Permutation City

by Greg Egan

Paul felt utterly refreshed – and utterly disinclined to give up his present state of comfort. He couldn’t think why he’d slept so late, but he didn’t much care. He spread his fingers on the sun-warmed sheet, and thought about drifting back to sleep.

Real-world biochemistry was far too complex to simulate in every last detail for a creature the size of a gnat, let alone a human being. Computers could model all the processes of life – but not on every scale, from atom to organism, all at the same time.

tycoons can get away with anything, they’re not expected to act like ordinary people. But just wait until the numbers go up by a factor of ten.”

With no struggle for financial security ahead, he’d been sinking quietly into a state of bemused complacency.

A computer model which manipulated data about itself and its “surroundings” in essentially the same way as an organic brain would have to possess essentially the same mental states. “Simulated consciousness” was as oxymoronic as “simulated addition.”

“You should listen. Crooked Buddhist Lawyers on Crack. They’re quite good.”

Why ask the question, if the answer told you nothing?

Ultimately, what difference was there between so-called cause and effect, and any other internally consistent pattern?

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?

Every permutation of the dust which was capable of perceiving itself, making sense of itself, would do just that.

she could not believe that the Lambertians themselves would have failed to have lived the very same lives without her. Somehow, they still would have found a way to assemble themselves from the dust. If that was true, though – if the internal logic of their experience would have been enough to bring them into existence – then there was no reason to believe that they would ever be forced to conclude that their universe required a creator.

Our bodies are ad hoc approximations.