Why do we get so worked up about our territory? Where does the sense of what is ours come from? What is ownership anyway?

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Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast produced by me, Fraser McGruer for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts, we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm here with Nick Hare, Peter Coghill and Chris Wragg of Aleph Insights. And this week we're discussing seagulls on the top of Chris's conservatory. Chris, tell us about those pesky seagulls.

Well pesky is the word, yes. So where my home office is, it looks out over my back garden and I can see the top of my conservatory going out the back of my house. And I've been having a bit of a run in with the local seagulls recently, which have taken to dropping moss on top of the conservatory and then sort of stamping on the moss. I imagine they're looking for something. If anybody can explain this behaviour to me, please, you know, please send me an email. These are definitely seagulls. These are definitely seagulls and not strange.

It's not moss that's been sort of jumping onto seagulls.

Yeah, no, it's definitely, it's definitely the seagulls dropping the moss and then sort of filtering through it, making a right mess of my conservatory, which is supposed to be transparent and isn't any longer. Anyway, the point is these things have been sort of in my garden and I'm now taken to every time they so much as land anywhere in the vicinity of my back garden, I've got a ball, I open up the window and I hurl this ball at them and shriek at them and so on. And I'm just getting increasingly sort of territorial about their encroaching on my garden.

Do you notice the same seagulls every time or is it potentially different seagulls?

Well, there's one with glasses and he's definitely the main culprit. I'm assuming they're the same.

Maybe this is exactly what the seagulls want you to do.

Well, so I've got to the stage now where I think I've raised the effort for them to sit on my conservatory enough that they now sit on the next door neighbour's conservatory, which as far as I'm concerned is fine. But this is part of a broader pattern in my life. For whatever reason, I seem to be a very territorial person. So cats walking around my garden, again, drive me mad, I have to get them off. You have to get the air rifle out for those things. Exactly. If the next door neighbour, our sort of driveway is divided by a sort of line and if the next door neighbour, if their tyres touch the line, I get really twitchy. So I was trying to work out what this is all about. It's just so sort of provincially petty bourgeois and which is, you know, not how I like to view myself. And yet there's obviously something deep seated going on there.

If you lived in London, you wouldn't have any problem with seagulls. No, we're much more diverse and accepting in London.

Yeah. Yeah. Apart from pigeons.

Well, I'm thinking of the absence of seagulls, actually, wouldn't be a problem. So, OK. Yeah, I'm still intrigued about, you know, how successful you're being with getting rid of these seagulls, but maybe we can come back to that later. Why is Chris, why does he feel obliged to be so defensive of his territory? And are we all like that or not? Peter? Yeah, well, I think fundamentally we're animals and we kind of grew up, evolved in a world where we're in a competition with loads of other animals. So maybe there's a part of us, deep reptilian brain area that says anything that's encroaching on what is familiar space to you, i.e. where you would normally hunt or gather. But in this case, it's Chris's conservatory where he has to clean the moss off and clean the gutters out. Expending some effort. It's competition. So you're competing against these creatures. So maybe that's what it boils down to, something as simple as that.

Well, it's not, it's obviously not completely explained by that in the sense that quite a lot of us are quite happy to share our gardens with a blue tit or an ant without getting really riled up. So, you know, there must be something, there must be some other rational process where we're able to assess not just, it's not just purely to do with competing with other animals. There's some other going through.

I think what I'm suggesting, because the seagulls are damaging it in a certain way, they're putting dirt on them. If the seagulls were like blue tits or ants and they left nothing but actually probably cleaned up after themselves, because blue tits take seeds and ants take detritus away, then Chris wouldn't have a problem with it. You see the fact that Chris is going to have to go out there in three or four months time, clean the moss off, clean out the gutters, stop the drains blocking.

Is it fair to say that seagulls, seagulls have a kind of slightly arrogant, general sort of demeanour, it's that their faces, it looks like you're lucky to have them land on your house. They give you that look, don't they, that look.

