"Permutation City" by Greg Egan is mind-bending in a way similar to The Matrix, except taken up a few notches.
Explores the consequences of consciousness being just a pattern. Would it continue if the pattern is paused? Seems yes, since we survive being unconscious. So we move in space and time, but still consciousness feels continuous.
What if you pause it, destroy it, recreate it somewhere else. Would it not continue then as well (the classic teleporter question). But it doesn't stop here.
What if you destroy it, but it just happens to continue somewhere else? Then it should continue there as well. So if you think that teleportation would not mean death, then you kind of have to accept that if anywhere in the universe at any time the same pattern exists when you die, then you can't really die because you'll just continue on from there instead.
Not sure I accept it, but it's certainly mind-bending to think about!
For higher dimensional mind bending his Diaspora book is a must read!
For mind games: The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi.
Plus for a related rabbit hole: the idea that a random pattern can just pop into existence and have consciousness is basically the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain concept.
Diaspora was going to be my answer as well, the ending in particular. It kinda forced me to accept as inevitable that at some point my consciousness will cease, in one way or another.
I can plausibly see life extension technology arising that gives me hundreds, or even thousands of extra years of life. It doesn't seem entirely impossible to extend that premise to millions of years, but at billions it doesn't really seem fathomable, and trillions seems to be well beyond what we know about the likely fate of the universe. And once I accepted that inevitability, it suddenly seemed a lot more plausible that my time left was probably closer to decades than even centuries, let alone anything beyond that. There were definitely a fair few existential crises in the weeks and months after finishing that book.
Uuuuuhmmmm, yes, agreed. That whole story still gives me the existential shivers sometimes. The juxtaposition of the big and small. Brilliant, raw, too elegant, too calculatingly cold, too far out - and all because of its hardness (as in I don't even know if you have to suspend disbelief, it seems so perfectly real/possible), truly a masterpiece of science-fiction.
'Very far off to left field' side note: The human brain is still active during unconsciousness.
EEG traces of the brain show this. When you are awake, drowsy, asleep, or under anesthesia, the patterns of your brain waves are very different [0,1]. But, the brain is not 'paused', it's just firing differently than when you are awake or drowsy.
So, the 'pattern' is not just 3-D, it's 4-D. You need time as well. You'd need to transport the 'trace' over vast distances, scales, and times.
Sometimes I wonder if I ever actually stop thinking at night; maybe I just don't remember it in the morning? Maybe every night is just laying concious for 8 hours, thinking weird dreamlike thoughts, but being unable to form memories.
I know brain measurements show that our brains operates differently during sleep, but we may still be concious, at least internally.
Have you ever had the same "sleep stage 1" experience I have?
If I start to fall asleep in the living room around people, their voices seem to become louder, I am aware of what they are saying, their sentences make sense. Yet, if I am suddenly awaken to full alertness, I will have no memory of what they were specifically talking about, although I do remember that I heard them talking. It's as though the ability to form memories went away before full conciousness went away. I believe this is a common experience, and I was fascinated when this pattern was first pointed out to me.
This one is actually a little different. There is much much less activity under anesthetic vs sleeping. There are even theories that going under general anesthetic actually causes some small degree of brain damage due to the shutdown.
It's either this or another Greg Egan book that has simulated people reprogramming their own consciousness. Changing their thought processes, personal motivations, and memories. I think he goes into some depth on how they can do that safely and what the implications are. One character programs himself to be obsessed with carpentry and spends lifetimes of subjective simulated time trying to craft the perfect table, but has a timer to turn off that motivation after some period of time. It's a fascinating idea that has stayed with me, and I think of it every time I see another depiction of a "brain in a computer". I'm disappointed that nobody else has tackled that idea, I think people are still getting used to the concept and it will be a few years before we see something like that in some more pop-culture sci-fi.
Diaspora includes a few examples of this as well. Mathematical discoveries can only be made in the "mines", and people install these mods to make them better at mining, after working through some of the beginner steps unaltered to see if they'd like it. There's also a mod that explicitly prevents you from ever uninstalling it; I don't remember what else it even did, it seemed to spread like a slow virus through the artistic communities in the simulation.
That idea also comes back in Diaspora. That book contains some nice things, like mind-grafts, procreation/creation in a non-biological society etc. Loved that book. I also like Ted Chiangs books. I.e. the idea from story of your life (a language that treats time flow differently), also "Understand" [0] is nice: What happens we we actually increase our thinking capacity. I mean that is hard to comprehend without a nice story, for a puny brain like mine.
Also I shouldn't have said "nobody else has tackled that idea", I am sure it has come up somewhere else. I am just thinking of recent examples like Black Mirror or the new Upload show on Amazon, that IMO miss opportunities to fully explore the implications of simulated minds. Stuff like that would be very difficult to film though...
Greg Egan's an impressively good author even though he's writing about the kinds of sci-fi setups that usually come hand-in-hand with bad dialogue and poor characters. I actually think Quarantine is my favorite of his that I've read so far, though the sci-fi parts are less strong than Permutation City, some of it's philosophical aspects about identity feel like they're more immediately relevant.
