10 ms·

Paranoid Android: The Divine Madness of Philip K Dick

194 points by samclemens 10y ago

Avianka 10y ago
Made me remember "Little Brother" by Cory Doctorow. The book described Paranoid Linux in this way: “Paranoid Linux is an operating system that assumes that its operator is under assault from the government (it was intended for use by Chinese and Syrian dissidents), and it does everything it can to keep your communications and documents a secret. It even throws up a bunch of “chaff” communications that are supposed to disguise the fact that you’re doing anything covert. So while you’re receiving a political message one character at a time, Paranoid Linux is pretending to surf the Web and fill in questionnaires and flirt in chat-rooms. Meanwhile, one in every five hundred characters you receive is your real message, a needle buried in a huge haystack."
- ekianjo 10y ago
  That approach may be easier to defeat nowadays with DNNs - they would be extremely good at getting the noise out of the signal, so I am not sure it's enough to counter any nation state capabilities who really want to know what you are doing.
  - gambiting 10y ago
    What's DNN? Google says it's DotNetNuke, but I don't think you mean that.
    - laksjd 10y ago
      Probably 'Deep Neural Network'
    - akjetma 10y ago
      Deep Neural Network, I think.
  - jlennon 10y ago
    Nonsense. Sure it _could_ work but being "extremely good" is just too much optimism.
    - ekianjo 10y ago
      Why do you think so? If the patterns are relatively predictable and constant (which would be the case if they are programmed to issue some specific noise on a regular basis), Machine Learning will have very good accuracy and distinguishing what is signal vs what is noise. Much better and faster than humans, that's for sure.
  - keithpeter 10y ago
    NSA/GCHQ are really good at pulling signals out of random noise, as someone here reminded me a couple of years ago.
  - throwanem 10y ago
    Sure. So to put up a plausible front, you need an AI of your own, trained to give the impression of an innocuous Internet user...
cmsefton 10y ago
One of my favorite books on Philip K. Dick is "I Am Alive and You Are Dead" by Emmanuel Carrère, a 'biography' written as a novel. A really great read.
- Finnucane 10y ago
  However, definitely, 'biography' in quotes, because not biography in actual fact. The English-language translator was a work colleague of mine, and I lent him a lot of PKD material out of my own collection. I ended up getting the odd job of looking up the original English for the translations of excerpts from the French editions of Dick's work (a very PKD task, like The Game from Galactic Pot Healer) quoted in the book. Carrere was clearly cribbing heavily from Sutin, when he was wasn't just making it up.
dcw303 10y ago
Being a child of the 80s, I was first introduced to PKD through Total Recall - the original, good one with Schwarzenegger in it. The mix of sci-fi, paranoia, and reality bending was mesmerising. Verhoeven is the only director who really got to the essence of what Philip K Dick was about. With the exception of the occasional episode of Star Trek TNG, I didn't have much access to much mindfuck sci-fi, so whatever I could get would leave pretty deep impression on me. I didn't immediately read through his stuff, though. I wouldn't really be reminded of it until I got into Sonic Youth in my late teens and found out that the Sister LP was a loose biography. Sonic Youth's guitar rock/pop mixed with discordant feedback was basically the musical equivalent of PKD's paranoia. After that I spent years going through a big chunk of his catalog. Obviously, a classic like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is worth your time. The Man in the High Castle is alternate history, and features what I still consider to be the best execution of a things-are-not-what-you-think-they-are ever. I've also been thinking of The Game Players of Titan recently, but that's probably because of the talking self driving car. Ubik is also really, really good, but I can't explain it to you at all. If you want some fiction that will make you question your grip on reality, I highly recommend reading through his stuff. Just don't wait until you're too old - once your ideals are firmly set in place it gets a lot harder to get into it.
- SideburnsOfDoom 10y ago
  > Total Recall - the original, good one with Schwarzenegger in it. it wasn't really considered "the good one" until a worse one was made.
  - retox 10y ago
    Like how 'lethal weapon' wasn't referred to as 'lethal weapon one' until the sequels. It has always been regarded as a gem by many people. First use of CGI in a film too, I believe. For the x-ray scene at the Mars port.
    - samatman 10y ago
      Early use, sure, but hardly the first. The owl in Labyrinth was 1986, and I'm certain there are earlier examples.
kagamine 10y ago
The pink beam of light PKD wrote about a lot in published works. I read that he claimed it told him his son had a brain tumor and when taken to hospital that turned out to be true. Thus, PKD believed that the divine intervention of the pink light saved his son's life. Is there any evidence of his son being treated for such an illness or this just more grapevine twaddle? I had also read, I think in the introduction to one of his novels (I could try to find it but I have many of his books on my shelf and I'm not home right now) that he claimed not to take drugs! That would be contradictory to what is written in this article, to say the least. It seems like PKD is much more than the man.
- byteface 10y ago
  electric ant was a great little story. https://philipkdickreview.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/comiccover.jpg https://philipkdickreview.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/comicc... indirectly all about drug use. by PKD
- icebraining 10y ago
  Not just with the article, but with his own work. A Scanner Darkly is all about the people, including him, who had taken drugs during the 60s. His after words, dedicating the book to the friends he lost to drug misuse, are particularly touching.
- jackfrodo 10y ago
