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A psychiatrist reflects on Philip K. Dick’s substance abuse and mental health
- ftxbro 3y agoif pkd were still alive he would think that gpt is communicating with him specifically
- lordfrito 3y agoYou know I think you're 100% right on this... wonder what kind of crazy things PKD would come up with after talking to chat GPT. Train up a GPT from his writing, and have a dialogue with himself?
- ndsipa_pomu 3y agoIf only there was some kind of android head we could use for that? https://slate.com/culture/2012/06/philip-k-dick-robot-an-android-head-of-the-science-fiction-author-is-lost-forever.html https://slate.com/culture/2012/06/philip-k-dick-robot-an-and...
- trash3 3y ago[dead]
- throw458294738 3y agoI have seen that LLMs (specifically character.ai) are not great for people in psychosis. I’m not sure that it’s actually worse than a psychosis without an LLM to talk to, but it has been painful to watch a loved one drawn in by it.
- ttctciyf 3y agoThe highly LLM-like artificial teachers in Martian Timeslip (see my other comment here) contribute to the protagonist's psychotic episode in that book, iirc.
- ttctciyf 3y agoThere's a passage in Martian Timeslip[1] where protagonist Jack Bohlen is brought in to repair an artificial teacher called "Kindly Dad": > "Hi, Kindly Dad," he said without enthusiasm. Setting down his tool case he began unscrewing the back plate of the Teacher. > Kindly Dad said in a warm, sympathetic voice, "What's your name, young fellow?" > "My name," Jack said, as he unfastened the plate and laid it down beside him, "is Jack Bohlen, and I'm a kindly dad, too, just like you, Kindly Dad. My boy is ten years old, Kindly Dad. So don't call me young fellow, O.K.?" Again he was trembling hard, and sweating. > "Ohh," Kindly Dad said. "I see!" > "What do you see?" Jack said, and discovered that he was almost shouting. "Look," he said. "Go through your goddamn cycle, O.K.? If it makes it easier for you, go ahead and pretend I'm a little boy." I just want to get this done and get out of here, he said to himself, with as little trouble as possible. He could feel the swelling, complicated emotions inside him. Three hours! he thought dismally. > Kindly Dad said, "Little Jackie, it seems to me you've got a mighty heavy weight on your chest today. Am I right?" > "Today and every day." Jack clicked on his trouble-light and shone it up into the works of the Teacher. The mechanism seemed to be moving along its cycle properly so far. Conceiving this as an LLM with a "kindly dad" prompt doesn't seem too far a stretch. PKD nicely catches the interpersonal "uncanny valley" into which his protagonist has wandered. 1: https://the-eye.eu/public/Books/ManyThings/PDF/Martian%20Time%20Slip.pdf https://the-eye.eu/public/Books/ManyThings/PDF/Martian%20Tim...
- roody15 3y agoInteresting read. Have always enjoyed Philip K Dicks novels… sadly not surprised he struggled with mental and substance abuse. His books read in a way that often feature a character somewhat removed from reality or in some form of psychosis. The idea of what is real or not real is explored over and over again. I cannot help but think he was writing from his own soul or at least his own experience. He was always the looker peering into the another world that he just didn’t quite fit into. It makes me feel sad like he was often likely very lonely despite his genius and fame :/.
- ndsipa_pomu 3y agoHis perspective is part of what makes his work so relevant to today with our manufactured realities that he predicted so well.
- pizza 3y agoI agree and would like for you to expand on that observation
- ndsipa_pomu 3y agoHis psychosis allowed him to see reality as being extremely flexible and influenced by often malignant forces. That applies to modern society as more of our "reality" depends on things such as social media and that's clearly able to be influenced by bad actors. It's only going to get worse as we can't believe that a picture or video of someone isn't faked and so all we can do is try to figure out our own narrative. His work also features lots of surveillance themes (again, likely due to the nature of his psychosis) and I can't think of anything more relevant to modern society. We've now reached the stage of technology where it's feasible for us all to be living in a panopticon. Another major theme in PKD's work is "what makes us human" and we're getting close to producing LLMs that seem to behave as though they are human. If we give an AI a sense of personal identity with some fake memories, then would we be able to tell that they weren't human and what would they "think" about it?
