Open Thread, May 1-15, 2012

OpenThreadGuy

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

I think the Ship of Theseus problem is good reductionism practice. Anyone else think similarly?

If I was to use an advanced molecular assembler to create a perfect copy the Mona Lisa and destroy the old one in the process, it would still lose a lot of value. That is because many people not only value the molecular setup of things but also their causal history, what transformations things underwent.

Personally I wouldn't care if I was disassembled and reassembled somewhere else. If that was a safe and efficient way of travel then I would do it. But I would care if that happened to some sort of artifact I value. Not only because it might lose some of its value in the eyes of other people but also because I personally value its causal history to be unaffected by certain transformations.

So in what sense would a perfect copy of the Mona Lisa be the same? In every sense except that it was copied. And if you care about that quality then a perfect copy is not the same, it is merely a perfect copy.

You would care if certain objects are destructively teleported but not care if the same happens to you (and presumably other humans)

Is this a preference you would want to want? I mean, given the ability to self-modify, would you rather keep putting (negative) value on concepts like "copy of" even when there's no practical physical difference? Note that this doesn't mean no longer caring about causal history. (you care about your own casual history in the form of memories and such)

Also, can you trace where this preference is coming from?

14TheOtherDave14y

Sure. Relatedly, the Mona Lisa currently hanging in the Louvre isn't the original... that only existed in the early 1500s. All we have now is the 500-year-old descendent of the original Mona Lisa, which is not the same, it is merely a descendent. Fortunately for art collectors, human biases are such that the 500-year-old descendent is more valuable in most people's minds than the original would be.

6[anonymous]14y

Requoting: "Look at any photograph or work of art. If you could duplicate exactly the first tiny dot of color, and then the next and the next, you would end with a perfect copy of the whole, indistinguishable from the original in every way, including the so-called 'moral value' of the art itself. Nothing can transcend its smallest elements" - CEO Nwabudike Morgan, "The Ethics of Greed", Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri [...] In that case, its history would be that it started off as atoms, was transformed into bits, and then was transformed back into atoms again. If the transformation were truly lossless, people familiar with this fact wouldn't care. Now, this specific example sounds silly because we have no such technology applicable to the Mona Lisa. But consider something like a mass-produced CD. You could take a CD in Europe, losslessly rip it, destroy the CD and copy the bits to America, then send them to a factory to stamp another CD. The resulting variation would be identical to that between the original CD and one of its siblings in Europe. People are familiar with the technologies involved, and they value CDs only for their bits, so the copy really is as good as the original. (Here I have even taken pains to state that the copy is not a burned CD-R, nor that the original was signed by a band member, or any such thing.) [...] "During World War II, the medals of German scientists Max von Laue and James Franck were sent to Copenhagen for safekeeping. When Germany invaded Denmark, chemist George de Hevesy dissolved them in aqua regia, to prevent confiscation by Nazi Germany and to prevent legal problems for the holders. After the war, the gold was recovered from solution, and the medals re-cast." - Wikipedia