Paranoid Android: The Divine Madness of Philip K Dick | Hacker News Reader

Paranoid Android: The Divine Madness of Philip K Dick

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194 pointssamclemens92 comments

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.

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch is also a total mind fuck.

Wow - I just ordered a copy after reading the first part of the plot summary on Wikipedia. (Those things can be a little spoilery...) It's interesting to see someone talking about global warming that early, and I want to try to find out how far back the notice of it goes. I don't recall anyone talking about it before the late 80's.

If you want ecology apocalypse, check out John Brunner's _The Sheep Look Up_ (written in the early 70s). No other book I've read scared me as much as that one. I think what did it was the utter normalcy with which everything was just accepted as is.

It's a great book, unfortunately few of its environmental predictions are very valid today. Brunner missed the greenhouse gas problem and focused on things like air quality, garbage, sonic booms (!), poisoned drinking water and overpopulation. One thing he does get right is the need to develop new agricultural tech -- a core subplot is about a company that uses a new hydroponics system to grow cassava at a large scale, for distribution to impoverished third-world countries.

The real impact, for me, was twofold: First, the idea that someone could develop a simulation of modern society to the point where it could make a recommendation about how to make a course correction (which turns out to provide the books its deliciously tragicomic ending), and second, the idea that society's collapse will prevent a technological solution to envionmental disaster. The latter is implied rather than spelled out.

User spc476's recommendation, Brunner's "The Sheep Look Up", isn't really a sequel, but appears to take place in the world of "Stand on Zanzibar", which I (personally) thought was better written.

Having been influenced by Alvin Toffler's "Future Shock", he (Brunner) also wrote a novel called "Shockwave Rider".

People of that era appear to have been worried more about "The Population Bomb" scenarios than "Global Ecosystem Collapse" scenarios. That said - the underlying driver of ecosystem collapse is overpopulation, so there is a fair amount of thematic overlap.

2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson comes to mind, but that might just be my broken brain talking nonsense...

2312 is definitely good ecosystem sci Fi (though it serves less well as a murder mystery sci fi). But it was written quite recently (published 2012).

There's also "Zodiac: An Eco-Thriller" written by Neil Stephenson in 1988, who's written a lot of other classic cyberpunk you may have heard of.

>The protagonist is inspired by environmental chemist Marco Kaltofen. Taylor is a recreational user of nitrous oxide, justifying his choice of drug by the eponymous Sangamon's principle: "the simpler the molecule, the better the drug".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zodiac_(novel)

An excellent book, featuring the Boston area as a major character.

After reading that book, I was afraid of Legal Sea Foods' All-You-Can-Eat Lobster Buffet.

I think of Shockwave Rider as the first nascent foray into what became cyberpunk. Highly recommended if cyberpunk is something you enjoy. John Brunner's work in general, really, but Shockwave Rider in particular

I read a lot of PKD when I was in my 20's. It all started with Ubik. Then Androids. A Scanner Darkly. And about 10 other novels. The early Total Recall is one of the better movie adaptations wrt covering the core concepts of the story. Waves and Waves of revelations about the nature of reality. Minority Report, not so much. And of course, Blade Runner is tangentially related to the book. (It's a masterpiece, but it's not Androids)

Once I started getting into the short stories, I started getting pretty paranoid. There's one theme that repeats throughout that reality is not your perception of it, to your eventual downfall. Repeated over and over, across post apocalyptic wastelands, it leads to a somewhat bleak view of the future. (One in particular, I think it's The Fifth Variety, seems to be tailor made to describe computer security from here on out. Spoiler: _Everything_ is a trojan)

In his own words "Reality is made of cardboard and if you push too hard, you fall through."

Describes his stories perfectly.

I think you mean Second Variety [1], which is really great in my opinion as well. It, like many of PKD's works, was also made into a movie (Screamers).

Second Variety is freely available [2] on the Internet Archive, via Project Gutenberg.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Variety

[2]: https://archive.org/details/secondvariety32032gut

Yep. Lost track of the number of Varieties.

Yes, there were more than 2 varieties - it's kind of key to the story! ;)

I think (or at least hope) that's not a spoiler for anyone who hasn't read it yet - it's worth reading!

You really need to read Ursula K Leguin's "the Lathe of Heaven" - it's a book written with her friend PKD in mind.

One of my favorite recent books.

> Verhoeven is the only director who really got to the essence of what Philip K Dick was about.

maybe, but he totally destroyed "the starship troopers".

I think he captured Heinlein's fascist streak quite well, albeit while poking fun at it.

Starship Troopers is a very well made movie, quite cleverly constructed. For people without a sense of humour, it appeals to their own militaristic tendencies; it hits two audiences at once.

It's an even better book - especially if you have any familiarity with the genre of soldier's memoirs, which often follow a very similar trajectory, from pre-military life to boot camp to the first brush with combat, to the climactic battle.

The philosophy is somewhat different, but the spiritual and thematic successor to Starship Troopers, Armor by John Steakley[1], which I think is an underappreciated classic.

