http://blog.rongarret.info/2015/02/31-flavors-of-ontology.ht...
Value is created by humans and something being an original definitely has an unambiguous meaning to most people. I think value comes partly from a reverence of history and I would hope that is something any civilization would cherish.
That's only because of current limitations of our technology. Did you read the article I linked to?
What's different is their history. Sure, one couldn't distinguish them through examination. But with authenticated chain of custody, they are distinguishable. In a word, metadata.
Suppose we wanted to sell "the original" Mona Lisa to an interstellar society. How would they be able to satisfy themselves that we had in fact sent "the original" and not a perfect copy? And given that there is no experiment that they could possibly perform whose outcome would be different, why should they care?
As far as the interstellar trade goes, they would need to trust the seller. Or trust third-party experts to authenticate it. That's all that any art buyer can do.
Regarding some particular release of Word, perhaps there is a disk somewhere containing the original compiled binary. I doubt that anyone has considered such stuff memorable, but who knows? Also, given how disk storage works, that arrangement of atoms wouldn't have persisted very long. So it's not such a useful distinction for software.
But that's the whole point: if you can make atomically perfect copies, then "the particular bunch of atoms Da Vinci put together" becomes meaningless. There is no such thing as "a particular bunch of atoms" in a world where the technology exists to make atomically perfect copies. "A particular bunch of atoms" is every bit as meaningless as "a particular bunch of bits", and for exactly the same reason: atoms, like bits, are actually states, not things.
Edit: Another issue is that objects aren't immutable. Let's say that we could make "atomically perfect copies". But those copies would remain "atomically perfect" only briefly. And then they'd be historically distinguishable. And OK, I borrowed that from Hoffstadter's I Am a Strange Loop.
Do you see people paying huge premiums for "the first instance" of a digital image?
It does if that person understands physics. If you can make an atomically perfect copy, then insisting on "the original" is just as silly as insisting on having "the original" of a digital image.
> You can't just arbitrarily claim something universally lacks meaning like that.
I am not "just claiming" it. I have cited an extensive argument in support of that position:
http://blog.rongarret.info/2015/02/31-flavors-of-ontology.ht...
Yes, is it unintuitive. But there are a lot of unintuitive things in physics that are nonetheless true.
This original and perfect copy stuff is mostly about status and the monkey-human desire to get to the top of hierarchies. Aliens might not care about that, but they might not care about anything we have.
And how exactly will that trust be built up? Keep in mind that it takes 8 years to do one round-trip communication to the closest star. The closest inhabited star will almost certainly take longer than a human lifetime to complete a round-trip.
Well, for starters, they might determine that there is no other version of the painting on Earth or nearby that is said to be "the original".
They could additionally investigate the chain of custody of "the original" as far back as is feasible. It's getting hard to fool investigators here-and-now about these sorts of things; a sufficiently advanced interstellar civilization could have all sorts of additional investigative tools at its disposal.
This is simply accepting the premise that aliens have a preference for the oldest purported original over the most recent exact forgery, or alternatively have a preference for not being deceived and if promised the original want the original. If they don't care about acquiring the original, then maybe the forgery doesn't have to be that exact. "It's so exact that they should not care" is simply shifting the "that exact" line around a bit; physics doesn't quite let you abolish "provenance". Or, more finely, having promised to deliver "the original", if the seller ships "a perfect copy", has the seller committed fraud?
This is all hypothetical anyway; we have no evidence for aliens of any sort, let alone ones that want to acquire a human artifact for whatever reason. Imagining aliens sharing our own peculiar preferences with respect to art, but not granting that individual humans have different peculiar preferences, is the real problem in this thread. I don't think imagining yet more Star Trek technology is especially enlightening, but at least it's a little interesting.
Small nit:
> If you take one atom and replace it with another
This is a bit sloppy; for your argument you want to replace it with an identical atom -- no swapping of isotopes etc. -- and in an identical state with respect to its neighbours. Already historians do studies of Cs, Sr etc. isotope ratios at various depths, to study the mid 20th century history of various artifacts. They are already quite good at determining on which continent a painting was displayed or stored (or fabricated) at various times during 1945-1963.