  re: his son's brain tumor, let's say this is true. Could it be explained by him noticing symptoms of it and subconsciously being suspicious, which led to the pink beam "telling" him?
  - pasquinelli 10y ago
    Even easier, he might have made up the pink light thing after the diagnosis.
  - okwhatthe2 10y ago
    Look, there is a really sinister interpretation of Philip K. Dick which one could engage in, if one were so inclined. I don't actually believe this, but it has occurred to me before. Here goes. Phil (whose stories I love) claimed at one point that the FBI - or some outside agent - had broken into his apartment and detonated explosives in his filing cabinet. This could've very well been Dick himself. Regarding his son, it was not a brain tumor, but a testicular hernia, or related, that his son had. Simply put, perhaps Dick was feeling up his son and decided to blame the finding on the light? I believe what happened is that he likely found the hernia and then, in a fit of paranoia, decided to find another context for its discovery. You need to remember that Dick claimed to have seen a giant Teuton warrior in the clouds, looking down on him, as if a demiurge was making its presence known to him. This was likely a very paranoia-inducing event. I am now reminded of the Anime Berserk. Anyway, I do not believe that Dick was a child molester or false-flag operator against his own filing cabinet (although I am unsure about the cabinet one). We don't really know. I think maybe he took a lot of amphetamines, and maybe he also had a mystical experience. Who knows? I have my own ideas but they may do more harm than good. Here be dragons: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXqHJYz8NXo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXqHJYz8NXo * This is your friendly reminder that human rights and a cessation of killing and torture globally serve as the bedrock for all modern law and that violent tendencies must be culled from our collective consciousness.
brakmic 10y ago
PKD in 1977. Talking about the Matrix. https://youtu.be/jXeVgEs4sOo https://youtu.be/jXeVgEs4sOo
soufron 10y ago
I tend to prefer his earlier books, those written because he was full-speed crazy. They get the same special thing, but they're more subtle. And as they look like classical sci-fi a little bit more, they're more accessible.
soufron 10y ago
Actually, one of my friend and the co-author of a documentary on the cyberpunk side of the Silicon Valley we're working on, had done a very interesting film on PDK in 2005: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3G4Q6UqMPU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3G4Q6UqMPU
- grp 10y ago
  Merci!
- armitron 10y ago
  Would be great to have english subtitles for this.
zer0gravity 10y ago
My impression about the universe: It's finite. "Infinity" is an abstraction, it cannot exist in reality. It's 100% deterministic, based on some fundamental rules. Those rules are imposed and enforced by computation and they can only exist in a computer simulation. Space is actually an N dimensional matrix where all cells are the same, minicomputers running the same program enforcing those rules. Don't know how it all really exists...
- chronolitus 10y ago
  That's just pushing the problem further away. Is the universe that computer is in also finite? deterministic? Even if it's computers all the way down, doesn't answer much.
  - zer0gravity 10y ago
    Not trying to solve anything here. I'm just saying that from my, non autoritative, perspective this is how things look like..
  - notduncansmith 10y ago
    One way this might be useful is in trying to communicate with whatever world is simulating us. I think in some circles this behavior is called "prayer". Of course, it could be that explicit communication (in a way we'd understand) is strictly forbidden, such that we would never receive objective confirmation or rejection of this theory. At best, we could prove the plausibility of the claim by doing our own simulation. How each chooses to spend their time is up to them.
- raattgift 10y ago
  Funnily enough, given your username, if you let de Sitter space evolve, it will -- literally -- grow to infinite volume. Barring some source of gravitation greater than that implied by studies of the energy content of the observable universe, and in particular under the \Lambda-CDM model, our patch of the universe will ultimately evolve to something so similar to de Sitter that it should (again, literally) grow to infinite volume. I don't think many physical cosmologists would complain about determinism; this is in part reflected in initial values surface formalisms. Your last two points have been the subject of substantial investigation; you might enjoy some of the pointers to primary sources in this article: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Digital_physics https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Digital_physics As noted therein, it is hard to divorce real numbers from working models that fundamentally explain (and predict) experimental and observational results at the energy scales we have access to. ("Fundamentally explain" as in "fundamental theory" as a term of art, as it were; contrasted with things like effective theory or classical theory or reduced theory.) Although I would not word it like your last sentence, you hit the nail on the head by saying that we have good evidence that there are some _local_ properties that do not change with a displacement in space or in time. That's the principle of relativity at work. Unfortunately when you accept that one of those invariants is the local measurement of the speed of light (or indeed the speed of any object with zero rest mass), you run smack into infinitesimals that under detailed experiments to date actually look physical.
dschiptsov 10y ago
I would not attempt to "review" the man who wrote Scanner Darkly or Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep, or The Game-Players of Titan. It is jus as if a PHP or Java EE coder would try to review the Common Lisp code from AIMA or PAIP. One has to reach a comparable level of intelligence first, and hopefully reaching that level will realize the futility to reviewing a "social genius". Aside from the biographic details the whole article is quite meaningless.
