> Interestingly enough, this starts to bring up questions that have previously only been super active in science fiction circles, particularly, Star Trek: If you can perfectly recreate something down to the molecular level, what actually has value? (Assuming, someday, that synthetic versions are excessively cheap, in Star Trek's case.)
This is really getting at a core contradiction in how we analyze value. On the one hand, you have something's monetary value. This is the exchange value - the value you can get, denominated in a currency, via a sale. On the other hand, something you need has value because it fulfills a role when you use it. This is use value.
We don't consider use value at all when talking about the value of a good and consider the exchange value to be paramount. But this makes no sense. When you're starving, a loaf of bread is quite literally worth your entire world. When you have plenty of food, one more loaf of bread is worth almost nothing at all. When you need to get around, one car is extremely useful. Hundreds of cars together are essentially worthless, except perhaps to rent to others (literally rent-seeking).
If you can recreate something down to its molecular level, and produce arbitrarily many copies, then it's only value can be its use value. And use value is difficult to quantify as it's tied to the subjective experience of need.
> If you can replicate cooked food perfectly, will people still claim that "real" food, grown, slaughtered, and cooked, is "better" or tastes "more authentic", despite no technical difference?
I suspect that some amount of this comes from our attempts to justify the price we pay. It costs more, and so it must be worth more. We invent reasons in our minds to justify the dissonance. Though, if you experience something better, there isn't really any argument that can satisfactorily say that you don't, since experience is subjective, anyway.