Arguendo, the technology exists to make a "perfect copy" of an object like the Mona Lisa painting that is _locally_ indistinguishable in principle from the original. Arguendo, interstellar art forgery is profitable use of this technology. Arguendo, the knowledge of the technology and its utility in forging art is unknown to to the aliens, even though they know about the Mona Lisa and want it (that is, the one "universally" believed to have been painted by Leonardo da Vinci) rather than some traditional form of copy (that is not as perfect). That is, they care about provenance, but have not been offered (and have thus not rejected) a "perfect" copy in your sense.
The issue here is that provenance relates to the worldlines of the constituents of the macroscopic painting and whether they all converged around Leonardo da Vinci, for instance, rather than not converging around Leonardo da Vinci, but converging around the forgery machine. Since humans do not see macroscopic objects as worldtubes, human physicists are continually at risk of falling prey to a sort of slicing/threading chauvinism. In particular, the risk is that we assume that since electrons have spacetime-position independent (and covariant) characteristics, only those characteristics matter in a system involving multiple electrons. (cf. ideally we want to avoid considering large numbers of small contributions).
Boiling that down a bit, I think you're arguing in this thread that we should only consider some "present" values surface (e.g. one in which the aliens begin a test of all the traits of the Mona Lisa painting with those they have come to learn through research) and that everyone can and will ignore the surfaces on one timelike side of that.
Take the spacelike hypersurface on which the perfect copy and the original both exist but the copy only exists in one of the adjacent spacelike hypersurfaces. I think you are essentially arguing that the only choices of gauge on that surface all throw away (as "redundant degrees of freedom") the information necessary to reconstruct hypersurfaces on the "no copy exists" side, forming an information horizon.
(Geroch has a few things to say about this sort of argument in various papers, given the mild assumption of hyperbolization, and there is a wider literature on the initial values / Hamiltonian formulation of General Relativity. To be clear, I don't think you necessarily need recourse to O(h^n), n > 1 effects to poke holes in a formalization that imposes information loss; you get it only from the causal structure of a Lorentzian manifold with a tiny handful of mild additional constraints, all of which are well supported experimentally.)
Accepting for the sake of argument that a perfect copy in your sense can be made, I'd agree in an instant that we do not have the in practice ability to distinguish between copy and original if we threw both into a tumble dryer and ran the latter inside a thick-walled lead box for a couple of hours. I'd accept that nature with its Gauss-Laws provides similar (partial[1]) screening of "provenance", even. However, I'm not sure I'm convinced that a sufficiently advanced alien society could not see through these in principle, given enough effort; here we could add yet more Star Trek technology in the form of transporters, scanners, extremely long range telescopes ("enhance!"), FTL travel, etc.
Finally, if neither party can see through these in practice, the salient point is that at least one forgery exists, as does an effort by the seller of the "original" Mona Lisa to make it maximally difficult to tell that that forgery is a forgery. Caveat emptor.
- --
[1] Distinguishing between information conserving systems and Hawking's semiclassical information-destroying black holes.
Really? And here I was thinking that the original paper was meant to be taken seriously. (Who is William Proxmire anyway?)
> for your argument you want to replace it with an identical atom -- no swapping of isotopes etc. -- and in an identical state with respect to its neighbours.
That's right, to the limits of what is measurable anyway.
> the knowledge of the technology and its utility in forging art is unknown to to the aliens
No, I'm assuming the aliens have this technology. So they have a choice: they can receive a scan of the original, from which they can construct an indistinguishable copy, for $X, or they can receive "the original" sent to them as a bundle of atoms for $Y, with Y>>X. There is no deception involved. My claim is simply that if the aliens have any sense at all they will choose the first option.
Does Homo economicus really exist? And even if it did, the ends optimized for are chosen subjectively, aren't they? If the aliens' goal is to possess the original fsvo original, that's their business. Just as it is the vendor's business to set the price of the original at $Y at a price of $X.
AFAICT you introduce "... as a bundle of atoms ..." here. Are you proposing that rather that to "actually ship" original or copy, rather than packaging up the original carefully to keep it intact on its journey, you ship a dust that the buyer can reassemble, IKEA-style ("Interstellar Kamprad")? (Even still, they may decide that destroying the original in this way is worth the price premium you're demanding above destroying the atomically-identical copy; who's to say?)
