[ExI] Wrestling with Embodiment

[Mike Dougherty]

2012/1/27 Stefano Vaj <stefano.vaj at gmail.com>:
> One Egan's novel where intelligence seems actually disembodied is
> Permutation City.

Was that disembodied or simply happening on a less-tangible substrate?

I took the ascension (for lack of a better word) of the CA aliens as
an example of a leap from one level of understanding to another by a
configuration that had an inherent efficiency to use knowledge in ways
humans did not.  The catalyst for the paradigm shift was delivered by
human intervention, but then the gnats integrated the new information
into a higher-complexity world-view and effectively popped out of
perception.  The precedence was set earlier in book by the world-seed
continuing after the 2 minute simulation had ended.  The idea, as i
understood it, was that self-consistent rules 'resonate'
constructively with reality generation but the underlying machinery
was left unexplained.  I also linked this idea to Tegmark Level IV
multiverse[1].

But I guess this only defers the embodiment implementation to
"somewhere else" as in "turtles all the way down"

[1] http://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/crazy.html