![]() ![]() ![]() His eternal simulated existence devolves into a continual repetition of his actions and the feelings of guilt and regret at what he should have done differently. But what if we edited our minds first to something that didn’t mind being a Copy…it would seem perfectly content in its simulated box, but would that be still us? I suppose some of this “mind changing” happens already we do it with psychoactive medication and drugs.įinally there’s the story of one character who holds onto his guilt from a secret, decades-old (real world) crime. Related to proactively “changing your mind” - if you, as a simulation, edit your own desires and memories and moods, are you really still you? Maybe “we” would hate being made a Copy, just like in the book where the vast majority of them “bail out” after just a short time. Eternal growth of the system is the only way to get eternity without repetition. Even this would get old, however, unless the system was expanding with new processing power and new data. Woodworking for 70+ years, then cataloging beetle specimens for another lifetime, etc. Kind of reminds me of the (old, maybe? “I don’t know if we teach that” – Hinckley) concept in Mormon theology, where we become gods ourselves and create and people new worlds.Īnother character programs his brain to automatically reconfigure itself every few decades to give him a new obsession. So what to do? One main plot point in the second half of the book is observing and analyzing an artificial world (simulation within a simulation) to see if artificial life could arise. Everything is simulated, so everything is knowable everything is conquered. But … does it know that it exists?)Īnyway, despite this there are some interesting ideas on a simulated immortality.įirst of all, there’s the problem of eternal boredom. The “mind state” of every person that ever lived continues to exist after they die, described somewhere in the randomness in the universe. (Seems kind of like an nice modern view of an afterlife, though. However, here’s where I got lost: I’m not really sure what is picking out the coherent “state” from the randomness, and I’m not really sure why it was necessary for Paul to start up his simulated universe on the real grid. And it’s ok if the processing steps happen out of order - it is transparent and meaningless to the simulated consciousness. So somehow the Elysium simulation is described by this apparent “randomness” in the universe. Kind of like Borges library - if we had a collection of books composed of all permutations of letter ordering, then there would exist all the works of literature in that set (along with a lot of meaningless garbage!). Out of all this seeming randomness, we could select a coherent set of data describing something. But somehow (and here’s where the technical aspect lost me) it goes on existing, forever! I think the discovery that Paul exploits goes something like this: the universe it made up of a nearly infinite amount of data - think of the random states of atoms, or quantum particles. It only runs on the world-wide cloud net for two subjective minutes, at a cost of several million dollars, then is deleted. A huge simulation, including Copies of people’s minds, is started - a simulation that is incredibly detailed but requires way too much processing power to do anything for very long. Most of the story involves the build up to the creation of Elysium, where Permutation City exists. But definitely some interesting ideas to think about here on artificial life and uploading our minds to the cloud. And I’m not sure I understand exactly what Paul Durham (main character) really did in creating “Elysium”. Kind of a convoluted story, with multiple asynchronous storylines and characters.
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