No, but they are the chavs of the avian world, aren't they? With their sticky up hair. No, they look at any moment, they might break into violence. They've got this look about them. They're just big enough to look like they might hurt.

I think the thing is, right, so obviously, I'm not in direct competition for resource with the seagulls. I don't want to eat the moss myself, at least not without, you know, a side salad. So it's not a sort of competition with a sort of near peer for, you know, for the same resource. So what is going on? I think, you know, there are other types of sort of territorial encroachments. And I think, you know, this is about sort of contamination of my space. So, you know, they're sort of ruining it, ruining it for me. So I think that's what it's kind of.

Yeah, I think this thing about, you know, a sense of what is yours, which I think this is about, right? So what do you own? And in terms of what we think we own, it's a very small proportion, really, of what we legally own, you know, so I don't, I mean, you know, I think you obviously things like your house is defined land has got a huge amount of admin associated with owning land. But things like, you know, the right to, you know, be able to walk to the station or the right to be able to, you know, not have noise or the right to, you know, be able to look at your back garden without annoying, you know, adverts. And, you know, thinking about things online that people are very territorial about things like social media, you know, what people feel like they're, you know, the services that they use, that they have a sort of right to. People get territorial about the products they buy, you know, about the brands that they use. Domain names. Yeah, well, I mean, there's also, I mean, and a lot of these things are sort of extended, are extended territory, which aren't necessarily what we would think of traditionally as property, but which we, as far as our brain is concerned, it is our property and we feel, you know, aggrieved about people encroaching on it. And I think, you know, think about things like the number of fights that start because of people encroaching on personal space or encroaching on, you know, each other's girlfriends or spilling each other's pints. And, you know, it's clearly a key, the concept of ownership is a big driver of a lot of, well, sensible and stupid behavior.

Yeah, I mean, look, we're about halfway through. I'm not really sure where to go because, I mean, to me, it just seems sort of fairly sort of simple. This is just like Peter was saying, it's our reptilian brains. This is mine. It's about a property. It's about ownership and it's, you know, defending one's own territory. But beyond that, what can we say?

Well, I suppose the thing is trying to understand that and trying to make sure that it doesn't lead unnecessarily to disputes, irrational disputes. I mean, you know, Nick was talking about different types of territory or different types of property that we think we are, you know, so physical space is something, you know, objects are something. But ideas and, you know, things in the virtual world. And it's, you know, understanding this instinct of territoriality, but tempering it so that it doesn't lead to, you know, unnecessary conflict, you know, that we can resolve. And how do, you know, how do animals and how do we mark territory and how do they govern that in a non-conflictual way?

I do it by weeing on everything I own. Yeah. Yeah. Which might be why I've got such a low Uber rating. Let me buy you a sharpie or two. But there's the sort of, I think the foundational theorem in economics here is the Coase theorem, which essentially says that obviously property is fundamental in economics. It's kind of, you know, who owns what and what you're allowed to dispose of and what you're allowed to do to stuff that you own is fundamental. And it's probably fundamental to, you know, to human decision making in general. There is a domain of which you have control and that's your property. The things that you can do are defined by what is considered to be your property. Right. So the thing and so, you know, the things you are able to make decisions about are also that that's defined by what is considered to be your property. So, for example, I mean, you know, let's say the president of the US or something. I mean, the rights that he has as the holder of that office are his property. They're legally defined property that, you know, the things that you can do, the policies he can make are kind of his property. You know, that's what doing that job entails. And the Coase theorem says that if every single possible property were assigned to everyone. So if anything that could be owned was definitely and unambiguously owned by someone, then everything would be efficiently allocated. So the classic example being polluting a river. So if you have a situation where, you know, you've got some factories upriver and you've got me downriver and I'm drinking the water, the factories, you know, they can dump stuff in the river and that's fine. And then I have to drink that and that's annoying. And whereas the Coase theorem says, well, look, someone has to own that river. Someone has to. Do they have the right to pollute that river? Or do you have the right to have clean drinking water? And once we've decided who has, you know, which of those two things, because they can't both be true. So which of those things do you own? Then then everything's cleared up because I can then I can then, you know, pay the factory. If I don't own the river, if the factories own the river, then I can pay them to stop polluting it. But if I own it, then they have to pay me to be entitled to pollute it. And that's that's the idea, really. And so, you know, if in a sense, property is all of the things that go wrong, all of the things that go wrong in markets, all of the things that go wrong with the delivery of services and products, all of the market failures are to do with property not being defined somewhere.

