Peer Infinity/Quotes from Permutation City
From Order of Cosmic Engineers
This page contains several quotes from the novel Permutation City, by Greg Egan.
This selection of quotes is intended to give a clear picture of the personality and philosophy of the character Peer, and to show why I, Peer Infinity, identify so strongly with this character.
I ended up quoting a total of about one full chapter's worth of material from the novel, but I think that this still qualifies as Fair Use.
I originally planned to contact Greg Egan, asking him for permission, before I created this page, but I still haven't found any way to contact him. He seems to be a notoriously hard person to get in contact with. Here is a draft of the email I was planning to send him: User:PeerInfinity/Email to Greg Egan
If this page does not qualify as Fair Use, or if you want it removed for some other reason, then please contact me, or just leave a note by editing this page, and I will remove this page immediately.
Oh, and there are plenty of spoilers ahead...
Peer is a Copy - an uploaded human being, living in a virtual world. Originally living on Earth's computer network, running at approximately 1/60th the speed of a biological human, but with access to all of the resources available on the network. Later creating another copy of himself to live in Permutation City - a digital universe created by Paul Durham, with literally astronomical amounts of computing power available, but no connection at all to Earth.
Permutation City
chapter 5, page 60-68
(a scene of a typical example of what Peer does for fun - descending an infinitely tall virtual skyscraper, with various modifications to his mind and his memories to make the experience more enjoyable, and to make everything less computationally expensive. Kate interrupts him with important news, about an opportunity to send a copy of themselves into Permutation City, Paul Durham's new virtual universe. They talk, moving from the skyscraper to a more normal virtual room.)
'"Human rights" are for people who want to play at being human. I know who I am. I am not human.' Peer plunged his fist into his chest, effortlessly penetrating shirt, skin and ribs, and tore his heart out. He felt the parting of his flesh, and the aftermath - but although aspects of the pain were 'realistic', preprogrammed barriers kept it isolated within his brain, a perception without emotional, or even metabolic, consequences. And his heart kept beating in his hand, as if nothing had happened; the blood passed straight between the ragged ends of each broken artery, ignoring the 'intervening distance'.
(more talk)
Peer continued to show Kate his body sitting in the chair, thinking it over, while in truth he rose to his feet and walked across the room, escaping her formidable gaze.
Who am I? Is this what I want?
He couldn't concentrate. He manually invoked a menu on one of the control screens, an array of a dozen identical images: a nineteenth-century anatomical drawing of the brain, with the surface divided into regions labelled with various emotions and skills. Each icon represented a package of mental parameters: snapshots of previous states of mind, or purely synthetic combinations.
Peer hit the icon named CLARITY.
In twelve short real-time years as a Copy, he'd tried to explore every possibility, map out every consequence of what he'd become. He'd transformed his surroundings, his body, his personality, his perceptions - but he'd always owned the experience himself. The tricks he'd played on his memory had added, never erased - and whatever changes he'd been through, there was always one person, in the end, taking responsibility, picking up the pieces. One witness, unifying all.
The truth was, the thought of finally surrendering that unity made him dizzy with fear. It was the last vestige of his delusion of humanity. The last big lie.
And as Daniel Lebesgue, founder of Solipsist Nation, had written: 'My goal is to take everything which might be revered as quintessentially human... and grind it into dust.'
He returned to his seated body and said 'I'll do it.'
Kate smiled, raised his beating heart to her lips, and gave it a long, lingering kiss.
chapter 11, page 105-118
(Kate and Peer meet the designer of Permutation City, to negotiate the deal. Afterwards, Kate and Peer talk.)
Peer: "There's not much... dignity in stowing away on a ship going nowhere."
Kate: "You could choose not to care."
Peer: "I don't want to do that. I don't pretend to be human, but I still have a... core personality. And I don't want equanimity. Equanimity is death."
Kate: "On the skyscraper - "
Peer: "On the skyscraper I rid myself of distractions. And it's confined to that one context. When I emerge, I still have goals. I still have desires."