- armitron 3y agoSuperficial and entirely missing the mark. PKD spent years doing research trying to understand his most important mystical experience, and his extensive notes and documentation ended up in the book "exegesis" (also greatly influencing the philosophy underlying works such as Valis). None of that is of course mentioned in the article. What we get is a random psychiatrist performing armchair psychoanalysis on someone he knows very little about.
- dboon 3y agoYeah, reads more like a collection of fun apocrypha than a serious look at something that affected the great author so profoundly
- ndsipa_pomu 3y agoAbsolutely. If you want to get a handle on PKD and his problems, it's so much better to read his work and get his own perspective. Radio Free Albemuth is interesting as a kind of precursor to Valis, but I must admit to not wanting to read Exegesis as it looks too in depth.
- Trasmatta 3y agoI like just flipping through the Exegesis and reading random entries. It's always a fascinating trip. I would never be able to read it end to end (and it certainly was never intended to be). It really is amazing to read after you've gone through VALIS.
- ndsipa_pomu 3y agoOkay, you've intrigued me with that - I'll chase down a copy
- Trasmatta 3y agoHere's a few random passages I've highlighted on my Kindle. It's completely full of stuff like this, that you can just find by flipping somewhere random. It skirts the line between genius and insanity (which describes the man himself, I think). Sometimes I read one of the passages and I'm like "this man had totally lost all semblance of sanity" and sometimes I'm like "he was one of the smartest men to ever live". I think both are true. (And you've got to love how PKD himself explores the "wow, I really must be insane" avenue when he talks about The Exegesis in VALIS.) > The brain is one multiperson ajna chakra, which one day as a unitary totality will open, discerning and annihilating (the 3rd eye of Shiva). (Herdsman of the souls.) All who participate in it will then see as I saw; they will be inside the eye; everything outside will be blasted, “burned like chaff,” i.e., cease to exist. At that point the brain will generate its own world out of itself. It, collectively, will totally control its world—the PTG. > Ah! In Ubik locating the Ubik messages in cheap commercials was absolutely right on. I couldn’t have “guessed” more accurately. It’s obvious that the real author of Ubik was Ubik. It is a self proving novel; i.e., it couldn’t have come into existence unless it were true. > This is a sinister life form indeed. First it takes power over us, reducing us to slaves, and then it causes us to forget our former state, and to be unable to see or to think straight, and not to know we can’t see or think straight, and finally it becomes invisible to us by reason of what it has done to us. We cannot even monitor our own deformity, our own impairment. > Axiomatically, if you derange the brain in precise ways, not only will it be deranged, but if you have affected precisely the correct circuits it will be unaware that it is impaired and so not seek to rectify the damage. > It’s like deciding something is real by comparing it with itself. So it’s a fool-proof simulation, > No, damn it, it is like Ubik! The outside macrobrain is signaling us to wake up, we are like the characters in Eye, asleep—not on the floor of the bevatron—but while watching for Christ to return. We were made toxic—i.e., put into “half life”—as if killed. Fuck! I know it; Ubik is the paradigm! The half-life, the messages, Ubik itself, Runciter—we are in a sort of bubble of irreality: spurious world generated by—the plenary powers, astral determinism, whatever the fuck that is.
- nologic01 3y agoSome people live at the cusp of the abyss but they are kind enough to dispatch so that we the rest dont have to
- placesalt 3y agoIt's bizarre that the article has a WARNING at the top which is a spoiler warning for a movie from the 1990s, but not a sensitive-content warning re: suicide.
- ycombinete 3y agoTo be fair the spoilers for Total Recall are whoppers.
- aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA 3y agoOff topic, but it bothers me when people decry spoilers for an older movie. As if everybody is supposed to have watched every major film in the history of Hollywood up to the last N years. "Spoiler alert for anybody who hasn't seen this movie from 1980: the dog did it!" Ugh.
- schwartzworld 3y agoWe need to agree on a statute of limitations for these things.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y agoSpoilers are a myth and don't affect enjoyment. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/08/opinion/spoilers-succession-science.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/08/opinion/spoilers-successi... https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/acp.4070 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/acp.4070' > they were just as immersed even though they knew the outcome. In follow-up questionnaires, they also reported the same levels of engagement and enjoyment as those who didn’t know the ending.
