[Author’s Note: If you haven’t read the Preface and Introduction, please read at least their first few paragraphs before coninuing here. The chapters of this book are the acts in a play and the Preface and Introduction are the stage and its set. The play will deliver significantly more information on a stage properly set.]
The Blessed Curse of Abstractions
In the realm of accurate, careful reasoning about the primordial levels of existence required by rigorous scientific research, there is little room for abstract entities, yet paradoxically, abstract reasoning is required in order to think about such subjects at all. This creates a risk: the mind may mistake its own conceptual tools for things that actually exist.
An abstraction is a mental crutch, a fabricated shortcut of the mind developed very early in the human brain as a coping mechanism that permits cogent function in the face of detail overload.1 It does this by grouping similar things into categories that compress many individual details into a single concept, suppressing those details while retaining the significance they had once conveyed. This preserved weight gives abstractions the authority of self-existence in spite of the fact that they are patently artificial.
Abstract reasoning, on the other hand, is the process of mentally dealing with patterns, relationships, conventions, and generalized concepts rather than with the individual entities that form those patterns relationships, etc.
But there are at least three problems with abstractions.
- ) that abstractions simplify things by hiding their details,
- ) that when you use an abstract word, I have to imagine the details of what you are saying and I may imagine something totally different than what you have in mind, and
- ) we have many of words that can be used as an abstraction or a concrete object. The word “label”, for example, is a concrete object in “Put this label on your shirt” but it is an abstraction in “It is bigotry to label someone.”
So using abstractions make communications fuzzy at best, and deceptive at worst. Adversarial politics and marketing are fruitful fields if you want to dig up confabulations designed to sound solid but are not actually connected to the real entities involved. So let’s sort this out.
We can think and talk of trees and forests. Trees are real, self-existent, physical things. A beaver can cut one down. The word “forest”, on the other hand, is an abstraction meaning a collection of trees, but a beaver can’t cut down a forest. Not because it would take too long, but because he can only cut down trees. The forest is the abstraction and the trees are the antecedents that gave existence to the forest idea in the first place. The distinction is crucial when we are working with allegedly logical statements.
The Abstraction Called Rights
A book on natural rights better have an understanding with its reader about this most fundamental word. To begin, I offer this general definition for natural rights:
Natural Right: An abstract idea of authority or dominion sufficient to justify the use of natural abilities independent of any other consideration.
I think this will do even though it feels foggy because it is an abstract idea.
So restricting our discussion to humans, it is probably true that only we have the ability to conceive and manipulate the idea of natural rights and perhaps that is why traditional theories of rights considered them unique to humans. But that was an arbitrary choice. Once we stop looking in the mirror for rights, we find them everywhere.
The idea and emotional sense of rights seems to be instinctive. A sense of justice and fairness develops at a very early age. Having raised ten children, I consider myself a minor authority in this matter. I don’t know how many times I witnessed the rights assertions of six month old infants precipitated by taking a toy from them and hearing their angry protests articulated in their one word vocabulary. One might argue that they perceived it a food and therefore a threat to their existence, but that is just a more fundamental right violation.
These facts underscore the need for all people to be educated and articulate in the science of rights so the related issues can be intelligently dealt with.
Rights and Ethics
Conflicting claims to rights are evident from the play pen to world wars, and the implications of rights violations are intrinsically moral considerations. Indeed, natural rights ethics suggests this:
Evil: Any unjustified violations of rights.
I have asked myself many times to find an evil that can not be seen as a rights violation. Only consensual depravity, and self-destructive behaviors come to mind. That response is interesting because it suggests that these are also violation of rights even though we may not recognize them as such. The Temporal Rights point of view realized in entropy will establish the fact of this intuition.
Concrete Temporal Rights
Perhaps the greatest contribution of the Temporal Rights theory to science, ethics, physics, and jurisprudence is that it suggests and empowers this definition:
Temporal Right: An existential authority or dominion sufficient to justify the use of a natural capability.
The significance of the absence of the word “abstraction” in this definition is why this book needed to be written. That explains why Temporal Rights upsets many fundamental concepts about the nature of nature and the nature of humanity. It explains why it can unify dichotomies, merge categories, and correct taxonomies.
