Philip K. Dick and the Fake Humans
bostonreview.net
bostonreview.net
His view was that we live in the vestiges of the Roman Empire, and I'm inclined to agree - we live in a gestalt system that receives its symbol-set from the earliest empire builders, and we are mostly oblivious to our inherited reality. We just accept it.
Reality is a fungible concept, as he describes - you can exchange one fixed set of givens for another without changing basic reality one jot, but such can drastically alter perceived reality.
PKD would argue that the President of the United States is not real - that the United States is not real - that there is no quantifiable "UnitedStatesness" about the latter and that the former is only so because we define him as so, and therefore, neither actually exist. We just collectively agree they do.
His prime argument always arced back to that which so appealed to Baudrillard - that we have exchange the real for symbols of the real, that we have exchanged reality for a representation of reality - a map so perfect that it is indistinguishable from that it describes - yet all of our actions are constrained to the map, not to actual reality.
Today, we disappear farther and farther up our own reality-hole, as we entrain and develop systems to further codify and divorce reality from itself - e.g. computers and the internet - the more we represent and perceive the representation as real, the less the real pertains to the reality we perceive.
It's really hard to break out, but not impossible - but you have to see the Black Iron Prison first through gnosis, and it's then purely a mental process.
Reading list: PKD's entire corpus - his non-SF novels ply the same waters - but the novels listed in the article are a good starting point. VALIS is where you go once you're prepared to have your mind melted and reformed.
Baudrillard's Simulation and Simulacra
Vonnegut's Galapagos
Anyway. Time for me to go stare at the pink laser beam.
Does this comment imply that if we removed the Roman Empire vestiges, and removed computers and the internet ...
Does this comment imply that people who lived before all that had a more real reality, or at least a more real perception of reality?
Or am I safe to assume that folk of yore were plagued by their own mythology. And so it was since time immemorial, and so it shall be forever forward.
I find it exciting. We each have within our heads the ability to sculpt reality not just for ourselves but for the human world as a whole. We just tend to imagine bad realities - vengeful gods, despotic dictatorships, the dangerous and unknown “other”.
"Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the Charlatans" by Stanislaw Lem: https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/5/lem5art.htm
"Radical Detours - A Situationist Reading of Philip K. Dick", a master's thesis by Andrew Raba: http://researcharchive.vuw.ac.nz/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1006...
http://culture.pl/en/article/philip-k-dick-stanislaw-lem-is-...
And that's the sad reality. When we look at what the Internet has become, who did it that way - it's us, developers working for small and large companies, driven by profit, and willing sacrifice a thing or two on the way. And, there is no way back.
Yeah, I greatly admire works that can show a diverse ecology instead of trying to say that an entire world is controlled by a single entity. It just feels stale.
Kim Stanley Robinson (who wrote his PHD thesis on Dick's works [0]) is really good at building an ecology of interesting elements that interact and create complexity.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Novels-Philip-Studies-Speculative-Fic...
Neal Stephenson also has excellent worlds. The Diamond Age is my favorite.
In "Impossible Planet" they go for a weirdly romantic ending that is the opposite of the story, and turns it into some kind of wish fulfillment fantasy.
"Autofac" starts great, but then introduces a twist that makes no sense. Dick's story is extremely dark (taking the automatic, unstoppable factory idea to its logical next step), and the final ending essentially makes the whole premise pointless, turning a smart comment on runaway consumerism and automation into a cheap thriller about love conquering all.
Film adaptations have generally been unable to make something faithful to PKD. I just wish someone would have the balls to do it, because it could be fantastic.
The one I didn't like was the one where the smartphone helpdesk gaslights the teenager. I'm willing to suspend disbelief a bit that the teenager won't recognise what's happening, but the end didn't work. She should have died! Every day that she's alive is another day where she might talk about her experience and have someone else go "Wait, that doesn't make sense..." Instead she's doing presentations and inviting people to hear her story!