[1] http://amzn.to/2bNDHMB

I'd also recommend you read Joe Haldeman's The Forever War, which is very much a response to Starship Troopers: while Heinlein was writing from the perspective of WW2, Haldeman was writing from the perspective of Vietnam, and it shows.

I haven't read Armor. I should check it out.

Haldeman has said on many occasions (like nearly every interview with him) that The Forever War was absolutely not a response to Starship Troopers. He oughtta know, right?

I strongly support the recommendation to read both of them, though.

> I think he captured Heinlein's fascist streak quite well, albeit while poking fun at it.

read spider-robinson's essay : 'rah rah R.A.H !'. imho, anyone trying to pigeonhole robert-heinlein into any of pejoratives e.g. fascist, racist, militarist etc. etc. has either an axe to grind, or has serious reading comprehension problems.

I'm not pigeonholing Heinlein, thanks. There's a few recurring themes in some of his books; one is an enthusiastic embrace of militarism (and it's far from universal, it's mostly in his earlier books for younger readers). When something comes up, it's good to see it reproduced in a screen adaptation.

Militarism is intrinsically fascist. It's all about banding together, being stronger when pulling in a single direction, under the leadership of the state, and not brooking any dissent. It's intrinsically a dangerous social setup only suited to extremes of survival. I'm not a fan of fans of military qua military.

>nyone trying to pigeonhole robert-heinlein into any of pejoratives e.g. fascist, racist, militarist etc. etc. has either an axe to grind, or has serious reading comprehension problems.

Pigeonhole as in "he was just/only a militarist" no.

But he was clearly a militarist.

Uh no. I have recently written an article about this very subject. Heinlein seems militaristic in the "starship troopers" but he effectively kills two of the concepts militarists love: the chosen one myth - that the soldiers, best ones at least, are chosen ones and they should be smart and brilliant and be a Nietzschean superman, and discipline myth - that because the soldiers are disciplined, they are better than civilians. You can read it in the chapters where Rico is inducted into Officer Training School, where Major Reed is giving the Moral Philosophy lesson again.

Actually, if you take a look at the man's literary career I think he is just experimenting with the "what is best ruling regime?" "Starship troopers" is a possible answer, so is the "moon is a harsh mistress" and I even see the "Stranger in a Strange Land" in this light.

My two cents.

Heinlein moved substantially politically over the years, from being a firm Democrat in his younger years (campaigning for the Democrats and attempting to win a seat to the California State Assembly as a Democrat in 1938, to becoming conservative in the early 50's, and right-libertarian and eventually describing himself as anarchist or autarchist (economically right wing anarchism, basically) by the 60's, and a lot of his works reflects pretty directly his political position at the time of writing.

Starship Troopers is sometimes viewed as his "parting shot" to the left wing, though it was written several years after he ceased to consider himself a Democrat.

While it probably wasn't as militaristic as it appears at a casual glance (he's elaborated on the ideas elsewhere in ways that further "softens" it), it did come at a time where his political views were evolving towards a more conservative and more authoritarian ideal (though that soon changed again).

I think this goes for many Verhoeven's movies - lot of them contain a non-negligible amount of parody. But as the common wisdom says, working parody must be a good example of the genre it parodies and Verhoeven's movies are excellent examples of their genres.

At least, I think it works with Starship Troopers, Total Recall and Robocop. I'm not sure what to make of Basic Instinct and Playgirls.

Isn't it Showgirls, or is this a regional title variation? Anyway, it's clearly an attempt at parodying the exploitation movie genre by delivering all the required elements but not actually being enjoyable.

I think it's a real stretch to say Heinlein had a fascist streak.

You'd be surprised.

http://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/26352/did-heinlein-...

Perhaps, but to be so would require a line of argument, and a source, much more capably supporting the "Heinlein was a fascist" thesis than those. It would help for said source to be new, and it would help more for it to have some stronger claim to make than "he said a couple times that war probably isn't going away any time soon, therefore Mussolini".

I mean, don't get me wrong! I agree that you can see fascism in some of Heinlein's work. But you have to want to see it there. If that's the way in which you choose to appreciate his work, I don't suppose it's my place to tell you you're wrong, but I do think it's apropos that the place where we find ourselves discussing the matter is a thread originating in an article that explores a different sf author's perennial difficulty maintaining the distinction between perception and reality.

I thought he did pretty well with the film considering it was one of Heinlein's poorest books.

The movie shares little but the name with the book. I don't think of it as an adaptation.

Another PKD fandom perk is you get to call yourself a Dickhead.

You should read "Only Forward" by Michael Marshall Smith. He seems to be fairly unknown, but I love his work. Based on your descriptions I think you would too.

I highly advise the original Twilight Zone.

This show was miles ahead...

> Total Recall - the original, good one with Schwarzenegger in it.

it wasn't really considered "the good one" until a worse one was made.

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.

Early use, sure, but hardly the first. The owl in Labyrinth was 1986, and I'm certain there are earlier examples.

Tron (1982) Star Wars (1977)

Star Wars, 1977 (the Death Star diagram), The Black Hole, 1979 (the wireframe model of the titular black hole-- drawn on a plotter!), etc. By 1986 we'd already had two entire films based around CGI-- Tron (1982) and The Last Starfighter (1984).