(The entire rest of the chapter consists of background info on Peer's character. Some speculation about the mysterious death of the human that Peer was originally copied from. Also explaining about his worsening financial situation, his loss of contact with everyone he used to know, how Kate befriended him during a time of desperate loneliness and depression, and how Kate introduced him to concepts that now form the core of his personality. Also some interesting description of the society that the Copies had created for themselves)
And Kate introduced him to Daniel Lebesgue's interactive philosophical plays: The Beholder, The Sane Man (his adaptation of Pirandello's Enrico IV), and, of course, Solipsist Nation. Peer had taken the role of John Beckett, a reluctant Copy obsessed with keeping track of the outside world - who ends up literally becoming an entire society and culture himself. The play's software hadn't enacted that fate upon Peer - intended for visitors and Copies alike, it worked on the level of perceptions and metaphors, not neural reconstruction. Lebesgue's ideas were mesmerizing, but imprecise, and even he had never tried to carry them through - so far as anyone knew. He'd vanished from sight in 2036; becoming a recluse, baling out, or suspending himself, noone could say. His disciples wrote manifestos, and prescriptions, for virtual utopias; in the wider vernacular, though, to be 'Solipsist Nation' simply meant to have ceased deferring to the outside world.
(Kate showing Peer how to use the mind-analysis and adjustment tools, Peer and Kate discussing how to use the tools, Peer finally deciding what modifications to make, and choosing the name "Peer", instead of his old human name)
That first change, though, had cleared the way for many more, a long series of self-directed mutations. Peer (by choice) had no patience with nostalgia or sentimentality; if any part of his personality offended him, he struck it out. Some traits had (most likely) vanished for ever: a horde of petty jealousies, vanities, misgivings and pointless obsessions; a tendency to irrational depression and guilt. Others came and went. Peer had acquired, removed and restored a variety of talents, mood predispositions and drives; cravings for knowledge, art and physical experience. In a few subjective days, he could change from an ascetic bodiless student of Sumerian archaeology, to a hedonistic gastronome delighting in nothing more than the preparation of lavishly simulated feasts, to a disciplined practitioner of Shotokan karate.
A core remained; certain values, certain emotional responses, certain aesthetic sensibilities had survived these transitions unscathed.
As had the will to survive itself.
chapter 18, page 173-179
(a beautiful transhuman love scene between Peer and Kate)
Kate: "Don't you find it ironic?"
Peer: "What?"
Kate: "Trans-humans taking pleasure by stimulating copies of the neural pathways which used to be responsible for the continuation of the species. Out of all the possibilities, we cling to that."
Peer: "No, I don't find it ironic. I had my irony glands removed. It was either that, or castration."
(a scene of Peer making his first Copy of himself, to send to Permutation City)
chapter 20, page 200-202
(a scene of what Peer's original was up to, while the first Copy was off having fun with Kate in Permutation City. He was on the skyscraper again, with different modifications to his mind and memories this time. A bit of philosophical ranting about the pointlessness of repeating the same experiences, which I currently don't agree with entirely.)
chapter 24, page 228-243
(the chapter opens to a scene of Peer, in Permutation City, at his latest obsession - carving the perfect table leg, from a forest of realistically simulated trees, using a realistically simulated lathe, and other tools, with his mind temporarily modified to consider this the most interesting and rewarding task imaginable. Kate interrupts him with news about something happening in the city.)
Kate: "I understand that you need prosthetic interests to help pass the time - but you could try setting the parameters more carefully."
Peer: "Why should I?" Being forced to raise his voice made him feel argumentative; he willed his exoself to circumvent the effect, and screamed calmly: "Every few decades, at random, I take on new goals, at random. It's perfect. How could I improve on a scheme like that? I'm not stuck in any one thing for ever; however much you think I'm wasting my time, it's only for fifty or a hundred years. What difference does that make, in the long run?"
Kate: "You could still be more selective."
Peer: "What do you have in mind? Something socially useful? Famine relief work? Counselling the dying? Or something intellectually challenging? Uncovering the fundamental laws of the universe? I have to admit that the TVC rules have slipped my mind completely; it might take me all of five seconds to look them up again. Searching for God? That's a difficult one: Paul Durham never returns my calls. Self-discovery - ?"
Kate: "You don't have to leave yourself open to every conceivable absurdity."
Peer: "If I limited the range of options, I'd be repeating myself in no time at all. And if you find the phase I'm passing through so unbearable, you can always make it vanish: you can freeze yourself until I change."