Finally, there is some circularity in you asking $X rather than $Y, Y >> X in this case -- if you don't see the difference yourself, why would you have priced them so differently, instead of charging either $X for both or $Y for both, and then randomly choosing to send the copy or the original at that price? For instance, "Because that is the price they are willing to pay? Because that is the price the market will bear?" involve some assumptions about your a priori market knowledge.
Not here. Not yet. But maybe somewhere.
But even here, no one pays a premium for "the original" of a digital image. Originals command a premium only in the absence of technology to make perfect copies.
He has an interesting wikipedia page. I can't for the life of me figure out why his campaign paid Krugman for this paper. Perhaps he gave the campaign (and it's anti-space-exploration platform) something they weren't expecting, and they had paid in advance. :-) More likely it was Krugman making a joke. There are several others in the paper.
Krugman's paper is interesting in arguing whose clock should be used for the calculation of compound interest and makes the perfectly reasonable argument that if a common frame of reference between the planet-bound sender and receiver is avaialble, that should be used, otherwise the receiver's (and certainly not a relativistically moving transport vessel). There's really not that much physics in it, which he cheerfully admits.
He also argues that the interest rates of the trading parties would equalize with trade. Again, perfectly plausible (and, it turns out, in the intervening decades that has essentially happened on Earth). He does have a relativistic take on this, though, doing roughly a Lorentz transform on interest rates. Maybe it partially anticipated the investment into low-latency/high-frequency trading that has been popular recently?
In other words, people aren't placing value in the arrangement of atoms, they're placing value in the context of how those atoms came to be arranged that way. The original object is a token of that context.
He is trying to define it in a way that the people who he is interacting with here don't agree with.
It's a bit incongruous to point to an article that claims, "Arrangement is everything" (emphasis his), and then proceed to consider the arrangements of atoms in a painting without considering the arrangement of the painting with respect to other things, and especially not with respect to everything. At a chosen time coordinate, the painting and its replica (down to their subatomic constituents) occupy a non-overlapping range of coordinates in space. They are different because of the arrangement. Yet his argument is that they are the same because of arrangement (but only of the atomic components of each).
More importantly, at a time coordinate in which Leonardo da Vinci was alive and the original Mona Lisa painting existed, there was only one such painting -- any atomically perfect duplicate comes much later, and it's that arrangement in time that is important in your arguments, which I agree with.
More generally, otherwise-identical extended composite objects differ because the average of their components' worldtubes are essentially non-overlapping and diverge (or converge, depends on which way you want to think about timelike directions in this context) at different points in spacetime. In the case of our paintings the divergence happens at the tip of the paintbrush Leonardo da Vinci applied his completing stroke with, versus in the Star Trek style replicator.
The value of these paintings are position-dependent, and history-dependent. Position and history (combined they are the worldline, or worldtube for extended objects) are degrees of freedom that does not vanish by physics tricks, although it is easy to neglect them when their effects are small, and neglecting them makes calculations much simpler. But the effect of position and history on the paintings' value is not small, or at least I think it would not be small for most assessors of value (although lisper claims he would value them equally).
This is a great way to express the historical aspect in physics-speak. That is, the object isn't just a spacelike thing at some particular time. It's a spacetime thing. I can't quite imagine how one could duplicate that.
Well, it's 'worm theory' (Balashov's terminology[1]), which is one way of defining at objects in relativity (curvature is not necessary, so you can do this in Special Relativity too). It unfortunately still imposes all sorts of human chauvinism in terms of what an object is, and what a worldline (or worldtube, for "objects" that aren't strictly pointlike) is.
An alternative is to take fields (which take on some value at every point in spacetime) seriously, and declare that the universe-pervading fields on the background spacetime (curved or flat) are the only "objects". Then, if you find a characteristic pattern of field values that appears in a region of spacetime wherein its components obey some adjacency function, you can describe the pattern as a worm or as a 3d object evolving in time.
