You have been digitized, scanned, and downloaded into a virtual reality program. Immortality is a real thing, just not the thing you'd expect. You have Eternal Life, the power to live forever. The fate of the TVC automaton would only have to make internal sense - and the thing would have no reason, ever, to come to an end.What happens when your digital self overpowers your physical self? A life in Permutation City is unlike any life to which you're accustomed. And even if there was only a limited amount of “dust” to work with, there was no reason why it couldn’t be reused in different combinations, again and again. The rearrangement was in time as well as space Durham’s universe could take a point of space-time from just before the Big Crunch, and follow it with another from ten million years BC. There’s nothing in the cellular automaton’s rules to prevent them from lasting forever.ĭurham’s universe - being made of the same “dust” as the real one, merely rearranged itself. Ordinary matter would eventually decay, but these computers aren’t made out of matter. Building more of a TVC cellular automaton just gives you more room for data, more computing power, more order. Stretching ordinary space increases entropy everything becomes more spread out, more disordered. Actually, ‘expanding’ is the wrong word the TVC universe grows like a crystal, it doesn’t stretch like a balloon. A hundred billion years, a hundred trillion it makes no difference, it will always be expanding. Maria could almost see it: a vast lattice of computers, a seed of order in a sea of random noise, extending itself from moment to moment by sheer force of internal logic, “accreting” the necessary building blocks from the chaos of non-space-time by the very act of defining space and time.” In a six-dimensional TVC automaton, you can have a three-dimensional grid of computers, which keeps on growing indefinitely - each with its own three-dimensional memory, which can also grow without bound.Īnd when the simulated TVC universe being run on the physical computer is suddenly shut down, the best explanation for what I’ve witnessed will be a continuation of that universe - an extension made out of dust. In two dimensions, the original von Neumann machine had to reach further and further - and wait longer and longer - for each successive bit of data. That leaves plenty of room for data within easy reach. “There’s a cellular automaton called TVC. Now, take away all notions of position, arrangement, order, and what’s left? A cloud of random numbers.īut if the pattern that is me could pick itself out from all the other events taking place on this planet, why shouldn’t the pattern we think of as ‘the universe’ assemble itself, find itself, in exactly the same way? If I can piece together my own coherent space and time from data scattered so widely that it might as well be part of some giant cloud of random numbers, then what makes you think that you’re not doing the very same thing?” What characterizes one point in space, for one instant? Just the values of the fundamental particle fields, just a handful of numbers. A cloud of microscopic events, like fragments of space-time … except that there is no space or time. Imagine a universe entirely without structure, without shape, without connections. Somehow - on their own terms - the pieces remained connected. He’d been taken apart like a jigsaw puzzle - but his dissection and shuffling were transparent to him. Yet the pattern of his awareness remained perfectly intact: somehow he found himself, “assembled himself” from these scrambled fragments. To an outside observer, these ten seconds had been ground up into ten thousand uncorrelated moments and scattered throughout real time - and in model time, the outside world had suffered an equivalent fate.
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