- svachalek 3y agoI'll spoil the links: 28 male college students aged 18-24 who were paid to do a job while watching a 30 minute episode didn't report enjoying it less if they were told the ending. Somehow I feel their conclusions might be a bit overly broad.
- rustybolt 3y ago"substance abuse" is such a weird term.
- foobarbecue 3y agoa euphemism for sure
- ithkuil 3y agoIs it though? The word "abuse" is pretty strong. If I'm abusing substances it's not like I'm just having a puff now and then do I? The term "substance" is a bit generic, I grant you that. But does that make it an euphemism just because the exact substance is not specified?
- serf 3y ago>If I'm abusing substances it's not like I'm just having a puff now and then do I? we can agree on that, but the phrase has been bandied around in the legal/law-enforcement community enough that it's clear that the definition is generally : if it's illegal, it's always abuse. If it's legal it's only abuse if Uncle Bob is nodding off at x-mas dinner and stumbling into the tree. There seems to be a strong inclination to 'help' the people that are generally a nuisance to other people -- which is to say that the 'help' provided is a way to keep the social status quo for others, not to provide the 'substance abuse victim' with support.
- ithkuil 3y agoSure. My point is that this is not what an euphemisms is. An euphemism is a mild word substituted for what you'd consider a harsh word. What you're describing is the use of a harsh word to reference a specific thing that is frowned upon by sole group and they don't want to use a too loaded word to protect themselves from being labeled bigots or whatnot. Consider this: A blind person can be called visually impaired. That's an euphemism. There do exist visually impaired people who are not blind. Technically a blind person is also visually impaired. Calling a blind person visually impaired is a way to soften the language. On the other hand, if every time you say "visually impaired" you only mean "blind" and all the non-blind people that are nevertheless visually impaired you no longer call them visually impaired, then that's no longer an euphemism, but the word just changed the meaning (as words do, often through the mechanism of euphemisms). For examples "odour" is not an euphemism nowadays, although when the word got borrowed from french it was
- jtotheh 3y agoRobert Crumb depicted PKD's religious experience in comic book form, here is a link: https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/02/07/r-crumb-weirdo-philip-k-dick/ https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/02/07/r-crumb-weirdo-phi...
- chpatrick 3y agoWell that was a blast, especially when calls the word of god in his head "artificial intelligence".
- mock-possum 3y agoWow. It’s terrifying how he says he wasn’t psychotic, while clearly describing psychosis. I didn’t realize how messed up he was.
- 2ICofafireteam 3y agoWhen you're going through it, it can make perfect sense.
- telesilla 3y agoYou'd think after reading so many of his books and stories you would know a person, this work from Crumb really shows how fiction writers often express themselves in unique ways that manage to keep themselves still private, somehow.
- BSEdlMMldESB 3y agowhere does psychosis end and 'real' mystical experience begin? here's a summary of Philip K. Dick's 'highest truths' https://www.tekgnostics.com/PDK.HTM https://www.tekgnostics.com/PDK.HTM
- readthenotes1 3y agoProbably hasn't ended with: "18. Real time ceased in 70 C.E. with the fall of the temple at Jerusalem. It began again in 1974 C.E. The intervening period was a perfect spurious interpolation aping the creation of the Mind. 'The Empire never ended,' but in 1974 a cypher was sent out as a signal that the Age of Iron was over; the cypher consisted of two words: KING FELIX, which refers to the "
- Trasmatta 3y agoIf anyone would really like to delve into PKD's life, I'd recommend the biography Divine Invasions (not to be confused with PKD's books "The Divine Invasion"). He was such a deeply fascinating person, and I feel like most articles you read about him manage to only touch on the obvious or superficial.
