#permutation city

[noosphe-re]

‘Imagine ... a universe entirely without structure, without shape, without connections. A cloud of microscopic events, like fragments of space-time … except that there is no space or time. What characterizes one point in space, for one instant? Just the values of the fundamental particle fields, just a handful of numbers. Now, take away all notions of position, arrangement, order, and what's left? A cloud of random numbers. 'That's it. That's all there is. The cosmos has no shape at all – no such thing as time or distance, no physical laws, no cause and effect. 'But ... if the pattern that is me could pick itself out from all the other events taking place on this planet... why shouldn't the pattern we think of as "the universe" assemble itself, find itself, in exactly the same way? If I can piece together my own coherent space and time from data scattered so widely that it might as well be part of some giant cloud of random numbers ... then what makes you think that you're not doing the very same thing?'

Greg Egan, Permutation City

[revelware]

The hook for Permutation City by Greg Egan, in the hopes that I can convince someone to read it:

In the near future where the wealthy can upload their conciousness to computers, a scientist attempts to run experiments on machine conciousness by cloning himself into the simulation.

The issue is that every time he tries to do so, the moment the clone wakes up inside the simulation, he immediately kills himself.

Why?

[bookcoversonly]

Title: Permutation City | Author: Greg Egan | Publisher: Night Shade (2014)

[mashivan]

Really enjoying permutation city and the thought experiments of, ok if you can simulate consciousness, you can start, stop, speed up, slow down consciousness.

The leap I’m slowly coming to accept is, can you run consciousness in reverse. If consciousness is defined by a sequence of states, what happens if you run that sequence in an arbitrary order.

Need a physicist with an actual understanding of entropy and thermodynamics to help explain why time does that, and whether consciousness has to follow thermodynamics

[c-53]

I finished reading Permutation City and. From the bottom of my heart. Girl, what?

[yvfu]

But having paid for the right not to fear death, at some level he must have confused the kind of abstract, literary, morally-charged, beloved-of-fate immortality possessed by mythical heroes and virtuous believers in the afterlife, with the highly specific free-market version he’d actually signed up for.

– Greg Egan, Permutation City

[c-53]

Theres so much media where ai experience reality so much faster, and so much more thoroughly than humans, and they are frequently described as having to slow themselves down for humans to keep up, but the alternative, as Permutation City presents it is so interesting. Fully self aware, humaniform intelligence, thats lacking in the hardware required for this realism to happen real time. The rest of the world needs to slow down for the ai, as it computes each state one frame at a time

[c-53]

Peer from Permutation City, my favorite beast