scandox 10y ago
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away" - PKD Which always suggested to me, that despite his paranoia he actually was quite a critical thinker. It's easy to let his extreme vision and his life experience after 2-3-74 and his mysticism, obscure the sharpness of his observations about life.
- gpderetta 10y ago
  Exactly. He believed in all kind of weird things, he had visions and was extremely paranoid. But he also knew that likely he had mental issues (possibly because of his drug abuse) and that there was at least the possibility that it was all a figment of his own imagination. Not surprisingly this is often (always?) a theme of his own books. The VALIS trilogy really explores this. The first book (VALIS) is about two protagonists (who are really the same person and really represent PKD himself), one who has visions and suffer from delusions and the other much more grounded. The second book (Divine invasion) is a oniric sci-fi/mithical story, with little grounding in reality. The last book, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (which is not even sci-fi), is narrated in first person by an atheist, skeptical person investigating possibly paranormal events. Describing PKD works are meta is reductive.
  - XVII 10y ago
    I've written out my favorite Valis quotes some time ago, it's really something special imo https://danieljakobian.com/logs/log0003.html https://danieljakobian.com/logs/log0003.html
    - gpderetta 10y ago
      "It is amazing that when someone else spouts the nonsense you yourself believe you can readily perceive it as nonsense."
- ZeroGravitas 10y ago
  You could read that quote the opposite way, to suggest that schizophrenic hallucinations or other unwanted mental disturbances are "reality" (which in a way of course they are, for the person experiencing them). From the stuff of his I've read he seems a smart cookie, and the more obvious interpretation of that remark seems somewhat beneath him.
icebraining 10y ago
Related: Stanislaw Lem's essay about PKD, "A Visionary Among the Charlatans": http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/5/lem5art.htm http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/5/lem5art.htm
- tnecniv 10y ago
  Coincidentally, PKD thought that Lem was a construct of the KGB and refused to accept a reward he was offered by him.
glaberficken 10y ago
Sorry for the off topic but just wanted to say that I get the best book recommendations ever from HN. Every single time there's a thread about an author/theme I end up reading some of the books mentioned and all of them are gems I wouldn't have found otherwise. Thank you all for this!
- okwhatthe2 10y ago
  <3 <3
simplemath 10y ago
Ubik
cyberpunk 10y ago
I've read a few of his works, and I pretty much enjoyed them; but I really have no idea what 'The Man in the High Castle' was all about. I got friendly with a few characters, reasonably adapted to the alternate reality and so on, but I have no idea what it was trying to say... Not that every book has to say anything to be enjoyable, but I hear many people rave about it and I feel like I must have missed something. Well read people don't rave about empty books when they got not much out of it but a read through that provoked little thought. I left it just confused. What was he trying to make us understand? The nazi's won, and in that reality things were pretty grim, so was the point about how people feel when they're forced to live subservient to a totalitarian regime? I doubt that's new to anyone, and you don't need the alternate reality to express that -- it happens today -- and he wasn't even particularly striking in his visualizations of it so I don't do think that was it... I was pretty deflated by it really, but I suppose it left a bigger mark on me because I spent so long afterwards trying to figure out the point :P If anyone feels differently, I'd really love to hear your views -- I just didn't 'get' it..
- scandox 10y ago
  I think it is a way off from being his best book. It has, conventionally speaking, the most striking premise (for its day). Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is much superior. What I found really interesting is to read his short fiction and then go back to the novels. In the stories you see his controlled, precise side and that kind changes how you feel about his longer work. I cannot recommend these enough: Faith of Our Fathers Upon The Dull Earth The Electric Ant I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon I think reading the novels one is only seeing one side of the writer.
tnecniv 10y ago
He was a really fantastic and unique writer with a very unique brand of science fiction. His visions of the future are often haunting in their own right before his paranoia and gnosticism gets layered on top.
sleighboy 10y ago
For those who prefer an audiobook, the reading of A Scanner Darkly by Paul Giamatti is excellent.
okwhatthe2 10y ago
Okay, imagine being a Kennedy. Imagine that the path your life takes, every iota of it, including the big "key-frames", are vitally important to you: You join the Peace Corps. You run for congress after obsessing over every minor detail, to make your campaign appear flawless, accessible, and imbued with a subdued, worthy sense of popularly-directed power. You consider what to eat, in public and in private. And why not?: Your /every/ decision is bound-up in the Path to Power And Glory: you are a rat, forever hitting a switch in your brain over all else, that says, "Yes! Yes to the Path to Power!" I will not disguise that "addiction" plays a part in what I write here. I have experience with amphetamines myself. Now, imagine that you are Philip K. Dick. You take amphetamines, think on SciFi terms -- not unusual, Hubbard being an example -- and read Greek poetry. /Why not you?/ Why not... Become a hero comparable to Aeneas, but within the confines of your past? Why not rewrite your own history to make yourself like a demigod? Enter Philip K Dick. A mild man with big ambitions. Done.

