9 ms·

You don't think there would be any trade in antiques? Even in the modern world, just because we can reproduce something exactly doesn't mean there are many peop

You don't think there would be any trade in antiques? Even in the modern world, just because we can reproduce something exactly doesn't mean there are many people willing to spend lots of money on something that is unreproducible.

sounds 8y ago
A lot of the value of antiques comes from the lost knowledge they represent, whether that's just sentimental "you just had to be there" experiences or more concrete "you don't know how to make the varnish on a Stradivarius" lost knowledge. 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.
lisper 8y ago
Well, I hope that any civilization that masters interstellar travel would have moved beyond such foolishness. If you can produce an atom-by-atom duplicate, what does it even mean for something to be "the original"? http://blog.rongarret.info/2015/02/31-flavors-of-ontology.html http://blog.rongarret.info/2015/02/31-flavors-of-ontology.ht...
- ThomPete 8y ago
  It means that it has history attached to it and that it's traveled in time. Humans will most certainly not abandon things of affectional value our lives and most value in life is built up around that. Why do you think you have different levels of friends? History is very important to us.
  - lisper 8y ago
    You clearly did not read the article I linked to.
    - ThomPete 8y ago
      I did, why don't you think I read it?
      - lisper 8y ago
        Because the article contains within it the refutation of your argument. In fact, that's the whole point of the article. "... 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..."
        ThomPete 8y ago
        May I suggest that you didn't read my comment then? That's not what I was answering.
        lisper 8y ago
        That's what it sounded like to me: "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.
- njarboe 8y ago
  As an ex-antique dealer the difference is "the original" existed in the past and has a recorded history. In the antique business it's call provenance. A piece of rusty steel pipe mounted on a brass stand and labeled "A piece of the Maine" is worth an order of magnitude less than the exact same object owned by the ancestor of an investigator of the Maine explosion with a photo of the object with the ancestor on the wrecked ship supporting its authenticity. 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.
  - lisper 8y ago
    > something being an original definitely has an unambiguous meaning to most people That's only because of current limitations of our technology. Did you read the article I linked to?
    - mirimir 8y ago
      > Replace the word "planks" with "atoms" and you have a modern version of this puzzle: if you replace every atom in an object with a different but identical atom, do you end up with the same object or a different object? The collection of atoms you end up with after the replacement process will be completely indistinguishable from the collection you started with, so on what possible basis could you call the new collection "different"? 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.
      - lisper 8y ago
        You don't quite understand the argument here. This is not about provenance, this is about physics. Atoms are just as indistinguishable from each other as a copy of digital data. If you take one atom and replace it with another it makes no more sense to call one the original the other not than it does to call one copy of Microsoft Word "the original". 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?
- ValleyOfTheMtns 8y ago
  It's about the story and the people behind the objects. You could create an exact atomic replica of the Mona Lisa, but it still wouldn't be THE Mona Lisa that Da Vinci sat in front of and painted with his own hands. From a purely material perspective they're the same, but from the perspective of historical narrative there's a big difference, and that matters to some people. 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.
  - lisper 8y ago
    > You could create an exact atomic replica of the Mona Lisa, but it still wouldn't be THE Mona Lisa that Da Vinci sat in front of and painted with his own hands. Actually, it would. That is the definition of "exact atomic replica". Did you read the article I linked to?
    - mirimir 8y ago
      Yes, it's an "exact atomic replica". But it's still a replica, and not the original. And really, "did you read" gets boring quickly.
      - lisper 8y ago
        Well, if you had read it you would understand why there really is no difference between an original and an exact atomic replica. Just as it makes no sense to distinguish between two copies of Microsoft Word and call one "the original", it makes no sense to distinguish between two atomically identical objects. (Or at the very least you would know that there is an argument for this position, to which you might have actually been able to muster a counter-argument rather than simply proclaiming with no supporting evidence whatsoever that "it's still a replica and not the original." No, an exact atomic replica is not "just a replica". But I'm not going to recapitulate the entire argument here.)
        mirimir 8y ago
- raattgift 8y ago
  > If you can produce an atom-by-atom duplicate, what does it even mean for something to be "the original"? 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.

