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How to build a universe that doesn’t fall apart two days later (1978)
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- palad1n 3y agoPhilip K. Dick is my spirit animal.
- Physkal 3y agoThis might be my first request for a chatgpt summary.
- lifeisstillgood 3y agoNot to get too confrontational but why? The point of reading text by a talented author is to read his/her words in the way they wrote it. Otherwise it's all "14 year old girl wanted to test if her boyfriend would really get upset if she died, faked her death, it goes horribly wrong"
- Physkal 3y agoTime investment? There is also no context? Fiction, nonfiction? As a reader how would I know what I am getting myself into? and how would I know on first click this a talented artist.
- SideburnsOfDoom 3y agoIf you are a Sci-Fi fan, then you should now already or learn now, that Philip K. Dick is "a talented artist" in the American canon. Or you could ask Wikipedia who he was. Or chatGPT if you don't mind fake knowledge. That is what makes the essay interesting, not the mildly paranoid musings about synchronicity, fakes, human kindness and drug dealing. If you're not a Philip K. Dick fan or a Sci-Fi fan, walk on.
- chmod775 3y agoOkay to be fair, Philip K. Dick is somewhat of a known quantity.
- _hzw 3y agoThere's no adventure if you know what lies ahead. But I suppose some are fine without adventure in their lives.
- nonethewiser 3y agoIs this the sole source of adventure? Windy but stylish online articles?
- Cthulhu_ 3y agoNo, there are more.
- Ensorceled 3y agoFrom Wikipedia… > Popular films based on his works include Blade Runner (1982), Total Recall (adapted twice: in 1990 and in 2012), Screamers (1995), Minority Report (2002), A Scanner Darkly (2006), The Adjustment Bureau (2011), and Radio Free Albemuth (2010). If you’ve not heard of P.K. Dick before it’s kind of weird to be worried about “is this a talented artist”… you really need to push your boundaries in any way possible.
- chmod775 3y agoI was about to agree with you and lay on them too, then I asked myself why I alt-tabbed to read HN comments midway through. If that was printed or I was reading it on my e-reader, I'd probably enjoy it just like I did enjoy reading some of his novels, but as of now I'm not lounging on a couch with a cup of tea and some cookies. Reading on a screen is way less comfortable and many of us will be reading HN stories as a momentary distraction as work - attention spans not primed for this sort of long-form writing. Hope that answers your question as to why someone would not read it right now. Since we're human it is no surprise one would be curious as to what it is about anyways - and request a summary. Personally I'm shelving it to be read later.
- nonethewiser 3y ago> Not to get too confrontational but why? The point of reading text by a talented author is to read his/her words in the way they wrote it. Or, you want the information. If so, compressed is better.
- Ensorceled 3y agoActually, now I’m interested in how ChatGPT will compress this. Reminds me of that M.A.S.H episode where Hawkeye and B.J. are mocking Readers Digest… “A Tale of a City”
- nonrandomstring 3y ago> you want the information There is no information. A piece like this by P.K Dick cannot be tokenised and reduced to a minimal takeaway wrap sans the experience. It was written to be read. Sometimes you just have to jump into the rabbit hole and enjoy the fall.
- nonethewiser 3y agoI didnt read very much of it so ill take your word. But the title certainly sounds like it includes instructions on how to do something.
- digging 3y ago> It was written to be read. Artists aren't infallible; their intentions don't have to be held sacred. There is nothing wrong with someone not caring for a particular piece of PKD's writing or any of it for that matter.
- gilleain 3y agoI would argue that this text is very hard to compress as it is already a compressed version of PKD's thoughts on reality, religion, perception, philosophy, and more. It's well worth the time it takes to read it all.
- Ygg2 3y agoDid you read the article? It's still Philip K. Dick. It's absolutely bonkers. It starts normal, story about a dog biting the garbage man from PoV of the dog, story about surgeons discovering reality altering tape in a man, the question of what is reality, then descends into PKDs ramblings about being stuck in Satan's Tesseract Labyrinth, that it's actually AD 50 and people wearing pisces are real Jesus' followers, that his son is reincarnation of a prophet, and so on. Here are these gems: The answer I have come up with may not be correct, but it is the only answer I have. It has to do with time. My theory is this: In some certain important sense, time is not real (snip) it, specifically, is the period immediately following the death and resurrection of Christ; it is, in other words, the time period of the Book of Acts. “I am a fisherman. I fish for fish.” Christopher, at four, had found the sign I did not find until I was forty-five years old.
- stareatgoats 3y agoIn all fairness, it is a long article. Articles submitted to HN should ideally not be much longer than the title, because people don't have time nowadays - time has somehow shrunk to the point of near disappearance. It's not an accusation, it's just an observation, a fact of life. But once in a while a wormhole to another existence opens where there is still time to read a whole story, not sure how but some people seem to be able to. Alien tech?