Let's consider a piece of flat 2d Lorentzian spacetime, with a single scalar field drawn as a 5x5 matrix:
1 0 0 0 0
0 1 0 0 0
0 0 1 0 0
0 0 0 1 0
0 0 0 0 1
Take the bottommost row as a spacelike 1-d hypersurface at some early time, then the next row up as a similar surface at a later time, and the next row up at an even later, and so forth. We won't lay down coordinates, and won't be precise about scale beyond "this is a small region of a larger spacetime".
Let's complicate the picture:
1 0 0 0 1
0 1 0 1 0
0 0 2 0 0
0 1 0 1 0
1 0 0 0 1
But what's "happened" here under our slicing? Is one "1" always going left and the other always going right, and they just pass through each other? Or, alternatively, do they bounce off one another, with the "1" on the left scattering leftwards at t=3 and moving rightwards at t=4? The "1"s are indistinguishable, so it could be either! We need an interaction rule for the field, deciding when "1"s pass through each other and when "1"s bounce off each other.
We could complicate this further, by adding more fields (and more complicated fields, and interactions among the fields) on the same spacetime. Indeed, we could add all the fields (and their mutual interactions) of The Standard Model of Particle Physics. This requires specifying a set of values for each of the fields at each point in spacetime, everywhere throughout the spacetime. And indeed, the Standard Model, on flat spacetime, allows one to do exactly that.
Our conversation's Mona Lisa is in this way of thinking "just" a recognizable characteristic pattern of a vast number of values across several fields in a region of spacetime. But "recognizable" here is critical: it's not the theory picking out an object; it's a user of the theory first spotting a pattern and then deciding how that pattern evolves or moves, by fixing a gauge[2]. In the 4-d fields on 4-d spacetime block universe, there is no motion or evolution. We only get that by making choices that let one talk about what's past and what's future, and what's separated spatially within a 3d space at some time t.
When one does not have at hand all the values for all the fields across the whole of spacetime, one wants to fill in the blanks using already-known values and adjacency rules. The typical human only has access to a small range of observables, so is missing a lot of detail locally as well as knowledge about what's further away on her or his left, right, front, back, above, below, future and past. Fundamental theoretical physics to some extent is about finding useful rules that let one accurately fill in missing detail near to a point in spacetime, and about predicting the detail further away from that point. It's also about things like accurately connecting a crystallized blockworld formalism with a deterministic Hamiltonian formalism for the same spacetime with the same field content.
> I can't quite imagine how one could duplicate that
Original Mona Lisa is qualitatively characterized by some set of values that that "hang together" across a region of spacetime. One has to say pattern adjacent to Leonardo's studio and pattern adjacent to Louvre wall are "close enough to be the same". That requires deciding that many values in the spacetime between those are "noise". Cosmic microwave background photons, solar and cosmic neutrinos, and so on, don't "hang together" with the core painting pattern across such a large region. Also, one has to coarse grain somewhat, since the values of quark and gluon and electron fields at positions within the pattern (relative to something we pick out as it's centre, say) are far from the same at small scales over large spacetime regions.
Likewise, Original Mona Lisa and Duplicate Mona Lisa can only ever be "close enough", or "identical within the limits of our ability to measure, and deliberately ignoring measurable differences in position, orientation, ...".
Indeed, even comparing Original Mona Lisa complete-and-with-Leonardo and Original Mona Lisa complete-and-being-appreciated at the Louvre by President Macron, the painting at the latter point in spacetime has outgassed, dropped off flakes or chips, had environmental pollutants adsorbed onto it, and so on, and thus is not atomically the same.
- --
[1] Balashov, Y. (2002), "On stages, worms and relativity", in Callender, ed., _Time, Reality and Experience_, Cambridge University Press, pp. 223–252
[2] in the relativity sense, https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2008/09/27/what-is-a-gauge/ cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinate_conditions?oldforma...
Actually, it would. That is the definition of "exact atomic replica".
Did you read the article I linked to?
And really, "did you read" gets boring quickly.
> ... muster a counter-argument rather than simply proclaiming with no supporting evidence whatsoever that "it's still a replica and not the original."
It's you who are missing the point. One can have supporting evidence about which is the original.
