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The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick by R. Crumb (1986)
- KingFelix 2mo agoCrumb is awesome, he let me use this work in a Philip k Dick event I put on years ago https://www.shipinthewoods.com/owl-in-the-daylight https://www.shipinthewoods.com/owl-in-the-daylight
- jabits 2mo agoLooks like a great event!
- KingFelix 2mo agoIt was really great, Phil's old editor, David Brin, and a few other of Phil's friends came to join. I made a play that was from an interview he did before he passed away, describing an unfinished book. The interviewer also attended, (RIP Doris), What If Our World is Their Heaven. Great book if you're a pkd fan!
- SoleilAbsolu 1mo agoUsername checks out!
- KingFelix 1mo agoYeah! read some of your comments, you're def a scifi nerd. Reading any good books at the moment? Just getting through Lems Perfect vacuum, and really like Alan Moores new series. He does such a good job of world building. Looking for more good books if you have any to recommend!
- Animats 2mo ago"Onset of acute schizophrenia, or a genuine mystic revelation, or is there a difference?" That's a great insight.
- germandiago 2mo agoA great insight? Where is the insight if there is no way to know? Objectively speaking, you end up exactly the same way you started. It is as if I said: oh, the app hangs: infinite loop or crash and frozen? It is one or the other, but never both. Yet you do not know if there is no way for further inspection.
- echelon_musk 2mo agoThe insight is not into either state but toward the relation of the states.
- wartywhoa23 2mo agoExactly, the metadata is the key to encrypted data.
- kjs3 2mo agoNot everything in real life distills to a programming analogy.
- germandiago 1mo agoMy point was about what you can or cannot know depending on how much you can inspect. It could have been anything else the example.
- wartywhoa23 2mo ago> Objectively speaking, you end up exactly the same way you started. Absolutely not. You end up feeling you're unable to explain x86_64 instruction set you just saw and understood not only to your fellow tribesmen gathered around the campfire and waiting for your trip report in a language which lacks even a remote possibility to explain that, but even to yourself. Yet, the knowledge of the fact of seeing and understanding persists.
- keiferski 2mo agoThe link isn’t loading for me, but I definitely relate to the title at least. PKD’s stories definitely have a tendency to untether you to reality, and you finish them feeling both extremely creative and kind of mentally lost in space. The interesting thing though is how it seems like he developed this over time. Many of his stories are just straight up bad, goofy cliche messes. When you read an anthology of his short stories, for example, at least half of them read like bad jokes an AI came up with. At some point I need to read his works in chronological order, just to observe his growth as a writer more directly.
- zeafoamrun 2mo agoMy local library had them so I read through most of his works in high school. My favorite is Ubik which if I remember correctly follows an anti-psychic contractor who dives into the world of his comatose boss' brain after an explosion on a moon base in order to get some important information, which is trying to communicate itself via in-world advertising.
- Trasmatta 2mo ago> who dives into the world of his comatose boss' brain This isn't quite what happens. It's actually left extremely ambiguous what's happening and where they are after the explosion.
- zeafoamrun 2mo agoYeah I decided not to Google it and rely on my own fuzzy decades old memory of it, which seemed more PKD-esque
- wise_blood 2mo agoI'm going through this collection right now, and loving it: https://www.loa.org/books/311-the-philip-k-dick-collection-3-volume-boxed-set/ https://www.loa.org/books/311-the-philip-k-dick-collection-3...
- vintermann 2mo ago
- SadErn 2mo ago[dead]
- permalaise771 2mo agoI really want to read this. But the resolution is just so insanely low. I don't know how anyone can read this. I downloaded the .cbr and its the same.
- bsenftner 2mo agoJust start reading PKD and you'll find that Crumb comic to be the "lite" experience.
- PaulRobinson 2mo agoHaving dealt with a few people with schizophrenia, either diagnosed, or clearly exhibiting many of the symptoms and refusing to engage with medical professionals until I cut off relationships for my own safety. I think something really sad was happening here. In fact, in a bout of lucidness, he tried to take his own life because "Elijah had left him". That's horrid. The people I have known have hurt themselves and took actions that were designed to hurt others - physically, emotionally, in one case financially - because they believed in a higher order. Sometimes, that higher order was, errr, me. [1] If the story of saving his son's life is true, that's marvellous and mysterious and wonderful. But the surgery referred to at the start of the surgery sounds like it introduced an infection and/or change in brain function somehow, and he suffered with the consequences the rest of his life. As an aside, it's weird how many stories of mental hallucinations are tied to the music of the Beatles. Perhaps its popularity, or because it was a step change in how music was written and produced, but I was watching something the other night that mentioned just how obsessed Manson was with the White album. Now this with Strawberry fields. Don't know what to make of it, just an odd data point. [1] These people felt I was controlling their mind, I could read their mind, I was instructing them, and so on. I was just having a chat down the pub with them, nothing more (but then, if I were a mystic being trying to do my work through others I would say that, wouldn't I?). The common factor in all these men (and they were all men < 35 years old at the time), was heavy cannabis use, particularly in teen years. This is now well documented in literature as being linked to schizophrenia.
- echelon_musk 2mo ago> it's weird how many stories of mental hallucinations are tied to the music of the Beatles I think Lennon once made the claim that he had taken acid 1000 times. So it lines up.
- vintermann 2mo agoThe surgery was just the extraction of a wisdom tooth. If Philip K. Dick was brain damaged, it probably wasn't from that, but from the years of heavy drug use (he praised/romanticized LSD, but by most accounts he didn't take it more than a few times - meth was his drug).
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- thisisauserid 2mo agoA lot of the behavior people point to as schizophrenia was heavily driven by his prolonged amphetamine. Amphetamine psychosis is almost indistinguishable from paranoid schizophrenia. It causes severe paranoia, delusions, visual hallucinations, and a complete break from reality.
- yaya69 2mo agoThe ai version of this story is going to slap.
- butlike 1mo agoCrazy how trauma influences the brain. I wonder if all trauma, not even just trauma to the head, will be considered patrtially 'brain damage' in the future.
- dang 1mo agoOne past thread: The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick by R. Crumb - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16434721 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16434721 - Feb 2018 (39 comments)