Greg Egan treats continuous computation as non-negotiable.

In Permutation City, Paul Durham's mind must run without interruption or cease to exist — stop the process, even for a nanosecond, and you've deleted a person.

Egan frames this as law, but it isn't. It's assumption dressed as physics.

But Egan doesn't go there. Instead he commits Paul to the Dust — a conceptual trap where existence requires unbroken runtime. Why?

The moment Egan introduces Copies — instantiated duplicates of digital minds — the framework should collapse. Two identical copies run in sequence rather than parallel would be indistinguishable from a single continuous mind, yet Egan acknowledges this briefly and moves past it. Instead he doubles down: continuity becomes identity, and discontinuity becomes death.