Starts with the birth of an orphan “orphanogenesis” in a post singularity world. Citizens live in polises, and experience in ways completely foreign to us (gestalts and linear modes). There are no limits on individual expression, connection, and creation of new individuals.
The development of a mind is similar to what I remember in Permutation City of the development of the various levels of simulated worlds (very automata like). The creation of minds and what is and isn’t natural in the development of a being reminds me of the cognitive science and psychology stuff in Blindsight, though the tone is more positive here.
Has Egan’s classic style of having cool thought experiments and math stuff in here, like Schild’s Ladder and Permutation City.
Even though you could paste a mathematical genius’s understanding of mathematics onto you, people don’t do that, as it puts you in the exact same place as them. Mining in the truth mines on your own introduces some randomness and variety into the way you view the world. At the end of the day, it’s better to have an organic random search over rigid mind development.
Being able to shape manifolds and create scapes and projections is pretty cool - similar to Schild’s Ladder, where one of the main characters grows up in a space with different physics.
Outlooks are interfaces that change the way one thinks (a cyberperson).
Getting to the surface and realizing that they are facing the problem that The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect faces at the end of the book in cyberspace, but in real life. People are self modifying, and diverging - becoming unable to communicate or relate to each other. Their solution is interesting - create a genetic range with extremities that can talk to the furthest branches, and have a continuum along that range (such that each person is close enough that they can talk to their neighbors) so that there can exist a chain of people that can facilitate communication between any two people.