Peter Gerdes's Reviews > Permutation City

This was my first introduction to Greg Egan and it blew my mind. Permutation City was the first book I ever read that made me say, 'Wow, that's a really interesting argument.' Other books made me think, 'huh, maybe we will have jet blaster space rays in the future.' but this one presents a serious and troubling philosophical argument. Permutation City isn't as fast paced or as idea dense as some of his other works but the ideas are much bigger and more provocative.

Egan is often criticized for lacking literary virtues like character development and deep complex psychological interaction. I don't deny that this isn't high literature but I think the criticism is misplaced. Egan doesn't write about emotional soap operas, if that's what I wanted I would just go out and talk to real people, but he writes about ideas. I think his charachters are quite believeable but they just aren't the focus of the show.

In Permutation City Egan draws out some of the consequences of strong AI, in particular the hypothesis that any system which implements the same computation as the human brain would have the same experiences. Egan argues that the notion of a computation is sufficently broad (undefined?) that if we take this idea seriously we have to accept that almost any situation we can imagine experiencing is being experienced by someone. One might view this as a fiction analog of Chalmer's view that a computational theory of the mind will entail pan-psychism (more or less).

If you like philosophy and can handle abstract arguments that make mincemeet of common sense (but aren't absurd) you will like this book. If you want an emotional soap opera or you stop listening as soon as people talk about abstract things like math or philosophy don't even bother reading the blurb on the back.