Permutation City

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Permutation City is a science fiction novel (ISBN 1-85798-218-5) by Greg Egan which explores quantum ontology via the various philosophical aspects of artificial life and simulations of intelligence. It won the John W. Campbell Award for the best science-fiction novel of the year in 1995 and was cited in a 2003 Scientific American article on multiverses.

Permutation City asks many of the same kinds of philosophical questions as other works such as The Matrix, Blade Runner and Ghost in the Shell, as well as other cyberpunk and postcyberpunk works – is there any difference between a perfect computer simulation and a "real" person? – but its textual nature allows it to push the ideas further. Egan gleefully deconstructs and undermines traditional notions of self, future, personality, and even physical reality. It also displays Egan's "dust" theory of existence, which postulates that our universe is but one instance of an infinitely configurable data pattern being run on a universal computational substrate.

Further Egan novels which deal with uploaded personalities include Diaspora and Schild's Ladder.

The book opens with a 20 line anagrammatic poem, in which all lines are anagrams of the book's title.

Another interesting idea expressed in the novel is that of the Autoverse, a virtual chemistry for a virtual world, containing thirty-two chemical components/elements), but which are "easier" to computationally model than real chemical elements whose interactions is highly dependent on quantum processes. I.e., the Autoverse is a clockwork Newtonian chemistry set. In the novel, the Autoverse is created to answer the question: does consciousness depend on quantum mechanics? The Autoverse is a simulation of a small universe, with laws of physics and chemistry that are internally consistent, but much simpler than our own. Autoverse atoms are truly indivisible and act in a totally deterministic manner - they are a type of cellular automata, similar to an advanced version of Conway's Game of Life. The universe is seeded by its creator with a primitive form of life - Autobacterium lamberti, a bacterium-like organism which is able to evolve and mutate, becoming subject to natural selection - and then left to run on its own to see whether consciousness eventually evolves. These ideas show some similarities to concepts discussed in the context of Endophysics.