194 points by samclemens 10y ago

Made me remember "Little Brother" by Cory Doctorow. The book described Paranoid Linux in this way: “Paranoid Linux is an operating system that assumes that its operator is under assault from the government (it was intended for use by Chinese and Syrian dissidents), and it does everything it can to keep your communications and documents a secret. It even throws up a bunch of “chaff” communications that are supposed to disguise the fact that you’re doing anything covert. So while you’re receiving a political message one character at a time, Paranoid Linux is pretending to surf the Web and fill in questionnaires and flirt in chat-rooms. Meanwhile, one in every five hundred characters you receive is your real message, a needle buried in a huge haystack."

ekianjo 10y ago
That approach may be easier to defeat nowadays with DNNs - they would be extremely good at getting the noise out of the signal, so I am not sure it's enough to counter any nation state capabilities who really want to know what you are doing.
- gambiting 10y ago
  What's DNN? Google says it's DotNetNuke, but I don't think you mean that.
  - laksjd 10y ago
    Probably 'Deep Neural Network'
  - akjetma 10y ago
    Deep Neural Network, I think.
- jlennon 10y ago
  Nonsense. Sure it _could_ work but being "extremely good" is just too much optimism.
  - ekianjo 10y ago
    Why do you think so? If the patterns are relatively predictable and constant (which would be the case if they are programmed to issue some specific noise on a regular basis), Machine Learning will have very good accuracy and distinguishing what is signal vs what is noise. Much better and faster than humans, that's for sure.
- keithpeter 10y ago
  NSA/GCHQ are really good at pulling signals out of random noise, as someone here reminded me a couple of years ago.
- throwanem 10y ago
  Sure. So to put up a plausible front, you need an AI of your own, trained to give the impression of an innocuous Internet user...

cmsefton 10y ago

One of my favorite books on Philip K. Dick is "I Am Alive and You Are Dead" by Emmanuel Carrère, a 'biography' written as a novel. A really great read.

