Vladimir Oane's Key Ideas from Permutation City
by Greg Egan

In Egan's book "Permutation City" Copies are digital renderings of human brains with complete subjective consciousness. Only the wealthy could afford the computing power so the most autonomous Copies belonged to billionaires.

The poor lived in digital slums. The poorest were devout of any interactivity capability. Called Witnesses, they existed just to watch the news and observe history unfold.

Economic equality thus gets replicated in the virtual world.

Copies, digital brains, could remove or restore talents, mood predispositions, or experiences. All while retaining the core, the kernel of what made a person who (s)he was. 

Computing power was the scarce resource in a planet devastated by climate change. And that broke the world in 2:

• World governments wanted the computer power to run very complex weather simulations which will predict weather for the people living in (bad) real world. 
• Immortal billionaires running their financial empires from their digital form. 

In "Permutation City" the plot revolves around giving the billionaires a safe heaven from the impending world conflict. 

Represents a state of a system that can't be the result of any previous state. 

It's a first state configuration that you have to put in by hand. 

Suppose you have a world where all agents experience consciousness. If you apply an encoding function of the world the agents of the translated world would also contain all the information at origin and be consciousness too.

Applying the inverse argument' assuming you find a random blob of dust, you can come up with a function mapping the dust to our world.

Thus concluding that conscious experiences of all agents are present in all sufficiently complex blobs of random dust and all sufficiently complex networks of mathematical relations.

The problem with the proposed theory is that random blobs of dust will have no structure. Something called Kolmogorov complexity.

After creating a new universe based on the Dust theory, the inhabitants notice a simulated simpler life-form is actually creating a competing universe that is eating their own. 

The conclusion being that a system with better explanation will always win. The implied conclusion being that Dust Theory is not a sufficiently good explanation. The deeper idea being that mathematical order is more important than physics.