My only minor quibble is that the ending is a little too easy to guess on most of them. The Lesbian Space Cop/Distraught CEO episode was the best for this, it kept you guessing for a right long time.
I recommend reading the short stories - the series absolutely lost the meaning of every single one of them.
It's worth pointing out that Dick's stories are dark. Autofac has one of the most apocalyptically pessimistic endings ever written (though his seminal "Second Variety" manages to be even darker). I can't think of many that are in some way uplifting. Most of his best stories — "I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon", "Impostor", "The Electric Ant", "A Little Something for Us Tempunauts", "Second Variety", "Explorers We" and "Colony", to name a few — are end on a dark, often depressing note. Of the few classics that aren't, such as "Paycheck" and "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale", would probably not lend themselves to Black Mirror-style stories, although I'd love to see faithful adaptations of these. (By the way, if you don't find these stories great or original, I don't know what to tell you. They are masterpieces!)
If the producers didn't want dark stories, it's strange that they would choose Philip K. Dick.
http://www.lettersofnote.com/2009/09/blade-runner-will-prove...
I'm not sure what the purpose of faithful adaptations is really. Better to capture the spirit of the original and make something new (something the new Amazon series doesn't do either as it totally lacks the emotional/somewhat mystical side of PKDs writing).
Blade Runner is the rare adaptation that is pretty faithful to the essence of the original material (which is what you'd hope for), although by making Deckard a replicant it changes the point of the novel, which is to show a man's disillusionment with a world that has become itself an illusion, a fake reality that lacks meaning. The androids in DADOES are sociopaths who can't feel anything, whereas the film portrays them as full of empathy and deserving of love. The film turns it into a story about a hunter who learns how he's wrong to hunt brings that can feel as much as he does, which is an altogether different and rather more mundane concept than what the novel strives to tell us.
Personally, I feel analyzing PKDs books as if they were written with a clear point in mind doesn't work well. PKD, was a heavy drug user (in fact he's quoted as saying all his books were written while on amphetamines). He claimed to have paranormal experiences. And claimed to have had a parallel life where he lived as "Thomas", a Christian persecuted by Romans in the first century AD. I think he was heavy interested in Christian mysticism.
It's his questioning of reality, and his visions of other worlds, and the idea of a shifting, unstable reality that come across in his work for me. I think Blade Runner the film, is an interesting take on this. It's certainly a very vivid vision of a different, confusing and mysterious world, and it's my guess that this is what he liked in what he saw.
I also also surprised to hear he liked it, given how different a world it is to what he wrote.
Reminds me of the recent Hawaii false missile alert.
:P
Alright, that's too much of a simplification, and the article is worth a read—but I'd warn that it's plagued by the annoying (and all too common) use of 'reality' in place of 'belief' or 'theory' or other more appropriate options, which magically makes all kinds of statements sound more interesting than they really are.
> ... Yet they were also based on a keen interest in the processes through which reality is socially constructed. Dick believed that we all live in a world where “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 heads of the reader.”
Now imagine if instead it were simply said that, "the media, governments, big corporations, religious groups, and political groups attempt to conceal the truth and tell their own versions instead."
The term 'reality' is kind of useful because 'creating a reality' isn't quite a simple as telling a lie, since it's more like a network of lies used to present an alternate account of the state of things. But, it also carries with it the implication that there isn't any objective reality, and that when a political group 'creates a new reality', that it is somehow ontologically equivalent to any other 'reality' available.
I know this is kind of a side rant, but seriously, I can't wait for the day when it's no longer socially acceptable to talk about 'constructing reality' in random contexts, whether the reader is aware of its particular meaning (it's jargon from Sociology and spread to other areas) or not. I can just imagine how it would have felt to read the article if I didn't happen to know the origin of that phrase ('social construction of reality')—it would seem mostly coherent and would appear to be talking about something of the utmost significance, and yet with some kind of vagueness I couldn't quite place (that's my recollection of running into it years ago).