Finnucane 10y ago
However, definitely, 'biography' in quotes, because not biography in actual fact. The English-language translator was a work colleague of mine, and I lent him a lot of PKD material out of my own collection. I ended up getting the odd job of looking up the original English for the translations of excerpts from the French editions of Dick's work (a very PKD task, like The Game from Galactic Pot Healer) quoted in the book. Carrere was clearly cribbing heavily from Sutin, when he was wasn't just making it up.

dcw303 10y ago

Being a child of the 80s, I was first introduced to PKD through Total Recall - the original, good one with Schwarzenegger in it. The mix of sci-fi, paranoia, and reality bending was mesmerising. Verhoeven is the only director who really got to the essence of what Philip K Dick was about. With the exception of the occasional episode of Star Trek TNG, I didn't have much access to much mindfuck sci-fi, so whatever I could get would leave pretty deep impression on me. I didn't immediately read through his stuff, though. I wouldn't really be reminded of it until I got into Sonic Youth in my late teens and found out that the Sister LP was a loose biography. Sonic Youth's guitar rock/pop mixed with discordant feedback was basically the musical equivalent of PKD's paranoia. After that I spent years going through a big chunk of his catalog. Obviously, a classic like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is worth your time. The Man in the High Castle is alternate history, and features what I still consider to be the best execution of a things-are-not-what-you-think-they-are ever. I've also been thinking of The Game Players of Titan recently, but that's probably because of the talking self driving car. Ubik is also really, really good, but I can't explain it to you at all. If you want some fiction that will make you question your grip on reality, I highly recommend reading through his stuff. Just don't wait until you're too old - once your ideals are firmly set in place it gets a lot harder to get into it.

SideburnsOfDoom 10y ago
> Total Recall - the original, good one with Schwarzenegger in it. it wasn't really considered "the good one" until a worse one was made.
- retox 10y ago
  Like how 'lethal weapon' wasn't referred to as 'lethal weapon one' until the sequels. It has always been regarded as a gem by many people. First use of CGI in a film too, I believe. For the x-ray scene at the Mars port.
  - samatman 10y ago
    Early use, sure, but hardly the first. The owl in Labyrinth was 1986, and I'm certain there are earlier examples.

kagamine 10y ago

The pink beam of light PKD wrote about a lot in published works. I read that he claimed it told him his son had a brain tumor and when taken to hospital that turned out to be true. Thus, PKD believed that the divine intervention of the pink light saved his son's life. Is there any evidence of his son being treated for such an illness or this just more grapevine twaddle? I had also read, I think in the introduction to one of his novels (I could try to find it but I have many of his books on my shelf and I'm not home right now) that he claimed not to take drugs! That would be contradictory to what is written in this article, to say the least. It seems like PKD is much more than the man.

byteface 10y ago
electric ant was a great little story. https://philipkdickreview.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/comiccover.jpg https://philipkdickreview.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/comicc... indirectly all about drug use. by PKD
icebraining 10y ago
Not just with the article, but with his own work. A Scanner Darkly is all about the people, including him, who had taken drugs during the 60s. His after words, dedicating the book to the friends he lost to drug misuse, are particularly touching.
jackfrodo 10y ago
re: his son's brain tumor, let's say this is true. Could it be explained by him noticing symptoms of it and subconsciously being suspicious, which led to the pink beam "telling" him?
- pasquinelli 10y ago
  Even easier, he might have made up the pink light thing after the diagnosis.
- okwhatthe2 10y ago
  Look, there is a really sinister interpretation of Philip K. Dick which one could engage in, if one were so inclined. I don't actually believe this, but it has occurred to me before. Here goes. Phil (whose stories I love) claimed at one point that the FBI - or some outside agent - had broken into his apartment and detonated explosives in his filing cabinet. This could've very well been Dick himself. Regarding his son, it was not a brain tumor, but a testicular hernia, or related, that his son had. Simply put, perhaps Dick was feeling up his son and decided to blame the finding on the light? I believe what happened is that he likely found the hernia and then, in a fit of paranoia, decided to find another context for its discovery. You need to remember that Dick claimed to have seen a giant Teuton warrior in the clouds, looking down on him, as if a demiurge was making its presence known to him. This was likely a very paranoia-inducing event. I am now reminded of the Anime Berserk. Anyway, I do not believe that Dick was a child molester or false-flag operator against his own filing cabinet (although I am unsure about the cabinet one). We don't really know. I think maybe he took a lot of amphetamines, and maybe he also had a mystical experience. Who knows? I have my own ideas but they may do more harm than good. Here be dragons: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXqHJYz8NXo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXqHJYz8NXo * This is your friendly reminder that human rights and a cessation of killing and torture globally serve as the bedrock for all modern law and that violent tendencies must be culled from our collective consciousness.