I mean, just consider the Mona Lisa. How do we know which of the many copies of that painting are the original? We arguably don't know that through any sort of measurement. Because Da Vinci and the early owners didn't have the technology to make necessary measurements. So what would we compare our results to? Maybe one could get at it through radiochemical dating, but even that's iffy.
Anyway, how we know which is the original is through the chain of custody. And that also applies to atomically exact copies.
Of course we do. We can, for example, carbon-date the wood that the original is painted on. We can do chemical analysis of the pigments. There are a lot of ways to distinguish a real Rennaissance painting from a modern copy. But (and this is the main point) only because the technology we have for making copies of paintings is not yet perfected. If we could make an atomically perfect copy of the Mona Lisa, it would be absolutely indistinguishable from the original.
"Absolutely"???
The painting is an off-axis bump on a slowly rotating roughly spherical planet; consequently it sheds gravitational radiation. The painting is effectively a rigid extended object, and thus the gravitational radiation has a corresponding characteristic mode depending on the painting's position and orientation. The mode propagates to infinity. Sure, it would take an ultra-super-hyper-advanced gravitational wave detector to pick it out at interstellar range, but it is possible in principle.
Before forgery: one Mona Lisa mode; after forgery: two Mona Lisa modes. The modes will differ because of different position and/or orientation on Earth. The position and orientation of the "original" has changed over time, pretty substantially; the latter's position and orientation is likely to change over time too. Anyone observing the relevant bits of Earth's gravitational radiation spectrum (over time, if you want to think of it that way) would be able to distinguish the two. Trouble if the buyers are already accomplished gravitational wave astronomers (we've just barely started) and keep detailed records.
I think it's easier to handwave an extremely tuned gravitational wave detector than an exact atomic duplicator or a device which determines that a pair of ~ 8kg paintings are atomically identical (especially one that does not render them atomically non-identical).
Well, lets look at the current state of the art with respect to each.
We can make non-destructive 3-D scans of objects, and we can image and manipulate individual atoms. We can fabricate 3-D structures with feature sizes a few atoms wide. That's not quite at the level of a 3-D atomic duplicator, but it seems to me to be well on the way. The machines that do these things are not yet household items, but they are not uncommon, and the technology is improving all the time.
By way of contrast, the state of the art in gravity wave detection lets us see nothing less energetic than the collision of two black holes, and there are two devices that can do this on the entire planet.
So a 3-D atomic duplicator seems much more plausible than a device that can track an 8kg object through a gravitational field at interstellar distances.
Of their surfaces. What about the internal components?
The Mona Lisa is many things but it is not very thin or flat.
There are pigments and bindings involved that are sensitive to protein structure, as well; it's not just the count of atoms (and subatomic components; there are metals involved too, and isotope ratios are fingerprints), or even their relative position sensu stricto that matters.
I'm not sure how you could go about non-destructively determining (for example) potassium radioisotope differences in the original painting's layers between the optical surface and the canvas.
> state of the art in gravity wave detection ... black holes
We can detect gravitational waves of much closer much smaller systems just fine, and did so about 105 years before Poincaré proposed them formally. It was almost eighty years later that they were cast into the current perturbative formalism though.
The amplitude isn't really the critical factor with LIGO. It's sensitive to a particular frequency band (~ Hz - kHz) that is far from that of a small off-axis bump on a planet (~ microHz). It would totally pick up a set of deadlift weights spun around by a dental drill, if you could make that work in practice. (The amplitude difference between the sites would exclude it as an astronomical signal; the final inspiral of binary black holes and neutron stars have enormous amplitude, but that falls off linearly with distance, and they are very very far away, so the amplitude difference between sites is basically nil).
> track an 8kg object through a gravitational field
Given that one knows a number of things about the object including rough position and its surrounding environment (notably one wants to know its background metric exactly, or at least the exact model metric for Earth and some subleading-order non-Mona-Lisa contributions to perturbations thereof), it gets much easier. For a painting it's not something we could do today even if we had a spaceborne observatory sensitive to the relevant bits of Earth's GW spectrum, but it is plausible that we could observe the GWs shed by Olympus Mons with current technology, for example. (It'd be expensive to build).