And isn't reality even a somewhat bigger term than you describe, in that (loosely: post-modern) reality is always subjective. Your drilling down ("Now imagine ...") still suggests A truth, while for me 'constructing reality' really drives home that reality is subjective, a construct.
> ...for me 'constructing reality' really drives home that reality is subjective, a construct.
That is a large part of why I take issue with the phrase: the idea that 'reality is subjective, a construct' is one philosophical stance, but by no means the only one possible (afaik, it's quite uncommon for those outside the humanities and certain social sciences to believe this), so it's problematic to have it assumed as true, and to encode that assumption subtly into the language you're using (it's a phrase made up of common words, so unless you're familiar with it, you won't know it has a special meaning).
A "constructed reality" is not the same as a lie (or incomplete truth). A lie can stand alone in contradiction with facts and proofs, as your statement above does, by definition. A lie can be integrated into a coherent view of the world, a constructed reality, composed of truths and other lies.
Yes, agreed. The only issue I have here is about the contortion of language to support a particular philosophical viewpoint. If the phrase were 'the social construction of subjective reality', there would be no problem. Instead, this underhanded usage of 'reality' is an attempt to remove the distinction between objective and subjective reality. Not only does it do that functionally, but it was also promulgated by people who do not believe in the existence of an objective reality (comically, in part because of then-vogue linguistic theories and bad interpretations of quantum and relativity theories).
It's funny - I find myself violently opposed to epistemological relativism right up until the moment I hear someone else use the term "objective reality". ;-)
You might believe you're the leader of your country, and you are as long as everybody else also thinks you're the leader - and as soon as they stop believing it, it's no longer true. This is shared, constructed reality in action, and it's also "objectively true": if you imagined a disinterested observer looking at a human society through a set of powerful instruments, they could identify you as the leader. It still doesn't stop you coming down to earth with a bump if you believe you can fly, of course.
Which is great when you're talking about stuff you can poke and kick and study but people very quickly start creating new stuff like "beauty" and "justice" and all the other nouns that you can't kick or poke.
Even things you can kick or poke start to become rather tricksy if you're not careful:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox
It's not unreasonable to argue that the number of things that are amenable to uncontroversial objective study is rather small. We live in a world full of nouns and we aren't terrible clear on which ones are objective and which ones aren't.
You can take this idea and use it as an excuse to retreat into passivity, or you can see it's power and use that to go out and make a difference in the world. It's your choice, your Karma, as they say. :)
I'd recommend reading "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense" by Nietzsche.
I certainly agree. One would hope, I sure do for one, that the cloud of subjective realities trends towards the objective as time approaches infinity, assuming such objective reality exists. The cloud may even ultimately converge on the objective reality when all the knowledge is eventually acquired and made universally known. Then human race can be said to have achieved enlightenment. It is certainly a race against time due to cosmic forces beyond our control. One of the issues this article raises is that humanity is now actively and successfully devising machines that serve no other purpose but to disperse the said cloud of subjective realities away from the objective one. By doing so it is willfully directing resources (time) towards postponing or preventing enlightenment.
And further, what we experience as reality depends on our model of reality. And then we act, which reinforces whatever reality we think exists.
I'm not so sure about that. I find Kant is pretty convincing; scientific realism is pretty vulnerable when faced with the fact that theories change. Science is best viewed with an instrumentalist perspective, that's where it is most solid.
We simply don't know if we're brains in vats, or creatures in a simulation. The real reality is unknowable.
"Concealing the truth" is a particularly bad substitute for the concept. Creating worldviews might be a better one. But consider that there are even in our world actual realities that are social constructs. Think of social media. Facebook is real, has a part in our lives and what happens in it has real impacts on us; in turn this relevance is determined by the socially agreed value we attribute to it. At its most basic level, because of a network effect: it's real because it's used, and it's used because people think it's used.
My understanding is that he used that as a metaphor for getting at this social construction of reality idea.
Additionally, I take no issue with Dick's usage of 'reality'; I have an issue with the article's.
