Permutation | City

Discuss the between the Copies and the originals

Permutation City (1994) Author: Greg Egan Genre: Hard SF / Post-Cyberpunk The Premise: Life as a Copy

Written in 1994, it portrays a highly realistic, terrifyingly plausible 2050. Permutation City

The story follows , a man obsessed with achieving true, eternal immortality for these Copies, who are otherwise doomed to die when their host computer hardware inevitably fails. Core Concept: The "Dust Hypothesis"

Durham launches a virtual world built on the "Autoverse," a system allowing for infinite, self-replicating computational nodes, promising infinite life to its inhabitants. Discuss the between the Copies and the originals

Egan suggests that the mathematical data constituting a consciousness exists regardless of the order in which the calculations are performed. Even if a simulation is broken into pieces, scattered across time, and computed in a chaotic, non-continuous way ("dust"), the experience of that conscious self still occurs. Key Narrative Features

The novel's main intellectual driver is the "Dust Hypothesis." Egan challenges the notion that consciousness requires a continuous, physical, hardware-based simulation. Egan suggests that the mathematical data constituting a

It goes beyond simple "what if" scenarios to investigate what defines a self when memories are editable and death is optional.