Permutation City Quotes

“Is a stranger in a crowd less than human, just because you can’t witness her inner life?”
― Greg Egan, Permutation City

“How does it feel to be seven thousand years old?"
"That depends."
"On what?"
"On how I want to feel.”
― Greg Egan, Permutation City

“Order my life. I’m nothing without you: fragments of time, fragments of words, fragments of feelings. Make sense of me. Make me whole.”
― Greg Egan, Permutation City

“Now he was…dust. To an outside observer, these ten seconds had been ground up into ten thousand uncorrelated moments and scattered throughout real time - and in model time, the outside world had suffered an equivalent fate. Yet the pattern of his awareness remained perfectly intact: somehow he found himself, “assembled himself” from these scrambled fragments. He’d been taken apart like a jigsaw puzzle - but his dissection and shuffling were transparent to him. Somehow - on their own terms - the pieces remained connected.

Imagine a universe entirely without structure, without shape, without connections. A cloud of microscopic events, like fragments of space-time … except that there is no space or time. What characterizes one point in space, for one instant? Just the values of the fundamental particle fields, just a handful of numbers. Now, take away all notions of position, arrangement, order, and what’s left? A cloud of random numbers.

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? If I can piece together my own coherent space and time from data scattered so widely that it might as well be part of some giant cloud of random numbers, then what makes you think that you’re not doing the very same thing?”
― Greg Egan, Permutation City

“What am I? The data? The process that generates it? The relationships between the numbers?”
― Greg Egan, Permutation City

“Opponents replied that when you modeled a hurricane, nobody got wet. When you modeled a fusion power plant, no energy was produced. When you modeled digestion and metabolism, no nutrients were consumed – no real digestion took place. So, when you modeled the human brain, why should you expect real thought to occur?”
― Greg Egan, Permutation City

“There’s a cellular automaton called TVC. After Turing, von Neumann and Chiang. Chiang’s version was N-dimensional. That leaves plenty of room for data within easy reach. In two dimensions, the original von Neumann machine had to reach further and further - and wait longer and longer - for each successive bit of data. In a six-dimensional TVC automaton, you can have a three-dimensional grid of computers, which keeps on growing indefinitely - each with its own three-dimensional memory, which can also grow without bound.

And when the simulated TVC universe being run on the physical computer is suddenly shut down, the best explanation for what I’ve witnessed will be a continuation of that universe - an extension made out of dust. Maria could almost see it: a vast lattice of computers, a seed of order in a sea of random noise, extending itself from moment to moment by sheer force of internal logic, “accreting” the necessary building blocks from the chaos of non-space-time by the very act of defining space and time.”
― Greg Egan, Permutation City

“The TVC universe will never collapse. Never. A hundred billion years, a hundred trillion; it makes no difference, it will always be expanding. Entropy is not a problem. Actually, ‘expanding’ is the wrong word; the TVC universe grows like a crystal, it doesn’t stretch like a balloon. Think about it. Stretching ordinary space increases entropy; everything becomes more spread out, more disordered. Building more of a TVC cellular automaton just gives you more room for data, more computing power, more order. Ordinary matter would eventually decay, but these computers aren’t made out of matter. There’s nothing in the cellular automaton’s rules to prevent them from lasting forever.

Durham’s universe - being made of the same “dust” as the real one, merely rearranged itself. The rearrangement was in time as well as space; Durham’s universe could take a point of space-time from just before the Big Crunch, and follow it with another from ten million years BC. And even if there was only a limited amount of “dust” to work with, there was no reason why it couldn’t be reused in different combinations, again and again. The fate of the TVC automaton would only have to make internal sense - and the thing would have no reason, ever, to come to an end.”
― Greg Egan, Permutation City

“Simulated consciousness" was as oxymoronic as "simulated addition.”
― Greg Egan, Permutation City

“We perceive – we inhabit – one arrangement of the set of events. But why should that arrangement be unique? There’s no reason to believe that the pattern we’ve found is the only coherent way of ordering the dust. There must be billions of other universes coexisting with us, made of the very same stuff – just differently arranged. If I can perceive events thousands of kilometers and hundreds of seconds apart to be side-by-side and simultaneous, there could be worlds, and creatures, built up from what we’d think of as points in space-time scattered all over the galaxy, all over the universe. We’re one possible solution to a giant cosmic anagram … but it would be ludicrous to believe that we’re the only one.”
― Greg Egan, Permutation City

“Don’t underestimate the need to appeal to people’s imaginations. Maybe you can see all the consequences of your work, already. Other people might need to have them spelled out explicitly.” Maria”
― Greg Egan, Permutation City

“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.”
― Greg Egan, Permutation City

“Let me understand you. Let me piece you together, hold you together. Let me help you to explain yourself.”
― Greg Egan, Permutation City

