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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 o

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?
    - mirimir 8y ago
      It's not about objects. It's about meaning. Owning a "Da Vinci original" is not about owning some bunch of atoms. It's about owning the particular bunch of atoms that Da Vinci put together. 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.
      - lisper 8y ago
        > It's about owning the particular bunch of atoms that Da Vinci put together. 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.
        mirimir 8y ago
        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.
        lisper 8y ago
        > 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?

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?
  - mirimir 8y ago
    It's not about objects. It's about meaning. Owning a "Da Vinci original" is not about owning some bunch of atoms. It's about owning the particular bunch of atoms that Da Vinci put together. 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.
    - lisper 8y ago
      > It's about owning the particular bunch of atoms that Da Vinci put together. 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.
      - mirimir 8y ago
        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.
        lisper 8y ago
        > 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?