Can we, I mean, given given that sort of defining fundamental of human behavior, can we imagine a different world where perhaps as we in the new age where there's ever more opulence, ever more sort of abundant resource? Can we imagine a world where property is no longer a thing? I'm thinking of the kind of the world like the Thomas More's Utopia or K-Pax or the the story after Fight Club where there's no more no more ownership of anything. Could could there be a world in which we can still be productive?

Well, I mean, it's interesting because because I because I think, you know, we're already at a stage for many of us where resources are so abundant that we don't need to sort of compete against about them. And there are things which are sort of, you know, the the Internet is something which is, you know, democratized elements of it are owned, obviously. But I wonder whether we can conceptually move beyond the idea of property and territory just because of our evolutionary background.

No, I think there's always there's necessarily going to be scarcity until we're able to do something really beyond what we can even possibly imagine about the way that we experience the world. We you know, whether we are necessarily limited in terms of well, it's obviously like there is only a certain amount of world. There's only a certain amount of matter in the universe. So there's that's going to always be a constraint somewhere. And then time, you know, processes take a certain amount of time to happen. And and then, you know, the time that you have consciously to spend doing things is also limited. You know, we can't fight that either. So that there's there's always going to be some kind of rationing and some sort of, you know, sense of, well, I've got I've got this time spent with my children. It's time that I'm not, let's say, producing a new, you know, writing a new concerto. So, you know, there's already a situation where someone has an incentive to give, you know, to give you to demand your time spent on something else. Well, what what's going to make you spend time doing one thing or another thing? You know, you someone might want to pay you to produce that concerto. And they would have to do that because, you know, there's only a certain amount of you to go round.

Yeah. And I suppose the issue is as as more and more things become automated. So if you were able to say, well, I won't write the concerto, but this algorithm will. Yeah. You know, effectively, as you know, we we become as time becomes less, less of a scarce resource because everything is done for us.

What? Well, it's still scarce, though, because you can only listen to one concerto at a time. So, you know, there's how are you going to allocate, you know, how are you going to know what to allocate time to?

You know, there's. Yeah. And I mean, go ahead. I'm slightly lost in the discussion. But if you've got a response to that. Yeah, go ahead.

No, I was I was actually going to sort of take it in a bit of a bit of a different different direction, which was, you know, in terms of sort of digital property ownership. There are, you know, there are a number of things which, you know, technologies which actually start to make shared shared ownership of things. So like document creation, for example, you know, whereas before you would have your your own document that you were working on and then hand it over to somebody else. Now that document is shared collaboratively and you work on it simultaneously. And there is no there is no ownership of that document.

No, there is. But because it's but it's collectively owned and it's like it's like communism doesn't involve not having property. It just means that it's not exclusive to individuals. You know, if you have three people editing a document, the right to edit that document is a property that you own. Yeah, right.

And that's right. But I think that collective ownership with some of these technologies open up creates additional problems that are, you know, fundamentally about. Well, but that's no different to house sharing.

I mean, that's the same as owning a house jointly. You've got the same problems, really. You know, what are the rules that we have in this document? And as I said, you know, if you're going to go all kind of massively coast theorem on it, you might start to say, well, look, actually, I have the right. I own these words being in this document. Or do you? I mean, if we all agree that none of us own the words that are in the document, you know, then we can all just go and edit to our heart's content. But in theory, you could have that.