> But consider that there are even in our world actual realities that are social constructs. Think of social media.
Social constructs are real—agreed. However, that is a very different statement from 'alternate realities are socially constructed' or even that a single reality is 'socially constructed,' even granting the reality of social constructs.
That would be in itself a good reason to talk about it in the article. I think Dick also had some mild psychiatric issues, maybe natural, maybe drug induced (again, what's the difference?). His religious delusions and paranoid ideation probably made him see reality in a much less clear cut way than, say, a physicist would.
Anyway, I'd say that reality in this context means "subjective reality", the complex of our individual beliefs of what is real. I'm fine with this usage: its meaning is clear in this context. Nobody is trying to say that by believing really hard in it we can defy gravity or walk through walls :)
The important thing is that this fluid reality idea rings a bell with us today. The world is becoming increasingly more complex and layered, and we're less and less able to see through the layers the underlying truth, whatever it might be.
That's exactly the problem: the phrase is an attempt to identify reality with 'the complex of our individual beliefs of what is real'. In other words, it identifies the objective with the subjective. It erases the distinction between reality, and what one believes is real. Losing that distinction can only be harmful in our world which—I agree—"is becoming increasingly more complex and layered".
It's one thing to acknowledge the power of of ideas to shape one's perception of reality, but the particular tactic used here (of coopting the world 'reality' to mean something antithetical to its most common definition) is underhanded.
But if you think that e.g. the evening news represents reality and that people who deny this reality in favour of an alternate reality are harming the distinction between subjectivity and objectivity, I'm afraid I don't agree with you at all. It's all shades of grey, there is no binary distinction. That perspective is a political perspective, and it encodes whole piles of assumptions about what is and ought to be.
Times were simpler before because the people were easier to fool, not because we had a better handle on "reality".
It's a quote from his introduction to I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon.
Which was of course a fundamental subject explored by PKD.
Most disappointingly, the Amazon Man in the High Castle adaptation tossed all of that overboard (though it was the primary theme of the book) in favor of the frisson of Nazi porn.
In the TV show there are mysterious films with no explanation, and though the wonderful Embarcadero freeway scene from the end of the book is shown at the end of the first season, without the slow build up it isn't at all insightful.
Admittedly it's just a film, so not expected to be able to express the subtleties possible in text, but I feel they don't even get to the heart of the book at all.
I'm bearing with it - I think it's hit closer to the mark than electric dreams did - but the only PKD anything which has been faithfully produced was A Scanner Darkly, in my opinion.
n. The quality or state of being actual or true.
n. One, such as a person, an entity, or an event, that is
actual: "the weight of history and political realities” (
Benno C. Schmidt, Jr.)
n. The totality of all things possessing actuality,
existence, or essence.
n. That which exists objectively and in fact: Your
observations do not seem to be about reality.
idiom in reality In fact; actually.
n. The state of being actual or real.
n. A real entity, event or other fact.
n. The entirety of all that is real.
n. An individual observer's own subjective perception of
that which is real.
I'll only add not to forget the situation of the leader: his perception of reality is that he is the leader, but it is only true because other people's perception of reality is also that he is the leader. There's no reality here outside perceptions, but it's still true: you can still observe who the leader is in a group of social animals from observation.
(For philosophical purposes, I believe the quoted definition is true, primarily because every alternative seems to be unsound.)
It's probably fair to say that PKD would have found ideas like "consensus reality" (Charles Tart) or "reality tunnels" (Timothy Leary) to be, at least, relevant to his work.
I found this article helpful in sketching the developments that you seem to be objecting to: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/how-ame...
That looks like an interesting article—I'll check it out.