- sebisgosh 3y agoNever heard of this one - thanks for the recommendation
- duncancarroll 3y agoThis is a decent article but the author unfortunately has no understanding of what is known as a "spiritual emergence", which PKD very clearly went through and is critical to understanding his life and legacy. One of the first phases of this process is "anamnesis", in which you recall information from what is thought to be past lives. Laugh all you want, until this has happened to you, you can't even imagine what it is like, but PKDs entire experience with the fish symbol was a clear example of this. There are many other signs, his precognition, the "AI voice", etc., all of which are common. These events can mimic psychosis and other mental illnesses, but they are anything but. They signal the start of an inner metamorphosis, likely biochemically driven, though we don't yet know the biomarkers. It's like a second puberty, you have all these weird urges to meditate and whatnot, and if you do it right you grow and come out the other side a different person with a different experience of the world than the pre-pubescent . Because of the general cultural lack of understanding and guidance, PKD, while brilliant, could only guess as to what was happening to him and had no idea what to do about it. In other times and other cultures, perhaps he could have been guided through the process, just as parents guide their children through puberty. It can take years to unfold and can easily go off the rails, see: Gopi Krishna, Living With Kundalini. Unfortunately substances are one of the things that can make it go off the rails, and his propensity for them may have contributed to his untimely death instead of the preferred outcome of an "enlightened" individual. Again laugh all you want, until we figure out consciousness we have no basis to assume the non-existence of higher consciousness. But granted this whole space is polluted with new age crap, so unless you've had this happen to you it's understandable to paint it all with the same brush. His Exegesis is a wonderful work, one of his best. Highly recommend reading.
- duncancarroll 3y agoReality is that which, even when you downvote it, doesn't go away. ;)
- eternalban 3y agoThank you for comment. Knew little about the man himself. "I experienced an invasion of my mind by a transcendentally rational mind, as if I had been insane all my life and suddenly I had become sane." This has to be experienced. (It's like Jimmy Hendrix says.) I'm not sure I would compare it to puberty, or an invasion. Definitely a visitation, however. It seems the historical successful travellers on the path were in the main fortunate to be born into families of adepts. In many cases it was the father who initiated the son. For others, the cultural milieu typically seeded the necessary symbolic guide posts. > Reality is that which, even when you downvote it, doesn't go away. ;) You have perhaps forgotten your own initial encounters with such topics. It is a healthy response of the unprepared psyche to recoil from such content to protect itself; it can be dangerous, as you must know. The third rail is very much alive.
- iloveCS 3y agowhen I read "do androids dream of electric sheep" that was my first and last reading of PKD-- I instantly realized it was a mediocre work by a mentally ill person. Vitae brevis. And I went back to my Samuel Richardson's and the like.
- iloveCS 3y agowhich PKD-like moron downvoted my benign comment?
- degun 3y ago[flagged]
- krapp 3y agoWhat a weirdly trivial and petty thing to be upset about, much less to the point of nationalist bigotry. Go touch some grass. Maybe smoke some.
- TeaBrain 3y agoIt is not a random acronymization. Philip K Dick has long been referred to as PKD. There are printings of his novels with the recognizable initials PKD being printed larger than his name written out, like so: https://www.bookforum.com/uploads/publication.000/id30191/cover00_large.jpg https://www.bookforum.com/uploads/publication.000/id30191/co...
- worrycue 3y agoCould also be interpreted as a sign of respect. He is special enough to be referred to by the unique moniker “PKD”, he is not just some “Philip”.
- mock-possum 3y agoI feel like this could have dug much much deeper into paralleled through altered experiences on meth and the content of his stories.
- photochemsyn 3y agoPhilip K Dick is to amphetamine psychosis what Charles Bukowski is to alcoholism. Both are good writers, but living in their worlds would be something of a nightmare for the vast majority of people.
- toomanyrichies 3y agoHaving never read any of PKD's works before, I'd be interested in starting with his short stories (especially those that haven't yet been made into a movie, since I'd likely have seen it). Looks like PKD wrote (at least) 87 short stories [1]- any recommendations or under-appreciated favorites from HN folks? EDIT: A few that have been recommended on Reddit [2] that look interesting include "The Exit Door Leads In", "The Golden Man", and "Autofac". 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Short_stories_by_Philip_K._Dick https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Short_stories_by_Phil... 2. https://www.reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/a0blwl/rank_your_top_10_favorite_philip_k_dick_short/ https://www.reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/a0blwl/rank_your_t...