Where Is This Video?

Hey, Vsauce. Michael here. Steve Seitz and Chuck Dyer used view morphing to digitally reveal a side of the Mona Lisa we've never seen before. What it would look like if she stared directly at us. That's her, but it seems a bit unfamiliar. I mean, there is only one iconic view of the Mona Lisa. There's only one physical object you can look at to say that you saw the Mona Lisa with your own eyes.

Photographs exist. There are copies you can also look at. There are forgeries, there are parodies, but the true original Mona Lisa is in the Louvre. That's where it is. But where is this video? Seriously, where is this video? I mean, it's on your screen right now, but it's also on a lot of other screens. Where's the original? Well, it's stored on YouTube servers and the original export is on my hard drive, but those are just instructions for making the video.

This video is anywhere. Every stream, every viewing of this video is, as Bill Thompson would say, "a digital simulacrum of something that has no original". So, how does a museum curator or an archaeologist deal with this? Well, they are rethinking curating. I mean, take a look at this sculpture. "The distance from this sentence to your eye is my sculpture." That's pretty cool, but how do you put something like that in a museum?

This sculpture and this video can be endlessly copied, and every version is made out of different stuff at different times, a bit like your body. There's an identity crisis going on. As I discussed before, every few years nearly all of your atoms are replaced. Old ones leave, new ones come in. Where is the original you? Like this video, you are really just the result of a set of instructions being followed.

And in our cases, interestingly, those instructions are kind of forgeries. 'The $12 Million Stuffed Shark' is a great book about the art world. It mentions that, at one point in history, there were 600 Rembrandt's hanging in museums and 350 Rembrandt's in private collections. The only problem is Rembrandt scholars say that Rembrandt only ever made 320 paintings. Mistaken identity, forgeries, and phonies have been around for a long time.

In 1496 a young Michelangelo, the same Michelangelo that painted this, forged a statue. He treated the statue with acid to make it look not like his own work but like the work of ancient Greeks or Romans, so he could sell it for more money. But really, what's wrong with a forgery? I mean, sure, supporting forgeries is like supporting plagiarism, but as far as intrinsic aesthetic properties go, what's the difference?

Whether painted by Da Vinci, or a dog, or copied perfectly by a robot, wouldn't the Mona Lisa smile just as mysteriously and coolly? Well, here's the thing. We feel like the original, the Mona Lisa Da Vinci originally made, has an aura about it. As Richard Wiseman discussed in Quirkology—a great book—psychologist Paul Rosen once studied just how obsessed we are with relics, things important merely because of their auras.

He found that people were more willing to wear a sweater that had been dropped in dog poop than they were to wear a sweater they had been told was once owned by a mass murderer. We are influenced by auras. Right now, I am in Mougin, the city in southeastern France where Picasso died. On one occasion, Picasso refused to sign a painting he knew he had painted, saying, "I can paint a fake Picasso just like anybody else."

You can disown your own paintings, and you can disown your children, but you can claim to have created your own paintings. But can you really claim to have created your own children? Let's explore a metaphor. Your mother is a 3D printer that printed you. But hold on, your parents conceived you and curated you, cared for you. But the actual blueprints that made you were outside of their conscious control.

Your blueprint is a forgery. It has been copied, replicated over and over again, ever since the very first group of molecules were arranged in a way that automatically replicated billions and billions of years ago. It's not a perfect forgery. Changes occur every time, making successive copies a little bit different. But 99.9 percent of your DNA isn't different from anyone else's.

Now, you might say, but wait, Michael, we all look so different. Kind of. But that's also because your brain is particularly good at recognizing differences amongst things that you are familiar with. It's called the cross-race effect, and it's the reason new twins you've never met before look totally the same, until you get used to them. It's the reason people from a culture you're not used to tend to be more difficult to distinguish.

And the reason, say, a big group of black labs you've never met before all kind of look like the same black lab. We all have a common descendant, a common person our DNA has been replicated from over and over again, making us, in a funny way, a big bunch of forgeries. Go back 50 forgeries ago, 50 generations ago, and that's enough to connect every single human living on Earth.

I've said this before: you are at least 50th cousins with everyone else living on the planet today. But we can go back further than that, as Guy Murchie famously did. You see, animal populations, and even molecule populations, experience replication variation and selective pressures, which means you are trillionth cousins with all life on Earth and, technically speaking, quadrillionth cousins with water and trees and rocks.

It's a beautiful notion, but it's anything but new. The word 'human' comes from a word for soil. And compare the Hebrew word for 'ground' with their name for the first man. You are quadrillionth cousins with dirt, with rocks, with trees, with plastic, with the very clothing you are wearing right now. So whether you're fighting with a stranger in a bar or stubbing your toe on a rock, it's all just a family squabble.

And as always, thanks for watching. Oh, hey, you're still there. This is great because I have some really cool news. Vsauce was just nominated for a Webby, in the news and information category. It's a really big honor, and I want to thank you guys for making this possible. You can be a Vsaucer in a whole new way now by voting for Vsauce in the Webby's. Just follow the link at the top of this video's description.

All the nominees, by the way, are great. It's great that the universe has these channels, so check all them out. And as always, thanks for watching.