Here's another (shorter) one that deals with the issue: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2008/11/post-truth-spawn... (There's a very brief summary in the section "The truth about post-truth")
There’s social construction in the format of group consensus and shared narrative, but the “reality” PKD typically picks at is much more basic and fundamental - your perception, your symbol set, your very humanness defining your experience of “objective reality”. He thought that “objective reality” was absolutely inseparable from our perception, that we build a gestalt from fragmented chaos, and that that process can break down. Dick has characters in total isolation lose reality not through divergence with social norms, rather through their perception undergoing some shift - it’s no coincidence that he was into disassociative psychedelics.
The article, if anything, misunderstands Dick, as one of the fundamental aspects of his worlds is that more often than not the problem is the protagonist, who is blind to their own corrosive effects on reality, rather than reality being controlled by sinister entities with purpose and direction.
All of these so-called “realities” (I do agree with you on that aspect) are simulacra, mounted atop a further simulacra, ultimately possibly (Bostrom among others has dented my confidence in “probably”) mounted upon some physical base reality.
But it’s equally likely that we’re a Boltzmann brain having one hell of a hallucination - and that’s far closer to PKD’s ultimate truths than anything as mundane as manufactured “realities”.
Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation was directly inspired by PKD’s work, and explores his notions in quite some detail. It’s a light read, and I highly recommend it.
People love a good story and Philip K. Dick knows this well, he writes stories to convey these thoughts through fake realities. Entertaining stories, movies, narratives and 'fake news' essentially, simplifies the world into a good/bad structure and let's you in on the good side. People love a tub of confirmation bias to bask in.
It is the same situation as to why good news doesn't end up on the nightly news. Good news can make people feel worse. Watch HGTV for a while then look at your house and you can't help but feel less than, same with too much good news.
People like a story, stories sell, facts and the entropy of existentialism is too much for some people all the time or many. Same reason religion exists, it is a simplification that allows people to be 'good' and frees up mindspace to think about less jarring things.
Whether the story is lying and fake or entertainment, people like it because life can take you into areas that are reality which is messy and sometimes completely out of your control, a good story is a gift.
America and the world, could also be going through a Hypernormalisation moment. [1]
I decided to finally read "Do Androids..." after watching Blade Runner 2049 and have tried reading some of Dick's other work. It is a weird discrepancy between the low quality of writing and high quality of thinking.
This essay will give you the reasons why Dick is worth reading; maybe you haven't read any yet, or maybe you can't explain (to yourself or others) why you think he was worth reading.
Either way, my time was well spent.
The almost theatrically pulpy Ubik, for example, contains something of his finest writing (unlike much of what he wrote, it nails a certain unnerving combination of slapstick drollness and outright creepiness). Sure, some of his prose is a bit creaky, exposing his pulp roots, but not consistently so.
His writing matured once he slowed down in the late 1960s, and Flow My Tears and A Scanner Darkly both contain some damn fine writing. His essays, lectures, letters and the Exegesis also showed him to be a very good writer.
That said, I don’t think saying his writing is awful is necessarily derogatory - if anything, he just didn’t let good prose get in the way of a good story or a good idea - and frankly, his style actually enhances his literature - it’s almost part of the narrative.
He’s my favourite author by a country mile, and my several excursions into writing (a novel, two novellas, dozens of short stories, all unpublished as I don’t think they’re even worth pulp) may have inherited his approach ever so slightly, by which I mean they quite definitely have.
The Exegesis is pretty much my Bible.
I didn't like its overly biblical take on the universe with replicants as angels and Wallace as an old testament God, Luv an allusion to Lucifer.
Joi, on the other hand, could have been a high point. We'd have several "layers" of real with a hologram, an old Nexus 6 replicant like K and the new obedient replicants like Luv and her ilk.
But that vein was (AFAIK) just left as a gutpunch to K by the commercial hologram and didn't feel like the central theme in any way. For me, the "you play beautifully" line was the lynchpin of the old movie.
Having said all that, I only got to see it once and I may have missed something. I was awed by the movie back them, but not moved. Still left it as one of the better cinema-experiences of last year for me.
Oh? That's what legal marijuana legalization is for.
A less snidey thought is that humans always use various psychoactives for all kinds of social and asocial purposes.