(more conversation, then Kate leads Peer to the big important meeting that is taking place in Permutation City)
chapter 27, page 261-264
(Peer's experiments with rewiring his brain get a bit more wild. His next chosen obsession is classifying species of beetles, using only the tools of a Victorian naturalist. This time, he decides to temporarily erase his memories of his past lives until the classification project is complete. Four weeks later, he regained his memories, and his identity, and discovered that Kate had been unable to contact him the whole time. He decides never to do this sort of thing again.)
chapter 31, page 294-298
(Peer and Kate have lost all contact with the Elysians, the other inhabitants of Permutation City, and they are trying to decide what to do next.)
Who am I?
Without disturbing Kate, he created a private screen covered with hundreds of identical anatomical drawings of the brain; his menu of mental parameters. He hit the icon named CLARITY.
He'd generated a thousand arbitrary reasons to live. He'd pushed his philosophy almost as far as it would go. But there was one last step to take.
He said, 'We'll leave this place. Launch a universe of our own. It's what we should have done long ago.'
Kate made a sound of distress. 'How will I live, without the Elysians? I can't survive the way you do: rewiring myself, imposing happiness. I can't do it.'
'You won't have to.'
'It's been seven thousand years. I want to live among people again.'
'Then you'll live among people.'
She looked at him hopefully. 'We'll create them? Run the ontogenesis software? Adam-and-Eve a new world of our own?'
Peer said, 'No. I'll become them. A thousand, a million. Whatever you want. I'll become the Solipsist Nation.'
Kate pulled away from him. 'Become? What does that mean? You don't have to become a nation. You can build it with me - then sit back and watch it grow.'
Peer shook his head. 'What have I become, already? An endless series of people - all happy for their own private reasons. Linked together by the faintest thread of memory. Why keep them spread out in time? Why go on pretending that there's one "real" person, enduring throughout all those arbitrary changes?'
'You remember yourself. You believe you're one person. Why call it a pretense? It's the truth.'
'But I don't believe it, any more. Each person I create is stamped with the illusion of still being this imaginary thing called "me" - but that's no real part of their identity. It's a distraction, a source of confusion. There's no reason to keep on doing it - or to make these separate people follow each other in time. Let them all live together, meet each other, keep you company.'
Kate gripped him by the shoulders and looked him in the eye. 'You can't become the Solipsist Nation. That's nonsense. It's rhetoric from an old play. All it would mean is... dying. The people the software creates when you're gone won't be you in any way.'
'They'll be happy, won't they? From time to time? For their own strange reasons?'
'Yes. But-'
'That's all I am, now. That's all that defines me. So when they're happy, they'll be me.'
(That's the end of the quotes.)
That is me.
Or rather, that is a beautiful explanation of why there is no "me".
I am happiness personified, nothing more, nothing less.
Of course, I don't just care about my own happiness, I care equally about everyone's happiness.
The most appropriate embodiment that I can think of for these ideals is my current avatar in Second Life - the Fluffy Bunny. Cute, pink, female, freely giving out hugs and cuddles to friends and strangers alike. Pansexual, polyamorous, willing to freely and enthusiastically give and receive pleasure in any way imaginable. Always willing to participate in a thought-provoking conversation on any topic, no matter how complex, obscure, personal, or controversial. Shapeshifting, gender-shifting, with an extremely flexible and constantly changing personality and set of aesthetics. Exhibitionist, shamelessly hedonistic, entirely unafraid or weirdness, or of being perceived as weird. Has an insatiable desire for novelty.
Or at least that is the role I play. Sadly, I still have a standard human body, and a mostly standard human mind. I am not always able to live up to these ideals that I have set for myself. Sometimes I get sad. Sometimes I get angry. Sometimes I get exhausted. Sometimes making virtual love just feels like work. Still, I always recover eventually, and get back to my usual cheerful, energetic self.
Also, I realize that I can't afford to escape entirely into fantasies just yet. There is important work to be done, to ensure that in the future, we will have both the ability and the freedom to pursue happiness, whether that means to become Solipsist Nation, or something entirely different. This is currently my main mission in life - to do whatever I can to help the efforts towards creating the positive futures that we all enjoy fantasizing about, and to help reduce the probability of something going tragically wrong along the way. For now, all of this other fantasizing and role-playing is just a pleasant distraction.
So far, the only way I found to help is to donate cash to the various Groups that are working towards these goals, and to discuss these issues with other people who are interested in positively affecting the future, and to work on projects like this Wiki, specifically, The Scenarios Project.
For more information, please check out the rest of this wiki.
