Permutation city
New York, 1994
Abstract
The exploration of digital consciousness and ontological independence centers on the “Dust Theory,” which posits that subjective experience arises from complex informational patterns regardless of their spatial or temporal distribution across the physical universe. Through the iterative simulation of “Copies”—high-resolution digital uploads of human neural structures—the relationship between consciousness, linear time, and physical substrates is interrogated. The implementation of a self-sustaining virtual environment, known as Elysium, via a “Garden-of-Eden configuration” attempts to decouple digital existence from terrestrial hardware, asserting that persistent informational patterns possess inherent permanence. This experiment is complicated by the development of the “Autoverse,” a virtual chemistry simulation where evolved sentient lifeforms develop cosmological models that conflict with the underlying laws of their host environment. This conflict suggests that reality is defined by its internal logical consistency rather than its external origins. Ultimately, the transition from biological to purely informational states necessitates a radical reassessment of identity and mortality, as consciousness must confront the potential for infinite, non-causal existence within the scattered data of the cosmos. – AI-generated abstract.
Quotes from this work
Immediately before taking up woodwork, he’d passionately devoured all the higher mathematics texts in the central library, run all the tutorial software, and then personally contributed several important new results to group theory—untroubled by the fact that none of the Elsyan mathematicians would ever be aware of his work. Before that, he’d written over three hundred comic operas, with librettos in Italian, French and English—and staged most of them, with puppet performers and audience. Before that, he’d patiently studied the structure and biochemistry of the human brain for sixty-seven years; towards the end he had fully grasped, to his own satisfaction, the nature of the process of consciousness. Every one of these pursuits had been utterly engrossing, and satisfying, at the time.