kuniga.me > Books > Permutation City

Permutation City

Permutation City by Greg Egan. This science-fiction explores the simulation hypothesis in great detail. The main character simulates himself in different setups, including with non-continuous time and the simulation cannot tell the difference. It’s an amazing thought experiment. It concludes with the idea that simulations can go on without computers to run them which at first made no sense to me but I eventually internalized it and it was revealing.

While the first half of the book has a lot of science/philosophy, the second half is more fiction and it has a lot less plausible events, so I didn’t enjoy as much.

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This entry was parsed from an older retrospective post.