I thought it was a gem at the time ... a gem of b-movie bad sci-fi.

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."

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.

What's DNN? Google says it's DotNetNuke, but I don't think you mean that.

Probably 'Deep Neural Network'

Deep Neural Network, I think.

NSA/GCHQ are really good at pulling signals out of random noise, as someone here reminded me a couple of years 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...

Nonsense. Sure it _could_ work but being "extremely good" is just too much optimism.

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.

"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.

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.

I've written out my favorite Valis quotes some time ago, it's really something special imo

https://danieljakobian.com/logs/log0003.html

"It is amazing that when someone else spouts the nonsense you yourself believe you can readily perceive it as nonsense."

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.

I didn't actually intend a definitive statement on what he meant by that remark. The context is interesting: http://deoxy.org/pkd_how2build.htm

My point, if there as one, was just that I enjoy the balance. I like his mysticism because I know just how powerfully logical he could also be. I don't like to see him boxed-in, or presented as one thing or the other.

That is a really good point.

Assuming we are all spawned in our own reality, schizophrenia wouldn't be a problem at all assuming there was no observation made of us by a consensus majority.

As it is the CAP theorem (under the constraint of the fixed speed of light) mandates that there will never be a single truth, and all we can hope for is eventual consistency. Presumably under the constraints of the second law of thermodynamics eventual consistency will be an existential crisis at which point no further observation can occur.

okay time to re-read some of his classics I guess.

Related: Stanislaw Lem's essay about PKD, "A Visionary Among the Charlatans":

http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/5/lem5art.htm

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

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!

<3 <3

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

Merci!

Would be great to have english subtitles for this.

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..

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.

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.

electric ant was a great little story.

https://philipkdickreview.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/comicc...

indirectly all about drug use. by PKD

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.

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?

Even easier, he might have made up the pink light thing after the diagnosis.

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

* 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.

He did take drugs. In fact, he basically wrote novels to support his hobby. When he got low on cash, he would lock himself in his shed for a week with a bunch of amphetamines and bang out a novel. He hated LSD though.
Toward the end of his career, he quit drugs when he saw what had happened to all his friends. The preface to A Scanner Darkly, the first book he wrote off drugs, lists all the friends he lost.
It seems that he didn't really need the drugs anymore when the pink beam event occurred. After that incident, he started to have all sorts of hallucinations that he lead a duel life as a Christian being persecuted by Nero.

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

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

Not trying to solve anything here. I'm just saying that from my, non autoritative, perspective this is how things look like..

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.

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
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.

Well, this de Sitter space would "--literally-- grow to infinite volume" only in theory. If you would actually try to build such a thing I'd say the probability that at some point you would remain without building blocks is very very high..
Mathematics is a great tool, but it has the drawback of not being equipped to distinguish reality from fiction..
The way I've reached my oppinions is by asking myself a simple question ( although the answer is obviously not that simple ) : How would I build a Universe ?
You know the saying, "If I cannot create it, I do not understand".
From this perspective infinity is not an option and the "spacetime" doesn't really make any sense.
Time would, at most, be a way to measure the transition period from one state to another, but it cannot influence how your system works. The output should be the same regardless of how much "time" you would need for one transition...

dS space is really simple; you only need a cosmological constant to power a uniform metric expansion, and no matter to retard it. The far future dS space approximation has only localized matter, namely mostly isolated gas molecules and (swarms of) black holes, each occupying their own Hubble volume, as all their non-gravitationally-bound neighbours have disappeared across the horizon.
Unless something really unexpected arises to retard the metric expansion of space -- and many working scientists are looking for that, since it would be amazingly cool -- that we see right back to the surface of last scattering, the "in theory" part looks very sound.
"If I cannot create it, I do not understand" -- well, get yourself a very fine spectroscope and a monochromatic radiator (or an ideal blackbody, or anything with a highly predictable emissions and/or absorption spectrum) and probe the infinitesimals in the Poincaré group, which is the isometry group of Special Relativity (and which, incidentally, is what fundamentally defines Minkowski spacetime). https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Modern_searches_for_Lorentz_viol...
An experiment or observation inconsistent with infinitesimals, or preventing the far future dS state implied by observed energy-densities, would be groundbreaking.
Although your objection to a physical infinity, or physical infinitesimals as their complement, are aesthetic ones that conflict with experiment to date, don't let that stop you from thinking about, or even proposing, novel, objective, and repeatable experiments that probe the abolition of real numbers.
Just today Baez just helped you out a bit: https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.01421

I'm sorry, but you're using all these terms that I don't really understand and I don't have time nor interest in studying.
This doesn't mean that I can't think about things. I may not get far, but that's not the point. Actually I find great pleasure in reflecting about the more subtle things of my existence, as much as I can perceive them, and the pleasure is greater as I'm less biased by the knowledge of others. It's just me...
I do believe however that the truth can be rediscovered and there are more paths to it..
Thank you anyhow for your information packed replies. Don't really know if they were meant for me or for you but doesn't really matter. I probably remained with something.
That's why HN is great.
Cheers

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.

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

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.

Ubik

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.

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