We have good lunar masscon data so can watch the GWs shed by those as the moon relaxes into a more spherically symmetric shape; we have decent masscon data for Earth so can in principle with today's technology watch seismic events using gravitational wave Earth observation (as opposed to astronomy) (earthquakes make Earth rounder and spin faster, so the remaining masscons shed even more gravitational radiation).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-ray_microtomography
> We can detect gravitational waves of much closer much smaller systems just fine
So what? We're talking about interstellar commerce here.
> today's technology watch seismic events using gravitational wave Earth observation
Seismic events are many, many orders of magnitude more energetic than a painting being moved around.
Even if you had the technology, all it would take to foil it would be for the copy to move close to the original at any point in time.
(And I have to emphasize here that the point here is not that it would be easy to execute a deception. The point is that no sensible being could possibly care whether or not they have "the original" if they have to resort to such extreme measures to figure it out.)
Neat! But, can it work in principle to pick out the structure and arrangement and composition of molecules? (I'd guess yes, but am not sure).
> We're talking about interstellar commerce here
Interstellar distances are ~ pc distances; the GWs we are looking for with LIGO are >> Mpc or << pc with GRAIL/GOCE/GRACE and their follow-ons. These observatories are sensitive to sources at radically different distances, but since such sources are not what's under study (and in particular it is hard to correlate their GW signals with other observables), their signals are excluded.
One could build a GW observatory to study an exoplanet in pretty fine detail (down to whatever the appropriate word for its seismology would be); there are a lot of unknowns about exoplanets, but their mass quadrupoles are determinable independently, and GW observatories essentially just look for changes in mass quadrupoles. What's responsible for any given change is the hard part, after one has built the (distributed) observatory.
GRAIL II would have done exactly that for the moon and (it was hoped) for a couple of other objects in the solar system. GRAIL itself was an approximation of this broad technique for the moon.
> Seismic events are many, many orders of magnitude more energetic than a painting being moved around
Sure, amplitude-wise. They have very distinct frequencies though. The argument you want to advance is that there are lots of similar objects (8kg rectangles, roughly) that generate a lot of noise, and worse, some of them are in the same art gallery (and with similar orientation) as the subject of observation. Worst of all, picking it out if it never leaves the Louvre wall is implausibly difficult; but if it's moved around the gallery, and in particular, it's back does not always face the gallery wall it normally hangs on, that opens a lot of "technology will improve" arguments, such as you use with the "perfect copier".
> all it would take to foil it would be for the copy to move close to the original at any point in time
The emissions from a bump on a rotating sphere is strongly determined by the bump's position. I happily admit that you can contrive ever-greater screening, though, but the cat would be out of the bag that you were deliberately trying to frustrate distinguishing between the original and the copy.
Which rather raises the question, why? Why not just hang the copy and ship the original to the aliens as agreed?
> no sensible being could possibly care ... if they have to resort to such extreme measures
I think you have the ordering wrong; they might resort to such extreme measures because they care. Their valuation function might not be identical to yours (why the Mona Lisa rather than any other Earth painting? or any painting they could make locally, in the style of an arbitrary Earthling?).
Or, more pointedly, maybe when 'all you have to do is to try to define what "the same thing" actually means', you, other people, and aliens' efforts might lead to different definitions.
Well, yeah, they might. But I'm assuming the aliens understand physics, in which case only one definition makes sense. You can snooker the irrational and the ignorant into paying for anything regardless of what species they are.
On which note, I have this nifty bridge you might be interested in? It's available at a great price. And it is the original!
> ... It had been believed to have been painted between 1503 and 1506; however, Leonardo may have continued working on it as late as 1517. Recent academic work suggests that it would not have been started before 1513. It was acquired by King Francis I of France ...
So what we rely on here is custody records, all the way back to King Francis I. Also, why limit the discussion to modern copies? Again, from Wikipedia:
> A version of Mona Lisa known as Mujer de mano de Leonardo Abince ("Leonardo da Vinci's handy-woman") held in Madrid's Museo del Prado was for centuries considered to be a work by Leonardo. However, since its restoration in 2012 it is considered to have been executed by one of Leonardo's pupils in his studio at the same time as Mona Lisa was being painted.
