Permutation City

From: Selwyn St Leger <Selwyn.StLeger.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Sat, 25 Dec 1999 14:50:48 -0800

I have been following the discussions here with great interest for the last
couple of months. Have any of you read Greg Egan's 'Permutation City'? This
is an excellent sf novel which seems to have anticipated many of the ideas
being discussed here. For example, that computational processes (complicated
enough to sustain intelligences) can have being (I resist the word 'exist')
independently of physical entities.

Light was once thought to need an ether to transmit it and that idea was
abandoned. Some of you have abandoned the idea that computations require a
physical medium. Does this then necessarily entail acceptance of Platonic
forms? How do these ideas relate to the various philosophies of
mathematics - constructivist, formalist (discredited?), intuitionist etc?

Selwyn St Leger
Received on Sat Dec 25 1999 - 14:50:48 PST