- notpachet 3y ago"If we never take time, how can we ever have time?"
- acuozzo 3y ago> time has somehow shrunk to the point of near disappearance "The Magnificence of the Ambersons began in 1873. Their splendor lasted throughout all the years that saw their Midland town spread and darken into a city. In those days, the only public conveyance was the street car. A lady could whistle to it from an upstairs window, and the car would halt and wait as she shut the window, went downstairs, put on her hat, found an umbrella and told the girl what to have for dinner. Too slow for us nowadays, for the faster we are carried, the less time we have to spare."
- polishdude20 3y agoI thought about why I'd want an AI summary or even a human-made summary of a long text and realized there's a deep wrongness this need stems from.. I like a summary so I can know if I like the article and agree with it. If I would like and agree with the summary (thus reinforcing my worldview) I'll most likely read the whole article. If the summary is uninteresting or does not support my worldview, I'm more likely to skip the article. And this is the grave problem of the matter. I'm selecting things to read and learn about that I am already familiar with and agree to. That's no way to learn new things and new perspectives. This action repeated over many times over many days and years leads to a person who's very closed minded and starts to think of themselves as the main character of their reality. I'm noticing that in myself and it's really hard not to do.
- ordu 3y agoI can add a use-case for that. I'm trying to read Joe Dispenza "Breaking a Habit of Being Yourself". The book starts with Joe Dispenza views on a quantum nature of our world, and I see that the author knows about quantum even less then me. Moreover he tries to make me to believe in something similar to Philip K. Dick, except everything unexplainable is explained not by references to Holy Spirit, but by slipping a word "quantum" somewhere in a sentence. He kinda believe in a magic world where you can change the world by thinking hard about the desired change, but instead of "magic" he says "quantum". Sometimes he uses word "quantum" twice in one sentence. It was bad enough so I was fighting my desire to stop reading the book and to never try it again. I persisted because his bullshit was far outside of his supposed area of expertise and I thought he could become better when he gets to a point. But then Dispenza refers to a study showing that you can change past with a prayer: if you pray for a random sample of patients from a decade ago, then this random sample does better than a general population[1]. Then he refers to a study showing that people can unwound DNA by a force of mind[2]. Dispenza starts his book by asking a reader to keep an open mind, but there are limits of mind openness, and if you go beyond the limits then what is the point of having a mind? Am I ready to break a habit of being myself and start believing in bullshit? After I'd found [1] and [2] with a search engine, I searched for Joe Dispenza. He is not a neuroscientist but a fraud[3]. I think I need to make my fraud detector more sensitive. But the point is: if I had an AI summary, I'd probably never wasted my time trying to read the book. Though I'd better get from an AI not a summary, but a chat, so I could ask questions about the book and get answers (was it a butler who did this? lol). Btw, reading Philip K. Dick I noticed that I can read through such a concentrated bullshit without fighting an urge to stop wasting my time. I'm still thinking what is the key difference in my attitude to different authors. For now I think it is about my expectations: Philip K. Dick started with a question what is real, and so I'm happy to give him a license to talk some bullshit, while I expect from a scientist to have beliefs compatible with science. [1] It is not the paper he refers to, but it is about it: https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/the-ethics-of-joke-science https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/the-ethics-of-joke-sci... [2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8686570/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8686570/ [3] https://nesslabs.com/the-rise-of-fake-scientists https://nesslabs.com/the-rise-of-fake-scientists
- Sakos 3y agoI was curious how well it would work, so here's the summarize result from Kagi: Philip K. Dick explores questions about what is real and how reality can be manipulated through advanced technology and propaganda. He is fascinated by these topics and writes fiction exploring them. Dick believes that bombardment by fake realities can turn people into "spurious humans" who no longer know what is real. Fake realities breed fake humans. Scenes and elements from Dick's novels sometimes mirrored or predicted real events, even though he did not intend them to. This included mirroring biblical stories which he was unfamiliar with. Dick had vivid experiences where he seemed to relive or foresee scenes from his own novels, like a man hiding behind a tree outside his home. He wonders if our universe started as an illusion but God is slowly making it real through love and wisdom. Manipulating words is a powerful tool for manipulating reality, as George Orwell showed in 1984. Reality and fiction blur together, with fiction mimicking truth and truth mimicking fiction. Ancient philosophers like Heraclitus, Xenophanes and others had insightful views on reality and God's role that modern people simplify. Ordinary people say no to tyrants through small acts of resistance like Dick mailing a fortune cookie slip to the White House. A metal lantern Dick was given echoed the shape of a fish, reminding him of biblical stories in strange ways.