Basically, it was a copy, painted at about the same time. Now imagine that King Francis I liked the Mona Lisa so much that he had one or more copies created. How would we know now which was the original? Only via records.
To ignore that would ignore the change of things over time in the meeting associated with them. Whoever has the original is the authority on the state of the original, the copies are copies derived from that Authority. They have context in meaning only because of that original.
Whoever owns that, owns the culture and the story behind the original. That is something one can purchase and it does have value even though there are no physical differences. The original will diverge from the copies if anything just because how it's capped and where it exists in the universe.
Say there was a pan galactic radiation blast of some kind. And the original. Slightly contaminated. That's part of its history now, the copies wouldn't have been similarly tainted. Just one example.
People value stories, and we work to maintain them in their continuity. That is what the original represents. It can be purchased it does have value. This is not a physical thing.
Would you pay a premium for "the original" of a digital image?
The difference lies in the state of the object. Over time, it will degrade, change, be impacted by it's environment.
A copy, can be thought of like both the photo and a physical object.
In the photo sense, a capture sufficient to exactly reproduce the object is no different from the photo. That's just data.
In the physical object sense, the moment a duplicate exists, it begins to diverge from the original, which makes the original an authority. Future copies will differ from prior ones.
From there, they would diverge.
Three things happen:
One, the data capture representing the object gets dated, and would represent the original at some point in time, not as it is today.
Two, the copy objects would also diverge from both the data and the original.
Finally, the stories related to the objects differ.
The original remains the authority on that particular object. For many things, nobody would care, and I agree with you on all of that.
However, you very seriously under estimate the value history and culture have. And you also are ignoring how a story becomes intertwined with a given object.
As an extreme example, one could say there was some war, and one of the copies of a famous painting was damaged in the war, but owned by someone who won that war at great personal cost.
Now, we've got the original, with historical value, and one copy in particular with value, both above and beyond that value any other copy may have.
For those interested in, perhaps involved in, that war, the relevance of that specific copy, with the damage marks on it, where it's at, who owns it, all differentiate that copy from all other objects.
Things that are exactly the same do not remain the same.
And where that is true, originals will have value above and beyond copies.
Consider this scenario: instead of scanning the object, sending the information to some remote location, and recreating the copy at the remote location, the copier works like this: you put an object in, and after some time two objects come out, each atomically identical to the original. Now you really can't tell which is which.
In the case of remote-copy you can tell the difference. But would an alien race really care enough to be willing to pay a lot more for "the original"?
There's actually a similar situation going on right now in the diamond market. DeBeers has spent a lot of money trying to convince people that natural diamonds are somehow better than artificial ones despite the fact that they are absolutely indistinguishable from one another (and so DeBeers is putting a lot of money into developing technology that can mark "authentic" diamonds). IMHO this is a pretty transparent scam, and people fall for it largely out of stupidity or ignorance of chemistry. I believe (or maybe "hope" is a better word here) that any society that can travel to the stars will have moved beyond such foolishness.
I believe the impact will be profound, and in the majority of cases, will play out like you say.
There are some where it won't.
Why do you think you have different levels of friends? History is very important to us.
"... the universe has played a trick on you by supplying you with a continual stream of overwhelming evidence that the universe is populated by material objects that exist in particular places at particular times, and that have a continuity of identity such that it makes sense to say things like, "The vase on that table exists." The reason that continuity of identity matters is that it's required to make sense of the phrase, "The vase on that table." For that phrase to make sense, the vase that is on the table now has to be the same vase that is there a microsecond from now. If this were not so, then the vase on the table at time T0 might have existed at T0, but at time T0+epsilon it no longer exists. Instead, it's a different vase that exists at T0+epsilon (and a different one yet again at time T0+2epsilon)."
"This probably sounds like I'm being pedantic, because it's just obvious that material objects like vases do have continuity of identity. The evidence for it is just overwhelming. But despite the overwhelming evidence, it is in fact not true..."
"It means that it has history attached to it and that it's traveled in time"
For this statement to be true, or even meaningful, there has to be a meaningful referent for "it", and that referent has to have continuity of identity if the word "history" is to be meaningful. In this case "it" is a painting, which is a physical object. But physical objects do NOT have continuity of identity.
