Permutation City

Greg Egan

4 ideas

1. Dust Theory: experience needs no ordered substrate

   A conscious computation's sense of continuity does not depend on its states being computed in order, in one place, or at a steady rate. Each state contains the pattern that links it to the next, so a mind's experience assembles itself from whatever states exist. Taken to the limit, any sufficiently vast scatter of random events, the 'dust', already contains every self-consistent observer, and those observers experience coherent worlds without anyone computing them.

2. Paul Durham's sliced Copy and launched universe

   Paul Durham runs experiments on his own software Copy, computing its moments out of sequence and spread across separate machines. He then sells wealthy Copies places in a new universe, Elysium, runs its seed on a computer network for only a few hours, and shuts it down. The universe persists from the inside, now self-sustaining in the dust, with its inhabitants living on and no hardware beneath them.

3. Editable motives make meaning arbitrary

   A Copy who can rewrite his own desires can make any activity feel supremely meaningful, for example becoming passionately absorbed in carving table legs, then swap that passion for another. Once motivation is a setting you choose, the felt importance of a pursuit stops being evidence that it matters. The self becomes a sequence of chosen obsessions with no authority beneath them to judge between them.

4. A world's laws belong to its best-explaining observers

   When an artificial universe evolves its own intelligent life, the Lambertians, their account of their world's origins can compete with the account held by the creators who seeded it. The creators' story requires an external designer, while the natives explain their world by its own internal physics without one. When the native explanation proves more self-consistent and economical, reality reshapes itself around it, and the creators' version unravels.

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