Permutation City -

The novel's main intellectual driver is the "Dust Hypothesis." Egan challenges the notion that consciousness requires a continuous, physical, hardware-based simulation.

Written in 1994, it portrays a highly realistic, terrifyingly plausible 2050. Permutation City

If a human brain can be simulated, the "pattern" of that mind is what matters, not the specific physical substrate. The novel's main intellectual driver is the "Dust Hypothesis

Egan suggests that the mathematical data constituting a consciousness exists regardless of the order in which the calculations are performed. Even if a simulation is broken into pieces, scattered across time, and computed in a chaotic, non-continuous way ("dust"), the experience of that conscious self still occurs. Key Narrative Features hardware-based simulation. Written in 1994