Also take a trip to his website [1] if you haven't yet.
Right, he came highly recommended, but he is just boring. His stories exist to present a sci-fi concept, not be a good story. Same as Neal Stephenson's later work, which is a tragedy.
Egan is a close second for my all-time favorite sci-fi author. Some of his books read like mathematical dialogues or transcriptions of lectures (lots of the Orthogonal Series is conversations between professors and their grad students reasoning about physics of a world that we don't live in), but he also delves deep into mathematics and fringe ideas and presents them in a vista where you can enjoy the absolute splendor of the abstractions.
He also never thinks small. I thought I knew "the point" of Diaspora about 6 or 7 times, but then he just "zoomed out" and made the last point look small and trivial by comparison. The opening chapter of that book is so abstract and yet describes the birth of a consciousness in a way that feels understandable, believable, and internally consistent.
If you love finding interesting puzzles to reason about, then I strongly recommend Egan's books!
I haven't read Permutation City, though. I'm bumping this one to the top of the queue :)
Ian M Banks. The Culture series is the most splendid collection of books I’ve ever read. Some are better than others but collectively they build an insight into a galaxy spanning civilization.
It just comes down to my preferences for what kind of itch I liked scratched the most. Egan stretches my brain and makes me wonder at the complexity of complexity. But Banks makes me yearn for the future. Demonstrates what wonders could be possible if we fast forward technological development forward 10k years.
The magnificent intellects of the artificial minds that govern the society hits me in my soul. What a wonderful idea.
I think I remember reading another sci-fi book or short story that posited the classic "teleporter problem" but the device functioned by making a copy of the individual and then destroying the original, similar to The Prestige I suppose. Part of the plot centered around the original escaping that fate and then fighting for their continued existence. I think it poses a very strong argument against a copy of consciousness being a continuation since it makes no sense that there is continuity between copy and original only if the original is immediately destroyed, it just means that the copy is the only remaining instance.
Long time ago I read some idea (probably on reddit) from some guy, that was quite similar to this. The idea being is that essentially you can't die. There is no death. If universe is infinitely large and also it keeps restarting itself with big bang and some universe death all over. Then at some point. Right after you die, something exactly as you will be reborn somewhere else. Even if it takes unimaginable amount of time for that to happen. To you, that's irrelevant, you will just be immediately reborn and start again after death. Your copy might not be alive anywhere else at this moment, but it will be at some point. And well if it's exactly like you, then it's you. I found this pretty intriguing, even though I am not into any non-rational stuff. I wonder if this idea has any holes.
"Eternal return (also known as eternal recurrence) is a theory that the universe and all existence and energy has been recurring, and will continue to recur, in a self-similar form an infinite number of times across infinite time or space.
The theory is found in Indian philosophy and in ancient Egypt as well as Judaic wisdom literature (Ecclesiastes) and was subsequently taken up by the Pythagoreans and Stoics [and] Nietzsche..."
Ah jeez, I was just about to head to sleep. It’s like the library of Babel, but with universes. In infinite time with infinite random arrangements of matter, the matter will undoubtedly arrange itself exactly as it is right now. Thanks for the brain melt.
I could not think of a better answer. I've read this book 2 years ago and vowed to write a review or an interpretation of some sort when I got less excited. I didn't sleep for two days. And never wrote the review.
I find Greg Egan is also very good in small doses. I highly recommend his short story collection Axiomatic, where each story explores a different idea in brief. It's still hard sci-fi but it's chunked smaller so if you're less of a hard sci-fi fan you can still find it interesting.
After recommending it for years on every HN book thread I could find I'm happy to see it's not forgotten yet, really, Egan could have written at least 3 separate books with the content of Permutation City.
I bought this on Kindle after seeing it in another HN thread but I haven't gotten around to reading it yet. After reading your comment I think I'll bump it up higher on my priority list.
I loved the concept in permutation city of simulating your own mind out of order, but I think it would only be possible if we can show that consciousness is a pure function. If consciousness isn't pure and therefore depends on some internal state, then simulating out of order isn't possible because you need to go through all the intermediate states to get the right output.
Scott's MO through all of his books is to write about free will, specifically the idea that we don't possess it and that our brain makes decisions by itself and that consciousness is an illusion.
In this theme, "The Mind's I" by Hofstadter and Dennett is an interesting combination of short-form sci-fi and philosophy of consciousness.
It presents a well-chosen sci-fi story that explores an extreme modification to one of the parameters of consciousness, followed by an essay analyzing the consequences of that thought experiment.
Explores the consequences of consciousness being just a pattern. Would it continue if the pattern is paused? Seems yes, since we survive being unconscious. So we move in space and time, but still consciousness feels continuous.
What if you pause it, destroy it, recreate it somewhere else. Would it not continue then as well (the classic teleporter question). But it doesn't stop here.
What if you destroy it, but it just happens to continue somewhere else? Then it should continue there as well. So if you think that teleportation would not mean death, then you kind of have to accept that if anywhere in the universe at any time the same pattern exists when you die, then you can't really die because you'll just continue on from there instead.
Not sure I accept it, but it's certainly mind-bending to think about!