april 2022 uuss@FCB: permutation city

Last month's discussion of Pharmako AI briefly touched on that books discussion of the "cyberpunk" genre.

Building on that theme, I'd like to discuss one of my favorite books at least adjacent to that genre, Greg Egan's "Permutation City".

The book does some deep dives into what it would mean if we could "upload" ourselves, along with some ability to modify our "virtual" personalites.

(The book also has some deeper themes on the meaning of artificial realities which we may not get to)

The e-book version is available for $3 from several links at Greg Egan's Permutation City page. The paperback version is available for around $10. It is a brisk but thought-provoking read, and well worth the time and small money.

However, here is a PDF of some excerpts I find especially compelling - sections include:

• Prelude (virtual Paul Durham waking up)
• Paragraph on "Strong AI Hypothesis"
• Paul / Durham experiment with "control copy"
• Peer endlessly descending a skyscraper
• Paragraph on "Confidence" and "Optimism" mood-altering virtual potions
• Peer's Love of Table Legs

I am impressed at some of the implicit preditions made in this 1994 book, along with things that I still think might be coming down the pike.

• gradually unfolding climate catastrophe, along with attempts to mitigate
• The "Camel's Eye" software sorting the wheat from the chaff for
• heavy use of "masks" in personal communication - you're hardly ever communicating with the true, uncurated person, they are usually using some level of VR puppet. (Interesting to think of in terms of this Zoom age)

I think it's important to understand the difference in this fictional world and that of, say, "The Matrix". Philosophically, this is less like the "Matrix" (with people in the real world controlling avatars in a virtual space, albeit sometimes not realizing it) and more like the "Star Trek" teleporter, where uploading (i.e. showing up in a new type of space, digital vs real) is akin to teleporting, with the same issues of "is it cloning, or moving")

Here are some other topics we might touch on that aren't in the excerpt: (just putting stuff down while it's fresh for me)

• "The Church of the God Who Makes No Difference" - I really appreciate this extreme version of a religion for the "watchmaker" God
• Dust Theory - similar to the idea of the Boltzmann brain, implications of a kind of conscious order arising given sufficiently randomly energetic environments
• Planet Labert and the Autoverse: an entire reality with simplified physics, and a truly alien lifeform with very different sets of empicism
• "what's the use of a scan that will never be run" and other thoughts on the meaning of death and possible rebirth