The Dependency Statement
There’s a precise way to detect abstractions. This method uses “dependency statements”. The dependency statement ensures that we have properly identified and separated the abstraction and its antecedent. Comprehend the following dependency statements: (You may want to read it a few times so you can see how it functions.)
You can have a tree without a forest, but you can’t have a forest without a tree.
This is a perfectly rational statement and it proves that a forest is dependent on trees, i.e. that trees are more fundamental, and therefore a forest has no self-existence. A forest has no self-existence in spite of the fact that the abstract idea of “forest” is very real and feels like hard wood.
The key here is that if you can make a fully rational dependency statement about an object, you are assured that your conception of the matter is correct. If not, you may be dealing with two abstractions, or two self-existent things, or one may be an abstraction whose antecedents are also abstractions.
Noah Webster was so concerned about the tendency of abstraction to either hide reality on the one hand, or masquerade as self-existent on the other, that he learned 28 languages so he could understand the origins of words in their ancient context. “Even the use of words such as ‘the people,’ ‘democracy,’ and ‘equality’ in public debate bothered Webster, for such words were ‘metaphysical abstractions that either have no meaning, or at least none that mere mortals can comprehend.’”2
Thomas Hobbes and John Locke helped establish the vocabulary of natural rights. Their theories were predominantly theistic or metaphysical, relying on divine authority, innate human dignity, or natural law and therefore rather abstract. John Locke came close to Temporal Rights when he said, “The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.” Second Treatise of Government, Chapter II On the State of Nature, §6
Thomas Hobbes also approached an intrinsic basis with this: “A [natural] right of nature is the liberty each man hath to use his own power, as he will himself, for the preservation of his own nature—that is to say, of his own life—and consequently of doing anything which, in his own judgment and reason, he shall conceive to be the aptest means thereunto.” Leviathan, Chapter XIV Of the First and Second Natural Laws, and of Contracts
Both men appealed to the natural world to anchor their demonstrations of natural rights. They could feel that rights were a person’s authority to exercise their powers and recognized that freedom to do so was a required circumstance. Unable to find a primordial basis, their theories were abstract. Had they not confined their search to human rights, they surely would have made the step into the existential grounding that Temporal Rights exhibits.
I have taken you on this abstract excursion for two reasons; to teach you how to recognize abstractions (because the Temporal Rights paradigm will yield false conclusions when applied to an abstraction) and to soften up your mind so when I introduce the existential basis of Temporal Rights you will readily recognize it.
The Semantics of Temporal Rights
The Temporal Rights framework is infinitely generalized because every self-existent entity in the universe is an agent. All of the agents who display no power to effect change nevertheless have power to impede or prevent it. Thus a passive agent has the power and authority to actively resist change. That statement was logically contradictory but conceptually accurate because persistence seems active because it keeps on resisting. This semantic flip may help you understand why so many things called scientific are “junk science”. If we are going to find truth, which miraculously always makes sense once we arrive, we have to be very, very careful.
Following are definitions of words used in the Temporal Rights world
Operator: Any self-existent agent of change or its prevention, with existential boundaries. An operator may exist within another operator, but the highest operator in a nested stack must exhibit a persistent feedback loop.
Abstractions like “society”, processes, and amorphous aggregations are disqualified for want of clear boundaries. An operator failing to exhibit feedback becomes passive and probably operates only as a preventer of change but still owns at least one right. Families and governments are operators.
Operation: An effect instigated by an operator’s capability (power or authority). Operations, capabilities, and rights are perfect synonyms. Each capability demonstrates an agentive authority or right to execute a corresponding operation. Operations may be active or passive, such as a stone “courageously defending its right to the space it has acquired by immanent domain”.
Natural right: The abstract concept of the authority of an operator to operate. This includes both active and passive capabilities, viz., atoms doing chemical reactions and rocks defending their property rights to the space they occupy.
Domain:This is not an existential part of the operator but a descriptor of its spatial volume of operation and/or its type of operation. A rock’s domain is the space it occupies, while a tree’s domain extends beyond its own body when it gathers sunlight, water, and minerals. The domain of a bird may include a hemisphere, and of a star, an entire galaxy.
Dominion is rarely, if ever, sole and may be totally overpowered by other operators with coincident domains. This does not negate an operator’s authority, only its freedom to exercise its capabilities. Thus, a hierarchy of rights and their operators is the raison d’être of the changing universe.
