This article doesn't actually explain Dust Theory to someone who hasn't read the book. I haven't found a good standalone explanation of the theory that explains it in a compact manner so my recommendation to people is to read the book. Permutation City is among my top 5 favorite books because I found Dust Theory so mind blowingly amazing from a philosophical standpoint. I haven't seen it discussed elsewhere outside t…
Almost a decade ago I independently invented the same idea. Discussion was here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2727750 It's a pretty simple theory, which I ultimately reject even to this day. If it were true, however, the expanse of existence is truly terrifying. This theory leads to any possible existence existing, short of maybe self-contradiction[0]. Well, so if that is true, then there exists a relation of…
This statement maybe superficially correct, but I interpret it differently. Every possible existence may exist, but not every imaginable existence. For something to exist in this manner, it has to be possible to generate it in a logically consistent manner from some initial conditions and simple rules, and while that allows for a "terrifying expanse of existences" we can't say which imagninable existences can actually be thus generated, any more than you can look at a random jumble of dots and say whether those could have been generated by one of Wolfram's one-dimensional automata without generating all possible patterns from those automata and seeing if one matches.
The fact that you can imagine a hell beyond all horrors is not proof that any world-generating automaton would ever generate it... even in an infinite Universe it may not actually be a "possible existence".
Infinity != Everything.