brakmic 10y ago

PKD in 1977. Talking about the Matrix. https://youtu.be/jXeVgEs4sOo https://youtu.be/jXeVgEs4sOo

soufron 10y ago

I tend to prefer his earlier books, those written because he was full-speed crazy. They get the same special thing, but they're more subtle. And as they look like classical sci-fi a little bit more, they're more accessible.

soufron 10y ago

Actually, one of my friend and the co-author of a documentary on the cyberpunk side of the Silicon Valley we're working on, had done a very interesting film on PDK in 2005: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3G4Q6UqMPU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3G4Q6UqMPU

grp 10y ago
Merci!
armitron 10y ago
Would be great to have english subtitles for this.

zer0gravity 10y ago

My impression about the universe: It's finite. "Infinity" is an abstraction, it cannot exist in reality. It's 100% deterministic, based on some fundamental rules. Those rules are imposed and enforced by computation and they can only exist in a computer simulation. Space is actually an N dimensional matrix where all cells are the same, minicomputers running the same program enforcing those rules. Don't know how it all really exists...

chronolitus 10y ago
That's just pushing the problem further away. Is the universe that computer is in also finite? deterministic? Even if it's computers all the way down, doesn't answer much.
- zer0gravity 10y ago
  Not trying to solve anything here. I'm just saying that from my, non autoritative, perspective this is how things look like..
- notduncansmith 10y ago
  One way this might be useful is in trying to communicate with whatever world is simulating us. I think in some circles this behavior is called "prayer". Of course, it could be that explicit communication (in a way we'd understand) is strictly forbidden, such that we would never receive objective confirmation or rejection of this theory. At best, we could prove the plausibility of the claim by doing our own simulation. How each chooses to spend their time is up to them.
raattgift 10y ago
Funnily enough, given your username, if you let de Sitter space evolve, it will -- literally -- grow to infinite volume. Barring some source of gravitation greater than that implied by studies of the energy content of the observable universe, and in particular under the \Lambda-CDM model, our patch of the universe will ultimately evolve to something so similar to de Sitter that it should (again, literally) grow to infinite volume. I don't think many physical cosmologists would complain about determinism; this is in part reflected in initial values surface formalisms. Your last two points have been the subject of substantial investigation; you might enjoy some of the pointers to primary sources in this article: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Digital_physics https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Digital_physics As noted therein, it is hard to divorce real numbers from working models that fundamentally explain (and predict) experimental and observational results at the energy scales we have access to. ("Fundamentally explain" as in "fundamental theory" as a term of art, as it were; contrasted with things like effective theory or classical theory or reduced theory.) Although I would not word it like your last sentence, you hit the nail on the head by saying that we have good evidence that there are some _local_ properties that do not change with a displacement in space or in time. That's the principle of relativity at work. Unfortunately when you accept that one of those invariants is the local measurement of the speed of light (or indeed the speed of any object with zero rest mass), you run smack into infinitesimals that under detailed experiments to date actually look physical.

dschiptsov 10y ago

I would not attempt to "review" the man who wrote Scanner Darkly or Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep, or The Game-Players of Titan. It is jus as if a PHP or Java EE coder would try to review the Common Lisp code from AIMA or PAIP. One has to reach a comparable level of intelligence first, and hopefully reaching that level will realize the futility to reviewing a "social genius". Aside from the biographic details the whole article is quite meaningless.

scandox 10y ago

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away" - PKD Which always suggested to me, that despite his paranoia he actually was quite a critical thinker. It's easy to let his extreme vision and his life experience after 2-3-74 and his mysticism, obscure the sharpness of his observations about life.

