In "a world where the technology exists to make atomically perfect copies", people would still pay a huge premium to have the first instance. Some forgers have managed to produce copies that were, at the time, indistinguishable from originals. But that didn't lead collectors to ignore the distinction. It just made them more nervous ;)

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.

> In "a world where the technology exists to make atomically perfect copies", people would still pay a huge premium to have the first instance.

Do you see people paying huge premiums for "the first instance" of a digital image?

I have no clue. I can imagine that some collector might pay a premium for the workstation, shut down at the moment that the image was last saved. Or the dated disk image.

It doesn't become meaningless to the person who ascribes meaning to the original that Da Vinci put together. It's irrelevant to that person if perfect copies can be made, if they don't want the copies. You can't just arbitrarily claim something universally lacks meaning like that.

> It doesn't become meaningless to the person who ascribes meaning to the original that Da Vinci put together.

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.

OK, so how do you address the spacetime argument? An "atomically perfect copy" is not a perfect copy of the spacetime object. Because they diverge at the moment of copying.

It is, by definition, a perfect copy at the time it is made, albeit potentially displaced in time and space. Yes, after that they diverge, but so what? The situation is exactly analogous to making a copy of a digital image, where there is no economic value attached to "the original" because the very concept is correctly recognized as meaningless.

Value is a wholly human created concept. If humans value it, then it is valuable. Yes, one could try to re-educate people about a "more true" view of the world using the theory of quantum mechanics. Then humans would value an exact copy (how would making the perfect copy ever be possible, really) the same as the original. You don't seem to be convincing even the more scientifically minded people here on HN, but good luck with you evangelicalism. Maybe a better way to get converts is to suggest people to read Richard Feynman's book "QED : The Strange Theory of Light and Matter" for a difficult but technically correct and simple introduction to quantum mechanics. Your linked essay is quite convoluted and reads like a bunch of gobbledygook. I think most people would get more out of the Feynman book and maybe come over to the idea that reality is a very strange and anti-intuitive at the lowest, most fundamental level.