“Paul struggled to imagine the outside world on his own terms, but it was almost impossible. Not only was he scattered across the globe, but widely separated machines were simultaneously computing different moments of his subjective time frame. Was the distance from Tokyo to New York now the length of his corpus callosum? Had the world shrunk to the size of his skull – and vanished from time altogether, except for the fifty computers which contributed at any one time to what he called ‘the present’?”
― Greg Egan, Permutation City

“Aden would phone before he left, trying to patch things up, but she could see how easy it would be, now, to break things off permanently. And now that it had reached that stage, it seemed like the obvious thing to do. She wasn’t upset, or relieved – just calm. It always made her feel that way: burning bridges, driving people away. Simplifying her life. She’d”
― Greg Egan, Permutation City

“He tried to dredge up the familiar, comforting truths: The Copy would survive, it would live his life for him. This body was always destined to perish; he’d accepted that long ago. Death was the irreversible dissolution of the personality; this wasn’t death, it was a shedding of skin. There was nothing to fear.”
― Greg Egan, Permutation City

“When first resurrected, he’d worried constantly over which aspects of his past he should imitate for the sake of sanity, and which he should discard as a matter of honesty.”
― Greg Egan, Permutation City

“Peer shook his head. “What have I become, already? An endless series of people – all happy for their own private reasons. Linked together by the faintest thread of memory. Why keep them spread out in time? Why go on pretending that there’s one ‘real’ person, enduring through all those arbitrary changes?”
― Greg Egan, Permutation City

“The whole idea of a creator tears itself apart. A universe with conscious beings either finds itself in the dust … or it doesn’t. It either makes sense of itself on its own terms, as a self-contained whole … or not at all. There never can, and never will be, Gods.”
― Greg Egan, Permutation City

“Imagine a universe entirely without structure, without shape, without connections. A cloud of microscopic events, like fragments of space-time … except that there is no space or time. What characterizes one point in space, for one instant? Just the values of the fundamental particle fields, just a handful of numbers. Now, take away all notions of position, arrangement, order, and what’s left? A cloud of random numbers.”
― Greg Egan, Permutation City

“Paul closed his eyes and turned his face to the sun. In spite of everything, it was hard not to take solace from the warmth flooding onto his skin. He stretched the muscles in his arms, his shoulders, his back -- and it felt like he was reaching out from the "self" in his virtual skull to all his mathematical flesh, imprinting the nebulous data with meaning; binding it all together, staking some kind of claim. He felt the stirrings of an erection. Existence was beginning to seduce him. He let himself surrender for a moment to a visceral sense of identity which drowned out all his pale mental images of optical processors, all his abstract reflections on the software's approximations and short-cuts. This body didn't want to evaporate. This body didn't want to bale out. It didn't much care that there was another -- "more real" -- version of itself elsewhere. It wanted to retain its wholeness. It wanted to endure.”
― Greg Egan, Permutation City

“That’s all I am, now. That’s all that defines me. So when they’re happy, they’ll be me.”
― Greg Egan, Permutation City

“Where was the line? Between self-transformation so great as to turn a longing for death into childlike wonder … and death itself, and the handing on of the joys and burdens he could no longer shoulder to someone new?”
― Greg Egan, Permutation City

“Evolution was a random walk across a minefield, not a pre-ordained trajectory, onward and upward toward “perfection.”
― Greg Egan, Permutation City

“Immortality would have been meaningless, trapped in a “machine” with a finite number of possible states; in a finite time he would have exhausted the list of every possible thing he could be. Only the promise of eternal growth made sense of eternal life.”
― Greg Egan, Permutation City

“Paul scanned the old news reports rapidly, skimming over articles and fast-forwarding scenes which he felt sure he would have studied scrupulously, had they been fresh. He felt a curious sense of resentment, at having "missed" so much — it was all there in front of him, now, but that wasn't the same at all.

And yet, he wondered, shouldn't be be relieved that he hadn't wasted his time on so much ephemeral detail? The very fact that he was now less than enthralled only proved how little of it had really mattered, in the long run.

Then again, what did? People didn't inhabit geological time. People inhabited hours and days, they had to care about things on that time scale.

People.”
― Greg Egan, Permutation City

“Francesca said, “But don’t you see? We talk about God for the simple reason that we still want to. There’s a deeply ingrained human compulsion to keep using that word, that concept – to keep honing it, rather than discarding it – despite the fact that it no longer means what it did five thousand years ago.”
― Greg Egan, Permutation City

“Do you mean, that will be enough to satisfy you – or do you intend making a conscious decision to be satisfied?”
― Greg Egan, Permutation City

“In a human, or a Copy being run in the usual way, the physics of brain or computer meant that the state of mind at any one moment directly influenced the state of mind that followed”
― Greg Egan, Permutation City

“I have other time frames to worry about besides yours!”
― Greg Egan, Permutation City