So I think in a in a physical environment, shared ownership, like in a shared house, you know, you might have the chair that you habitually sit on. Right. And it becomes Nick's chair. And we do kind of particles of myself. That's right. Or you might, you know, so you might have a habitual use where you signal it out for yourself. You might leave your jacket on the chair or something, something like that. Or, you know, you might have some sort of rule where, you know, like a social boundary, which is, you know, Nick gets to sit on the chair on Mondays and Peter sits on it on Tuesdays. After I've given it a wipe. After you've given it a wipe, yeah. But we all of those for physical space and physical territory, we get that. And we've got sort of mechanisms for sort of preempting disputes about it. And I think what's interesting is as, you know, we have shared ownership, virtual shared ownership of things. How do we how do we do those same things to mark territory? How do we, you know, to set up rules to govern territory and so on?

But anyway, I wanted to bring it back to seagulls. I just want to be sure about these seagulls of yours.

Yeah.

So are they I've never heard of seagulls. Why are they dropping moss on your greenhouse?

That's what I don't know. But I think it's I think there must be something, either some some nutrient in the moss, which they are sort of sifting through to get or something, some parasite or something.

Maybe they're trying to build a big putting green or something.

Yeah. Or they're just doing it to spite me, which I wouldn't I wouldn't rule out.

And are your efforts definitely having an effect?

Well, they've migrated to next door's conservatory.

OK, good. That's good. Nick, you look like you're going to say something.

No, no, it's just about thinking about pests, really. I'm not too bothered about avian pests. It's more the the ones who live in your house, mice and and moths particularly drive me nuts because I feel like moths, they're not paying any rent, right? They just turn up and they eat your clothes. Really annoys me. But yeah, I mean, I do get really annoyed with pests. And I I used to but I used to I used to give if if there was a spider in my in my bedroom when I was a kid, I used to feel guilty about just squashing them. So I used to read them a verbal warning. I'd give them I'd give them like two minutes to leave the room. And if they didn't, if they did, then I would squash them. And that would assuage my guilt. OK, so I'm wondering if Chris ought to have some sort of have some sort of form of word.

I don't think seagulls deserve it, frankly.

I'm wondering if Chris is now fighting a proxy war via the seagulls with his next door neighbour who's already admitted parks on his drive or is perceived to park.

Well, the next thing that you should do is start putting putting seagull feed on the next door's conservatory. Start firing it over.

Yeah, well, we need to wrap up.

But before we do, I don't think we've really substantially broken down the concept of property here. Yeah, but yeah, I mean, probably because it's so fundamental. It's pretty hard to analyse.

Well, I don't think we've fully dealt with the concept of seagulls either, because actually there is no such thing as a seagull.

Well, seagulls do have a concept of property, right? I mean, they're territorial. They defend their nest. If Chris came round to one of their nests and started dropping moss on it, I'm sure they'd be annoyed by that. And yet they think nothing of doing that to us. I think I think you're right. I mean, I'm on board with you. But, you know, there's no actual thing as a seagull.

So what we call seagulls. Actually, just I mean, the whole thing is the gull family. So they're actually gulls. Right. And amongst those, one of the most common ones, which people tend to see at the seaside are herring gulls, which tend to be the bigger ones. There's no actual thing called a seagull. Well, there is, but it's just a label. Depends on how you. Well, there is if we all imagine it. There is no such thing as a seagull. There's plenty of people go, that's a seagull. That's just a class that's not an official zoological class. Yeah, but lots of people think there's a letter H as well.

It's like saying there's there's no such thing as a tomato. There's just several different species of plants that are all called tomato. No, no, no, no, no, no.

Listen, there is it's like saying, you know, that is, you know, it's like calling a crow an orange. It's not an orange, it's a crow. So in this case, just because everyone says it's an orange doesn't mean it's actually really is an orange.

All I can say is I wish there was no such thing as a seagull.

And, you know, we send them over to Fraser's house and he can look at them and go, well, that doesn't exist. It's not a real thing. It's an orange.

Okay, well, look, we better stop there. Well, look, thank you, as always, for listening to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast. I'm Fraser McGruer. We've been here with Nick Hare, Chris Wragg and his seagulls and or herring gulls and Peter Coghill. Thank you. They were quiet for most of the recording. And until next time, bye-bye.