Permutation City is a 1994 science fiction novel by Greg Egan that explores many concepts, including quantum ontology, via various philosophical aspects of artificial life and simulated reality. It won the John W. Campbell Award for the best science-fiction novel of the year in 1995 and was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award that same year. The novel was also cited in a 2003 Scientific American article on multiverses by Max Tegmark.
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Permutation City is a 1994 science fiction novel by Greg Egan that explores many concepts, including quantum ontology, via various philosophical aspects of artificial life and simulated reality. It won the John W. Campbell Award for the best science-fiction novel of the year in 1995 and was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award that same year. The novel was also cited in a 2003 Scientific American article on multiverses by Max Tegmark.
Permutation City deals with a question common in cyberpunk and postcyberpunk works: is there any difference between a computer simulation of a person and a "real" person? More specifically, Permutation City focuses on exploring one possible model of consciousness and reality, the Logic of the Dust Theory of reality, or simply Dust Theory, similar to the Ultimate Ensemble Mathematical Universe hypothesis proposed by Max Tegmark.
Like some other works of contemporary science fiction, it begins with the assumption that human consciousness is Turing...
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