism.
Okay, break it down. How does ARD work?
Two basic conditions for using someone’s P1. One, you have to apply it noncoercively. Two, you have to pay a non-zero royalty back to the innovator’s natural estate. Critically, you, the user, determine the royalty rate you think maximizes your own long-term profit from using that idea.
So, the user decides the rate, not some central authority.
Correct. But the magic is the remoteness dilution part.
Dilution means the payments get smaller.
Exactly. You’re building on layers upon layers of past ideas. Newton built on Kepler and Galileo, who built on others. The further upstream an idea is from your final product, the smaller its share of the royalty becomes.
How much smaller? Is there a formula?
It has to use a specific mathematical structure. A convergent series, think like 12, then 14, then 18, 116, and so on. Each step divides the previous one.
Why is that specific math so important?
Because a convergent series has a crucial property. Even if you add up an infinite number of terms representing infinite upstream innovations, the total sum never goes above a certain finite limit.
It never blows up to infinity.
Precisely. It guarantees the whole system is mathematically stable and financially viable forever, even with potentially infinite layers of past P1 contributions; the total royalty burden remains manageable.
Okay, that’s clever. Can you walk through that mousetrap example again, how the royalty gets split?
Sure. Let’s say you make a better mousetrap. You decide based on your business calculations that paying a 5% total royalty on revenue for all the P1 involved maximizes your profit.
Okay. 5% total.
Mr. X, who invented your specific mousetrap design, gets the biggest chunk of that 5%, maybe say 80% of it, right? He’s the most direct contributor.
But your mousetrap also uses older, more fundamental ideas. Maybe the principle of the lever, attributed way back to Archimedes, and the spring may be linked to Robert Hook. Because their ideas are much further upstream, much more remote from your final product, their natural estates would receive much smaller diluted shares of the remaining 20% of that royalty. Tiny fractions perhaps, but still a nonzero acknowledgement.
So everyone who contributed value, no matter how long ago, gets acknowledged and compensated proportionally through this automatically diluting system.
That’s the idea. It connects compensation directly to value creation across all time.
And this whole model forces you to rethink where value even comes from.
Absolutely. It highlights the product development process. The PDP value starts with innovation, then overcoming the disclosure barrier, getting the idea out there, then education and entrepreneurship to apply it, advertising to make people aware, and finally maintenance. Action doesn’t start at the factory door.
It starts in the mind, overcoming that initial barrier to share the P1.
There’s a chart they use: The Anchor Point of History.
Yeah. The AP chart. It visualizes this flow of knowledge from the past. Think Galileo, his ideas flow through and get integrated by someone like Newton or a modern innovator, who then builds upon it, creating a new P1 that flows into the future.
It’s like a river of ideas.
It’s the portrait of civilization, they call it, showing how all progress is built on this cumulative interconnected chain of P1, which they argue must be perpetually owned and compensated.
Implementing something this radical, though it requires huge changes, starting with basic business structures.
Definitely a core change required is moving away from the traditional employer-employee relationship.
Why? What’s wrong with that?
They see it as inherently based on a kind of subtle coercion, a holdover from older cast systems. The employer sets the wage, often disconnected from the specific value an individual actually creates. It creates conflict.
So what’s the alternative?
A universal shift to a buyer-seller of services model. Everyone from the inventor to the person assembling the product is treated as an independent contractor selling their services or licensing their P1.
And compensation is based on transparent revenue shares directly tied to the measurable value each person contributes. No more fixed wages set by a boss, but a share of the actual success generated. A true win-win structure.
Eliminate hitting that old hierarchy, right? Replacing it with a network of voluntary value-for-value exchanges.
And if society actually managed to adopt all this, the morality, the property rights, the compensation, the business structures, the payoff is that stable space-faring future, avoiding the critical juncture.
That’s the ultimate promise. Achieving what they call stabilized durable growth, escaping the cycles of boom, bust, and war driven by coercion.
Okay. If we connect this to the bigger picture, you mentioned the sources even apply this logic to alien contact.
Yeah, it’s a fascinating extension of the core principles. It directly addresses that common sci-fi fear, hostile alien invaders.
For the Independence Day scenario, they argue that it won’t happen.
The logic is based on economics and survival. Any civilization advanced enough to figure out practical interstellar travel. The P1 involved is immense must by necessity have already solved the problem of internal institutionalized coercion.
Why by necessity?
Because of the law of bureaucracy. A civilization still relying heavily on coercion would likely destroy itself through war, internal collapse, or ecological disaster long before it could develop the stable, cumulative knowledge and resources needed to cross interstellar space. Coercion inherently limits and destroys the very progress needed for such a feat.
So any alien showing up would have already passed some kind of moral or societal great filter.
Essentially, yes. They would have had to adopt principles aligned with absolute morality, respect for property, and noncoercion. Maybe they call it something else. But the functional principles must be there simply to survive long enough to become space-faring.
Meaning they wouldn’t be coming here to steal our water or enslave us.
Why would they? They’d understand implicitly that cooperation and trade are vastly more profitable and sustainable than conquest and plunder. They’d understand Ricardo’s law of association on a cosmic scale.
It’s always better to trade than to raid.
Exactly. So, the prediction is that any encounter with truly advanced extraterrestrials would likely lead to peaceful, mutually beneficial, noncoercive exchange. Trade, not war.
That is a surprisingly optimistic take derived from some pretty stark initial warnings. Progress itself requires moving beyond coercion.
That’s the implication. Noncoercion isn’t just nice. It’s the fundamental engine of durable progress and ultimately survival on a civilizational scale.
It ties back to that idea of infinite knowledge that we’re always just near the beginning of infinity, as one source puts it, right? And accessing that infinity requires continuous noncoercive creation in exchange of P1.
So here’s the final thought for you, the listener. If coercion always destroys information, always hinders progress, and noncoercion respecting property is what reveals knowledge and builds civilization, think about your own life. What information, what potential might you be inadvertently destroying through small acts of coercion, maybe even socially accepted ones? And conversely, what knowledge, what value are you revealing and contributing through your daily noncoercive actions, your voluntary exchanges, your own P1 creation? How do your choices fit into that vast portrait of civilization unfolding across cosmic time? Something to consider.
Powerful question to end on
Indeed. We’ll see you on the next Deep Dive.
For additional information, check out the book Blueprint for a Spacefaring Civilization.