sounds 8y ago

A lot of the value of antiques comes from the lost knowledge they represent, whether that's just sentimental "you just had to be there" experiences or more concrete "you don't know how to make the varnish on a Stradivarius" lost knowledge. 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.

lisper 8y ago

Well, I hope that any civilization that masters interstellar travel would have moved beyond such foolishness. If you can produce an atom-by-atom duplicate, what does it even mean for something to be "the original"? http://blog.rongarret.info/2015/02/31-flavors-of-ontology.html http://blog.rongarret.info/2015/02/31-flavors-of-ontology.ht...

ThomPete 8y ago
It means that it has history attached to it and that it's traveled in time. Humans will most certainly not abandon things of affectional value our lives and most value in life is built up around that. Why do you think you have different levels of friends? History is very important to us.
- lisper 8y ago
  You clearly did not read the article I linked to.
  - ThomPete 8y ago
    I did, why don't you think I read it?
    - lisper 8y ago
      Because the article contains within it the refutation of your argument. In fact, that's the whole point of the article. "... 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..."
      - ThomPete 8y ago
        May I suggest that you didn't read my comment then? That's not what I was answering.
        lisper 8y ago
        That's what it sounded like to me: "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.
njarboe 8y ago
As an ex-antique dealer the difference is "the original" existed in the past and has a recorded history. In the antique business it's call provenance. A piece of rusty steel pipe mounted on a brass stand and labeled "A piece of the Maine" is worth an order of magnitude less than the exact same object owned by the ancestor of an investigator of the Maine explosion with a photo of the object with the ancestor on the wrecked ship supporting its authenticity. 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.
- lisper 8y ago
  > something being an original definitely has an unambiguous meaning to most people That's only because of current limitations of our technology. Did you read the article I linked to?
  - mirimir 8y ago
    > Replace the word "planks" with "atoms" and you have a modern version of this puzzle: if you replace every atom in an object with a different but identical atom, do you end up with the same object or a different object? The collection of atoms you end up with after the replacement process will be completely indistinguishable from the collection you started with, so on what possible basis could you call the new collection "different"? 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.
    - lisper 8y ago
      You don't quite understand the argument here. This is not about provenance, this is about physics. Atoms are just as indistinguishable from each other as a copy of digital data. If you take one atom and replace it with another it makes no more sense to call one the original the other not than it does to call one copy of Microsoft Word "the original". 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?
ValleyOfTheMtns 8y ago
It's about the story and the people behind the objects. You could create an exact atomic replica of the Mona Lisa, but it still wouldn't be THE Mona Lisa that Da Vinci sat in front of and painted with his own hands. From a purely material perspective they're the same, but from the perspective of historical narrative there's a big difference, and that matters to some people. 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.
- lisper 8y ago
  > You could create an exact atomic replica of the Mona Lisa, but it still wouldn't be THE Mona Lisa that Da Vinci sat in front of and painted with his own hands. Actually, it would. That is the definition of "exact atomic replica". Did you read the article I linked to?
  - mirimir 8y ago
    Yes, it's an "exact atomic replica". But it's still a replica, and not the original. And really, "did you read" gets boring quickly.
    - lisper 8y ago
      Well, if you had read it you would understand why there really is no difference between an original and an exact atomic replica. Just as it makes no sense to distinguish between two copies of Microsoft Word and call one "the original", it makes no sense to distinguish between two atomically identical objects. (Or at the very least you would know that there is an argument for this position, to which you might have actually been able to muster a counter-argument rather than simply proclaiming with no supporting evidence whatsoever that "it's still a replica and not the original." No, an exact atomic replica is not "just a replica". But I'm not going to recapitulate the entire argument here.)
      - mirimir 8y ago
raattgift 8y ago
> If you can produce an atom-by-atom duplicate, what does it even mean for something to be "the original"? 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.