We Are Living in Philip K. Dick's Virtual World & That's OK

Via Boing Boing and this site, a video from 1977 that explains everything, except possibly nothing -- legendary author Philip K. Dick on his sudden realization:

It gets real (or unreal) at around 3:50:

We are living in a computer-programmed reality, and the only clue we have to it is when some variable is changed, and some alteration in our reality occurs. We would have the overwhelming impression that we were re-living the present - déjà vu - perhaps in precisely the same way: hearing the same words, saying the same words. I submit that these impressions are valid and significant, and I will even say this: such an impression is a clue, that in some past time-point, a variable was changed - re-programmed as it were - and that because of this, an alternative world branched off.

I love that PKD anticipated (if inadvertently) a theory that actual scientists are now testing. (Or for that matter, Keanu Reeves would help dramatize.)

Beyond that, however, there's some poignancy here too:

From what I've read about Philip Dick's life (and that's relatively quite a bit), PKD made these "reality is a computer simulation" assertions right about the time he was also saying "reality is the Roman Empire which the Devil is covering up", not to mention the pink laser that was drilling transcendence into his brain. That is to say, his insights seem to have stemmed from a sad and tragic paranoia, which caused his alternate realities to swallow themselves. Then again, he also saw reality as a simulation, and whether that's literally true or not... basically, nowadays, it already is.

Just ask Keanu.

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Comments

[Adeon Writer]

My typing makes no sound. I disabled it. You'll never see me coming. Text ninja.

I love the idea of the universe being a simulation - it's fun fiction to me. But I'm not clear on to what degree science agrees.

There are biological explanations for Déjà Vu, though.

[melponeme_k]

Philip K. Dick was just repeating Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan had these arguments (TV reality) years before Dick and he was much smarter in explaining them.

[Metacam Oh]

Deja vu is a glitch of the brain where what your seeing gets stored in your memory before the neurons of what you are seeing in live time are processed. Or something like that.

[Pussycat Catnap]

"reality is the Roman Empire which the Devil is covering up"

Sounds like PKD was a Rastafari without knowing it... :)

If you take that statement literally it sounds crazy. If you take it as a parable - its in line with a lot of different philosophies out there about how we're duped over the real nature of what is going on in order to make us complicit in our own downpression.

Interesting to me that he said that.

[Hamlet Au]

He literally believed it though, at least he said so in an essay. A girl delivered him painkillers after a dental operation, he noticed she was wearing a Christian fish necklace, and suddenly had a vision that they were still living in the Roman Empire. (Think I'm remembering that right without Googling.)

[Pussycat Catnap]

Yeah that is a bit peculiar...

[Iggy]

Trying again, since the Typepad Gremlin ate my earlier attempt:

The human mind is very complex, and I suspect PKD was simply dredging up half-recalled dreams and waking fears into the waking world. Out of it came his final Valis novels.

Does this mean any of his imagined worlds have an objective reality? I doubt it. For years I've had consistent, and memorable dreams about a parallel version of my home town, Richmond VA, with subtle changes and a few big ones. This parallel city is consistent from dream to dream and sometimes, in the midst of a dream, I know I'm dreaming and can even alter the dream a little. Choose to walk down a particular street, eat at a favorite old restaurant, and so on. Sometimes when I wake up, I feel that I've visited a parallel universe.

Where do these ideas come from? In my case, I put it down to wishing for a better version of the vanished city I recall from the 1960s and early 70s, before suburban sprawl began to wreck the place. For PKD, my reading about him indicates that the idea of something being "only apparently real" (the title of one of the biographies of him) came from his deep-seated paranoia.

PKD had his Berkeley apartment broken into, and his personal papers searched (his file cabinet was broken into). Before the event, he was fearful of FBI surveillance. Afterward, he was certain of it. No wonder his fiction is full of strange shadow-governments, even shadow-worlds.

Who was the woman who visited PKD? Maybe a fan who wanted to play a very cruel trick on him.