gpderetta 10y ago
Exactly. He believed in all kind of weird things, he had visions and was extremely paranoid. But he also knew that likely he had mental issues (possibly because of his drug abuse) and that there was at least the possibility that it was all a figment of his own imagination. Not surprisingly this is often (always?) a theme of his own books. The VALIS trilogy really explores this. The first book (VALIS) is about two protagonists (who are really the same person and really represent PKD himself), one who has visions and suffer from delusions and the other much more grounded. The second book (Divine invasion) is a oniric sci-fi/mithical story, with little grounding in reality. The last book, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (which is not even sci-fi), is narrated in first person by an atheist, skeptical person investigating possibly paranormal events. Describing PKD works are meta is reductive.
- XVII 10y ago
  I've written out my favorite Valis quotes some time ago, it's really something special imo https://danieljakobian.com/logs/log0003.html https://danieljakobian.com/logs/log0003.html
  - gpderetta 10y ago
    "It is amazing that when someone else spouts the nonsense you yourself believe you can readily perceive it as nonsense."
ZeroGravitas 10y ago
You could read that quote the opposite way, to suggest that schizophrenic hallucinations or other unwanted mental disturbances are "reality" (which in a way of course they are, for the person experiencing them). From the stuff of his I've read he seems a smart cookie, and the more obvious interpretation of that remark seems somewhat beneath him.

icebraining 10y ago

Related: Stanislaw Lem's essay about PKD, "A Visionary Among the Charlatans": http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/5/lem5art.htm http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/5/lem5art.htm

tnecniv 10y ago
Coincidentally, PKD thought that Lem was a construct of the KGB and refused to accept a reward he was offered by him.

glaberficken 10y ago

Sorry for the off topic but just wanted to say that I get the best book recommendations ever from HN. Every single time there's a thread about an author/theme I end up reading some of the books mentioned and all of them are gems I wouldn't have found otherwise. Thank you all for this!

okwhatthe2 10y ago
<3 <3

simplemath 10y ago

Ubik

cyberpunk 10y ago

I've read a few of his works, and I pretty much enjoyed them; but I really have no idea what 'The Man in the High Castle' was all about. I got friendly with a few characters, reasonably adapted to the alternate reality and so on, but I have no idea what it was trying to say... Not that every book has to say anything to be enjoyable, but I hear many people rave about it and I feel like I must have missed something. Well read people don't rave about empty books when they got not much out of it but a read through that provoked little thought. I left it just confused. What was he trying to make us understand? The nazi's won, and in that reality things were pretty grim, so was the point about how people feel when they're forced to live subservient to a totalitarian regime? I doubt that's new to anyone, and you don't need the alternate reality to express that -- it happens today -- and he wasn't even particularly striking in his visualizations of it so I don't do think that was it... I was pretty deflated by it really, but I suppose it left a bigger mark on me because I spent so long afterwards trying to figure out the point :P If anyone feels differently, I'd really love to hear your views -- I just didn't 'get' it..

scandox 10y ago
I think it is a way off from being his best book. It has, conventionally speaking, the most striking premise (for its day). Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is much superior. What I found really interesting is to read his short fiction and then go back to the novels. In the stories you see his controlled, precise side and that kind changes how you feel about his longer work. I cannot recommend these enough: Faith of Our Fathers Upon The Dull Earth The Electric Ant I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon I think reading the novels one is only seeing one side of the writer.

tnecniv 10y ago

He was a really fantastic and unique writer with a very unique brand of science fiction. His visions of the future are often haunting in their own right before his paranoia and gnosticism gets layered on top.

sleighboy 10y ago

For those who prefer an audiobook, the reading of A Scanner Darkly by Paul Giamatti is excellent.

okwhatthe2 10y ago

Okay, imagine being a Kennedy. Imagine that the path your life takes, every iota of it, including the big "key-frames", are vitally important to you: You join the Peace Corps. You run for congress after obsessing over every minor detail, to make your campaign appear flawless, accessible, and imbued with a subdued, worthy sense of popularly-directed power. You consider what to eat, in public and in private. And why not?: Your /every/ decision is bound-up in the Path to Power And Glory: you are a rat, forever hitting a switch in your brain over all else, that says, "Yes! Yes to the Path to Power!" I will not disguise that "addiction" plays a part in what I write here. I have experience with amphetamines myself. Now, imagine that you are Philip K. Dick. You take amphetamines, think on SciFi terms -- not unusual, Hubbard being an example -- and read Greek poetry. /Why not you?/ Why not... Become a hero comparable to Aeneas, but within the confines of your past? Why not rewrite your own history to make yourself like a demigod? Enter Philip K Dick. A mild man with big ambitions. Done.