Put this another way: consider the following two scenarios:
1. Take every atom in the Mona Lisa and replace it with a different atom of the same element and isotope in the same physical location.
2. Take the Mona Lisa and grind it up into sawdust.
I think you will agree that the end result of #1 can me more reasonably regarded as "still the Mona Lisa" than #2. And yet #1 is "different atoms, same arrangement" while 2 is "same atoms, different arrangement." So it's not the atoms that matter, it's the arrangement.
A vase owned by Djengis Kahn is worth more than the same type of vase owned by some no-name.
In other words it's not the atoms or the arrangement that matter but the history of the object. It's not the inherent value of the object but the value of the history of the object we assign to it.
I.e. the one shipped from earth is more valuable than the one replicated no matter the level of fidelity because I know the difference.
Again it's not the object that is valuable it's you deciding it's valuable. Living in a world like that we would find other ways to ensure that we track the authenticity to the extent we can. So value will always be ensured because it's created in the brain not in the object.
> You can't but that doesn't change much because it's still from earth
How do you know that? You just conceded that there's no way to know if the thing was replicated before being loaded onto the cargo ship. How do you know that it wasn't replicated on the cargo ship shortly before arrival?
> Living in a world like that we would find other ways to ensure that we track the authenticity
No, you wouldn't. That's the whole point. In a world with replication technology, the whole concept of "authenticity" becomes every bit as meaningless for physical objects as it already is for digital ones.
> So value will always be ensured because it's created in the brain not in the object.
This is essentially saying that you will always be able to find suckers. Which may be true, but I would hope that any member of a space-faring species would have a basic understanding of physics, cognitive bias, and logical fallacies.
I am saying that there will be fraud but also plenty of normal decent people who do not cheat, just like today.
I could hire someone to make sure there was no replicator on the ship just as an example. There could be procedures in place on earth to make sure its still the original.
You are completely disregarding the human part which is why you end up with the conclusion you do.
The only reason humans care about old things is that at the moment they are still hard to replicate, and that makes them scarce. As soon as it's easy to make something that is equivalent to an old thing in every measurable way they will no longer be scarce and their value will plummet just like everything else that can be mass-produced.
The diamond market was created to begin with, just because the market is going down doesn't mean that the value of a diamond is which any visit to a diamond store would tell you and certain historic diamonds certainly haven't gone down in price.
You can't recreate the history of an original ming dynasty vase just because you can replicate it down to it's atomic structure that's the point.
You can't see this because you keep thinking about the object as having value. It never had value it's us who attach value to things and we will continue to do that even if we can replicate, in fact that would just increase the price even more for originals.
I don't think so.
> You are assuming that there would be built no legitimate business which would not make it their thing to send original objects to earth.
No, I'm not assuming that. I'm presenting an argument for that. Not the same thing.
The argument is: in the presence of perfect replication technology, it is no longer possible to track the provenance of objects (and it is certainly not possible across interstellar times and distances).
If you think it's possible, tell me how you would do it. Suppose I own an original and you want to buy it. How can I convince you that what I am handing over to you is in fact "the original" and not a perfect copy?
Humans apply value. Today the Mona Lisa has no value inherent you can say that someone who pays 400milion for a painting is being scammed even if it's original.
But even if you can replicate the atomic structure the human perception of the value of the original does not go away and that means there is a market for that.
Claiming that it's not possible to send something created from earth which itself would be valuable even if it was something which was replicated on earth without being scammed is simply misrepresenting humans and that's the important part here humans, not the object.
Sorry, you'll have to refresh my memory.
Extracting from my longer reply, "the original"'s constituents' worldtubes diverge around Leonardo da Vinci. The atom-by-atom duplicate's atoms' worldtubes mostly do not -- they diverge around the forger(s) in their workshop instead.
For that matter, the distances between systems creates a sort of time-travel effect. You receive their knowledge hundreds of years after the fact, making it implicitly "antique lost knowledge."
So I think the point still stands that all trade would be done using photons.
I would be very interested to discuss how "trade done using photons" is such a 21st-century concept and that it bears as much resemblance to interstellar trade as the black pepper trade of the 13th-century proscribes capital markets today.