- gregw2 3y agoFascinating! Kagi managed to automatically omit and abstract away all the Christian-specific perspective leaving us with something purely deist in its presentation. I wonder if that’s a coincidence, or something inherent in the way LLM synthesizes word frequencies from the trainer’s chosen corpus that leads to that tendency/outcome.
- wudangmonk 3y agoLinked from r/Iam45andthisisdeep
- lifeisstillgood 3y ago“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” Great quote. So great I even posted it to my twitter account (my other bookmarking service) But the paste dropped the end quote mark and added a comma to the front. HN did not and did the above paste just fine. It bothers me, and I don't know why.
- rurban 3y agoJust got stuck at the exact same sentence. Brilliant quote
- quonn 3y agoBut the quote is only great on one level. If we give it some thought it is not so great. Why? Because our mind evolved as a tool for survival of our self which is to say as a tool for survival of that which may pass on the genes which create said mind. This mind is, by default, full of illusions, full of a particularly biased view of the world and the content of that view does not go away when we stop believing in it and looks to us just like reality. This is the whole point of meditation, but even if you do not believe in meditation yet, it can be observed in yourself and in others. In short the statement is only true for the rather small subset of things that can be scientifically investigated and on that level beliefs are not a category of concern anyway. It‘s a statement about the content of the world without an observer, but the observer-world interface is the more interesting part, the observer cannot be removed and any beliefs come from the observer in the first place.
- hutzlibu 3y ago"In short the statement is only true for the rather small subset of things that can be scientifically investigated" Which fundamental things cannot get scientifically investigated?
- quonn 3y agoOnly physical facts that do not affect our subjective consciousness. For example if the earth is flat or round. Actually, let me make a stronger statement than before: Even for scientific facts the statement is weak. If I stop believing that the world is round, then what does it mean that the „roundness“ will not go away? From my point of view it certainly goes away and the world _will be_ flat. In order to accept that it is, objectively, not flat I have to accept other information, often information that I do not check or verify myself. But subjectively, if I really stop believing the world is round then for sure it will start to feel flat. So this criterion is not a good one. I think it only is useful in the world of „succeeding“. So for example I may believe that a vaccination is dangerous and as a consequence I may die if unvaccinated. This is an example of reality not going away. Or I may believe that I can pass a test without studying but then I don‘t and so that‘s reality, again.
- SideburnsOfDoom 3y agoIronic, given that a hallmark of a "Phildickian" work is that the protagonist's reality can fall apart before the end of the work. https://philipdick.com/literary-criticism/essays/phildickian-a-definition https://philipdick.com/literary-criticism/essays/phildickian...
- Barrin92 3y agoEven casually throughout his stories. There's a great scene in Ubik where a group plans a heist and the there's a weird shift in reality just in the middle of a conversation basically. Dick was fantastic at creating these disorienting, unnerving situations.
- robocat 3y agoFrom article: I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing. It is my job to create universes, as the basis of one novel after another. And I have to build them in such a way that they do not fall apart two days later. Or at least that is what my editors hope. However, I will reveal a secret to you: I like to build universes which do fall apart. I like to see them come unglued, and I like to see how the characters in the novels cope with this problem. I have a secret love of chaos.
- defrost 3y agoIn PKD's own words, in the linked article: However, I will reveal a secret to you: I like to build universes which do fall apart. I like to see them come unglued, and I like to see how the characters in the novels cope with this problem. I have a secret love of chaos. There should be more of it. Do not believe — and I am dead serious when I say this — do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe.
- KingFelix 3y ago
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- trumbitta2 3y ago"But the problem is a real one, not a mere intellectual game. Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups — and the electronic hardware exists by which to deliver these pseudo-worlds right into the heads of the reader, the viewer, the listener." I love his work. His mind.
- nonrandomstring 3y agoFor me, the most powerful passage in this one is; """ The authentic human being is one of us who instinctively knows what he should not do, and, in addition, he will balk at doing it. He will refuse to do it, even if this brings down dread consequences to him and to those whom he loves. This, to me, is the ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people; they say no to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequences of this resistance. Their deeds may be small, and almost always unnoticed, unmarked by history. Their names are not remembered, nor did these authentic humans expect their names to be remembered. I see their authenticity in an odd way: not in their willingness to perform great heroic deeds but in their quiet refusals. In essence, they cannot be compelled to be what they are not. - P.K Dick """ This underpins my selective abstinence from certain areas of technological life. It lets me laugh at "inevitability" and "necessity, fear no "inconvenience" or being "left behind" or "out of the loop", and I could hardly care less that some others have a "competitive advantage". " I simply follow my own path, using the tools that work for me, the ones I understand, as I see fit for my own aims. And I feel oddly happy that most of what I do, my parochial craft, will be washed away and forgotten. But (quietly and not that it matters), I also suspect that such an "authentic" attitude is something the great organising Moloch machine shits its pants in fear of, because the authentic human cannot coexist with it and thus requires its destruction.
