Kind of a convoluted story, with multiple asynchronous storylines and characters. And I’m not sure I understand exactly what Paul Durham (main character) really did in creating “Elysium”. But definitely some interesting ideas to think about here on artificial life and uploading our minds to the cloud.
Most of the story involves the build up to the creation of Elysium, where Permutation City exists. 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. It only runs on the world-wide cloud net for two subjective minutes, at a cost of several million dollars, then is deleted. 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. Out of all this seeming randomness, we could select a coherent set of data describing something. Just about anything, really. 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!). So somehow the Elysium simulation is described by this apparent “randomness” in the universe. And it’s ok if the processing steps happen out of order — it is transparent and meaningless to the simulated consciousness. 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.
(Seems kind of like an nice modern view of an afterlife, though. The “mind state” of every person that ever lived continues to exist after they die, described somewhere in the randomness in the universe. But … does it know that it exists??)
Anyway, despite this there are some interesting ideas on a simulated immortality.
First of all, there’s the problem of eternal boredom. Everything is simulated, so everything is knowable; everything is conquered. 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. 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.
Another character programs his brain to automatically reconfigure itself every few decades to give him a new obsession. Woodworking for 70+ years, then cataloging beetle specimens for another lifetime, etc. Even this would get old, however, unless the system was expanding with new processing power and new data. Eternal growth of the system is the only way to get eternity without repetition.
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. 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.
Finally there’s the story of one character who holds onto his guilt from a secret, decades-old (real world) crime. 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. He knows he could just edit away the guilt … but realizes that he can’t give it up, because it’s “him.”
uniformly uninformative 