Reddit reviews Permutation City: A Novel

Physicalism was just what I was left with when I stopped believing in magic. We physicalists do acknowledge the existence of mathematics, language, emotion, hopes, dreams, etc. For us they're qualities of, or relationships between, or phenomena arising out of or dependent on physical processes, physical reality. "Physical" isn't relegated to what you can poke with a stick.

>If you believe that "you are your brain"

I am not my brain, no more than I am my foot. My sense of "I" comes from processes in my brain, yes, but that's a different statement.

>what happens if I create using some advanced technology a perfect copy of your brain in a different location ?

Then that copy too would have a sense of self. He would be an individual unto himself, and would feel the need for self-preservation and all the rest. We might start off as identical, but since our experiences would be different then we would quickly diverge.

As an aside, I'd recommend the great book Permutation City, which explores these ideas in great depth. Many of Greg Egan's other novels and short stories also explore the same territory.

>Which brain are you ?

"I" is a first-person experience. The other instantiation of "my" brain pattern (which would quickly diverge from the original) would be its own "I".

For anyone that wants to read an awesome book largely about this topic, I highly recommend "Permutation City" by Greg Egan. It's really good.

Some of the ideas explored with this concept is shit like rich dudes utilizing this tech to basically become immortal and continue to run their corporations after their real world self dies with their digital clones taking over. Basically also as a way to wait until real word robotics and cyborg tech and whatnot is advanced enough to host their consciousness in the real world again.

Also how like digital clones can mentally crack from the realization that the real them is not them etc etc.

https://www.amazon.com/Permutation-City-Novel-Greg-Egan/dp/1597805394#mediaMatrix_secondary_view_div_1562315580921

I think you would like Greg Egan's Permutation City

A couple of the best

Iain M Banks : Excession

Greg Egan : Permutation City

> Permutation City

Thats the hard cover. I got the kindle for $3 which is a steal, but can find the paperback for cheap: http://smile.amazon.com/Permutation-City-Novel-Greg-Egan/dp/1597805394/ref=tmm_pap_title_0

Permutation City by Greg Egan
https://www.amazon.com/Permutation-City-Novel-Greg-Egan/dp/1597805394

... dust theory is very intriguing!

Some questions and hypotheticals to probe your intuitions:

Someone you deeply care for is scanned and reassembled while sleeping dreamlessly (or under anesthesia, or whatever). Two of them lie side by side before you. Do you kill one without regret? Is it harder to kill one than it is to kill an extremely high fidelity video game model of one?

You say goodnight to your romantic partner of choice and go to sleep beside them. While you both sleep, someone sneaks into your bedroom and painlessly kills them. You wake up to see the intruder standing over their lifeless body. You are angry and upset. The intruder says "it's all good dude, I scanned them before killing them! Here's their saved brainstate (or whatever)". Do you laugh it off? And maybe kick the intruder out for playing such a hilarious practical joke?

Unbeknownst to you, you were copied yesterday and your copy has since slept a dreamless sleep (or is still saved somewhere and hasn't been created yet). Are you more comfortable with killing yourself then and there and being reformed from the save-state, or taking a 24-hour amnestic?

Is the badness of death continuous or discrete? Presume you're entirely, 100% OK with the perfect fidelity copying thing. Now wiggle some of the atoms around. Are you still 100% on board? Wiggle some more atoms. Change your favorite flavor of ice-cream to rum raisin, but leave everything else intact. Make your colon half an inch longer. Tuvan throat singing is now overwhelmingly your favorite sort of music. Etc. Still ok with it? Those things aren't really integral to your identity, are they? Or is the death of the "original", instead of being a neutral act, now 5% as bad as death sans "copy"? Now approach the process of copying from the other direction -- instead of having a perfect copy, you find out that "Sam" exists. Sam's your distant kin, and they sorta like the same things you do. They're willing to step into your shoes when you get vaporized. Are you now slightly reassured at the prospect of death?

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I myself wouldn't step into the copy-destroy-reconstruct machine (except in certain circumstances), but would be inclined to do a piece-by-piece mind upload. I'm not nearly certain enough that copies are meaningfully "me" to risk death in the former manner, but my intuitions don't balk nearly as much at the latter. Perhaps the question's even arbitrary, and you can just as well imagine agents who value their "particular" configuration of matter as well as those who value only the pattern that configuration represents, or those who value both, or those who value neither. That said, in a sci-fi universe, I'd be totally in favor of creating "back-ups" before performing risky activities, if only because a lot of what I value doesn't have to do with me, personally, and the backups could fulfill those goals just as well in the event of my untimely demise (I'd also be in favor of just creating more of me, but that's a separate discussion).

I've another question for those who believe it doesn't matter, or that you don't die in any meaningful respect when you step in the teleporter: how certain of this are you? As in, give me a number, p equals what? Are you 99% certain? That still leaves 1% chance you die meaningfully (and there's still uncertainty about that probability estimate). How great a benefit do you have to receive to gamble on that uncertainty?

As for sci-fi books that investigate the question of personal identity, I recommend Permutation City.

Wow, that short story was awesome. It's great that there's still so much Greg Egan I haven't encountered.

You're right that this idea feels like a deus ex machina. When I first read "Permutation City" I walked around for a few days in a euphoric haze, imagining simulations running without their substrates. But then reality hit. I was running huge microprocessor simulations in those days, and I remembered that you can't simulate their instructions out of order. There are dependencies that have to be respected[1]. And Egan had glossed past that in a single page, so slickly that I never noticed. This feels similar. It's dangerous to introduce too much fiction into one's worldview.

[1] Though it's possible you can sidestep dependency constraints, using something like maximum entropy to simulate a set of particles at far enough time steps without simulating the intervening steps, simply by estimating the probabilities of different kinds of interactions. It might work better if you have a goal in mind to train for using reinforcement learning. Then you could leave the fundamental laws of the simulated universe open and part of the weights to train, and select the simulation that gives you what you want. But all this is probably like Borges's library[2], or at least way beyond our computational capacity. Or maybe you need to imagine your goal to such depth that.. what's the point of finding a simulation that yields it? The world has never been easy, so better to assume it never will be until one is proven wrong.

[2] When I first read Carl Sagan's "Contact", the final chapter left me in a similar euphoric haze for a few days. Inside the infinite digits of pi in all bases you could find all possible patterns, all truths. Then I discovered the insight of Borges's library for myself.