- jacquesm 3y agoIt's the mirror image to "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.". Unfortunately history has taught us that P.K. Dick's view is rarely the prevailing one and that even if plenty of people are exactly like that too many of them are not and they will happily do that which they instinctively know they should not do. Especially if there is money or authority involved.
- Cthulhu_ 3y agoSubtle difference, Dick's statement doesn't say that "good men should do nothing", but that "good men should refuse to do bad things". Setting boundaries, in other words.
- badcppdev 3y ago"In Acts, the disciple Philip baptizes the black man, who then goes away rejoicing. " These days preaching has been replaced by podcasts. We listen to the new prophets and are baptised when we click on the Subscribe button, rejoicing our newly acquired view of the world
- rsaarelm 3y agoWhat's the deal with the "headline ... in a California newspaper", "Scientists say that mice cannot be made to look like human beings"? Is this referencing some actual thing or did he just make it up?
- syncsynchalt 3y agoPresumably in the context of medical testing. It's a common point made in journals to this day: - https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2020/why-drugs-tested-in-mice-fail-in-human-clinical-trials/ https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2020/why-drugs-tested-in-... - https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/12/science/testing-of-some-deadly-diseases-on-mice-mislead-report-says.html https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/12/science/testing-of-some-d... - https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/mar/20/mice-clinical-trials-human-disease https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/mar/20/mice-clinica... and a humorous take: - https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/08/01/scientists-ask-are-mice-people https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/08/01/scientists-ask...
- NickM 3y agoI wonder how many of the people commenting on this essay read all the way through. It starts out quite lucid and makes some seemingly insightful points, but as the essay goes on he starts to descend into some strange metaphysical ideas about time not being real and reality being a retelling of parts of the Bible. I’m not familiar with much of PKD’s works or his life story, but I honestly can’t tell if he had mental health problems or if this essay is supposed to be a sort of self-aware self-referential story about reality breaking down.
- sanroot99 3y agoI stopped reading from there on, it became relatively absurd
- NateEag 3y ago> I honestly can’t tell if he had mental health problems or if this essay is supposed to be a sort of self-aware self-referential story about reality breaking down. Yes. Less ellipticaly, Dick abused drugs at various points in his life and definitely struggled with his mental health. He also had mystical experiences that massively influenced his view of reality (beyond just the ones mentioned in this essay, actually - he reported a pink laser telling him his son had a deadly illness, which turned out to be true when he took his son to the hospital, IIRC). Whether those facts are all the same thing is left as a nontrivial exercise for the reader. It seems obvious to me that Dick was very aware of the amorphous unverifiability of so many of his life experiences, and that he loved to write about precisely the intersection of such nebulous experiences and the fact that reality is "that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." He seems to have understood better than most that the standard he defined says nothing about falsifiability or knowability. Many possible things could in fact be part of reality without being knowable or falsifiable. I think our fundamental inability to Know Reality is precisely the theme of most of Dick's glorious fever-dream fiction.
- magicalhippo 3y ago> I’m not familiar with much of PKD’s works or his life story, but I honestly can’t tell if he had mental health problems Oh he almost certainly had mental health problems. He experienced hallucinations and delusions[1], including an intelligent pink beam of light. He wrote about some of these in an autobiographical way in VALIS[2]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_K._Dick#Paranormal_experiences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_K._Dick#Paranormal_expe... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valis_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valis_(novel)
- paulpauper 3y agoThe genre of Hard Science fiction means that the author has enough background knowledge that the physics of the plot and world building is reasonably sound
- hateful 3y agoWhat's interesting is that early on he talks about when you watch TV the "Words and pictures are synchronized." - then both the Bible quotes and his quoted story have a rhythm, rhyme and alliteration in which to do the same. I found myself half way through the passages and I've stopped paying direct attention. He's re-writing our view of the universe by hypnotizing us. Like any good magician, he's told us the trick, right at the beginning. Like Romeo and Juliet or the opening song of Frozen - and we immediately forgot it - and then we were tricked anyway! Mr. Dick, I see what you did there.
- luxuryballs 3y ago“There must indeed be a mysterious Holy Spirit which has an exact and intimate relation to Christ, which can indwell in human minds, guide and inform them, and even express itself through those humans, even without their awareness.” When I finally realized this for myself I was rather shocked, not in a bad way, but it surprised me that it hadn’t been talked about more before I came face to face with it… God and Christ are the most well known and “perceivable” when people think of church literature yet ironically the Holy Spirit is the most accessible and influential of the three in the present reality. It wasn’t until I experienced it that I looked back and understood, as if it’s something that can’t be taught in the slightest, to any degree comparable to when the actual manifestation of that indwelling reveals itself.