Many operators recognize information and adjust their behavior accordingly. These have a physical domain and an informational domain. There may be other domain types yet to be identified.
Temporal Right: An operator’s existential authority to operate, a natural right. The word “temporal” is to be understood as “secular” and as an recognition that they emerge in the instant a new capability emerges and are extinguished in the instant of the capability’s demise.
Authority: An operator’s dominion. Some people have supposed that a rock has a right to its position or orientation. That’s a mistake because it has no capability to enforce that. It does have a property right to the space it occupies.
Observations and Implications
Operator Magnitudes: From entangled quantum particles to galazies
Temporal Rights extends downward without a hard lower limit. If an entity demonstrates even one observable capability, it qualifies as an operator and therefore possesses existential rights proportional to those capabilities. At the quantum scale, this principle leads to a striking conclusion: the smallest rights-bearing entities are the fundamental particles and field excitations themselves.
An electron, for example, exhibits clear, measurable capabilities: it possesses charge, spin, momentum, and the ability to interact electromagnetically. It can occupy superpositions, become entangled with other particles, and participate in chemical bonds. These are not metaphorical traits — they are empirically verifiable operations. In TR terms, the electron is therefore a minimal operator exercising dominion over its own quantum domain.
When two particles become entangled, their wave functions merge into a single non-local state. A measurement on one instantly determines the state of the other, regardless of distance. From the TR perspective, this is a pure case of domain overlap — two operators whose domains are inseparably linked. The entanglement represents a shared existential domain rather than two independent ones.
The measurement process itself can be viewed as a higher-order operator (the measuring apparatus or environment) asserting precedence. The collapse from superposition into a definite state is the resolution of a domain collision: the indeterminate capabilities of the quantum operator are overridden and resolved into a specific outcome. This is not “consciousness causes collapse” in the mystical sense, but a straightforward hierarchy of capabilities: the larger, more stable measuring system exercises superior operational authority.
Entropy and autonegentropy operate even here. Quantum systems naturally evolve toward higher von Neumann entropy (greater uncertainty). Yet under specific conditions — such as in Bose-Einstein condensates, superconducting circuits, or coherent photon states — local order (negentropy) can emerge and persist. These pockets of quantum coherence represent the smallest-scale examples of autonegentropy: operators spontaneously forming higher-order structures while still increasing total entropy elsewhere.
The radical implication is that rights descend all the way to the quantum vacuum. A single quark or photon is not “property” or “raw material” — it is a minimal operator with minimal but real existential rights to exercise its intrinsic capabilities without arbitrary interference. This does not mean we cannot use particles in accelerators or electronics; it means any such use must be understood as a domain negotiation between vastly different scales of operators.
In this way, Temporal Rights achieves a seamless unification: the same framework that grants rights to a beaver building a dam or an ecosystem maintaining balance also applies to an entangled pair of photons or an electron in a quantum dot. The hierarchy of operators is continuous from the Planck scale to the cosmic scale, with no ontological break.
Wherever capabilities exist, rights follow. Even at the smallest level, the universe is not a collection of inert building blocks — it is a society of operators engaged in constant domain negotiation.
OR use the following discussion instead of
In the Temporal Rights framework, two entangled quantum particles are best understood as a single operator possessing a non-local domain. Prior to measurement, the pair exists in a shared superposition — neither particle has a definite spin or state. The moment one particle is measured and its state becomes definite (for example, spin up), the distant particle’s state is instantly fixed in perfect correlation (spin down). No signal travels between them, and no time elapses. In TR terms, this is a domain resolution: the entangled operator, which had been operating with indeterminate capabilities, is resolved by the superior capability of the measuring apparatus. The two sub-operators are forced from a unified, non-local state into a definite, correlated configuration. This reveals that even at the quantum level, operators exercise capabilities within shared domains, and higher-order operators can resolve those domains through measurement.
The definition of operator, when applied to a human is existentialism. [citation]
1“In language acquisition, children typically learn object words first, and then develop from that vocabulary an understanding of the alternate uses of such words.”Wikipedia, June 4, 2018, 6:25 AM, MDT
2After the Revolution: Profiles of Early American Culture, by Joseph J. Ellis, W.W. Norton, 2002.
