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timujin comments on The mathematical universe: the map that is the territory - Less Wrong
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I wonder, how much people are there who 'invented' this idea independently? I came up with this idea on my own when I was 15, and I know at least one other person who did. And now you and Tegmark, so this is not unique at all. Is that sort of thing widespread in rationality/math/INTJ/technophile/whatever?
Greg Egan's book "Permutation City" was published in 1994. Max Tegmark's paper "Is "the theory of everything'' merely the ultimate ensemble theory?" was published in 1998. It is ironic that the paper gets more formal credit in a lot of writing than the book, even though the book explores more implications and has priority :-)
Based on my reading of Egan's other works, he has a minor sense of rivalry with Tegmark. One possible reading of Egan's Orthogonal Series is that it was an inspired way of pointing out that Tegmark's intuitions about the kinds of math that might contain minds are wrong because Tegmark's intuitions are grounded in thinking that "local physics" is especially privileged, perhaps from too little attention to ideas like "kolmogorov complexity" that are more native to artificial intelligence. The Orthogonal series is set in one of the kinds of physics that Tegmark claimed was probably uninhabited.