How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later (1978) | Hacker News Reader

How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later (1978)

urbigenous.net

83 pointspmoriarty19 comments

As true today as it was in 1978

I posted this content the last time this post made its way through here and it seemed there was some interest so here it is again: https://wuu.bi/the-religious-experience-of-philip-k-dick/

Read that and then had to look him up.

So today is the first day I can remember having heard about Philip K. Dick and also the day when I learn he has written the stories that became Blade Runner as well as The Adjustment Bureau.

His works are also the basis for Minority Report, Total Recall, and The Man in the High Castle

Also "A Scanner Darkly".

And arguably influenced The Matrix, The Terminator, and The Truman Show as well. Virtually any modern film that questions reality has probably been directly or indirectly influenced by PKD.

I dunno about PKD. His books are often lifeless to me, and I have other reservations but about blade runner, I read the book (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep) many years ago and IIRC there was virtually naff all in the films that related to the book.

So has anyone read the book and can say I misremeber, that the film and the book were at all similar? Honestly curious.

I watched the original again recently and it stood up rather well. The one thing that really dated it wasn't the curved CRTs which I can overlook but when Deckard had Rachael in his flat, and pushed her hard against a wall when she apparently wanted to leave. Such an action and attitude wouldn't be acceptable these days.

The book and the movie are very different but share the same philosophical underpinnings.

> pushed her hard against a wall when she apparently wanted to leave. Such an action and attitude wouldn't be acceptable these days.

I am tired of reading such comments where the current moral standards are being used to judge works of fiction written 50 years ago.

Of all the possible defenses of that scene (Deckard is a villain; Deckard literally does not consider her a person at this point in the story; Deckard is trying to break her association with being the rich niece of the inventor of replicants; others), this is the absolute worst.

Kanye West has also had eerily similar religious hallucinations. [0]

When I recounted the story to a friend who is a drug and alcohol recovery nurse, she snorted and said these kind of pink elephant episodes are common in recovering alcoholics. Although to play the spiritual devil's advocate, one could argue that mortifying the flesh has long been a mystical practice (accessing the etheric plane, if one believes in that modality).

Jung's Red Book [1], written and illustrated during a (debatable) psychotic break and only recently released from his archives in 2009, is also a fascinating attempt to integrate the spiritual with the scientific.

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/philip-k-dick...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Red_Book_(Jung)

Thanks for those links, fascinating

The description of the TV watching process is really juicy. And it certainly applies also to modern day video streaming. It’s not the delivery method but the video content itself that it’s dangerous.

The author read the bible first (or maybe he was read to as a child), then subconsciously recited stories from it in his writings. That's my explanation. No the Biblical mysticism he proposes.

One thing that constantly puzzles me about PKD is how far ahead his societal and philosophical imagination was, but how backwards his technological views remained.

He has androids being run by punctured cards (i.e this story), advanced civilizations relying on advanced typewriters using paper (i.e. The Little Black Box if I remember correctly the name), and mass communication based on telephone boots (i.e. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep).

He writes this paragraph that may explain your observation:

"So 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."

You know, I would've described Heinlein or Asimov the same way - people using slide rules on spaceships and so on. However, I happened to go back and read a short story and realized that it did in fact present a very plausible space age about 20 or 30 years ahead of time, and it's kind of uncharitable to criticize it for not accurately predicting 50 or 60 years in the future.

Sometimes we look back at, say, the 40s and the 70s and kind of lump them together as being long ago, but predicting a lot of things about the late 60s or early 70s from the perspective of WWII or its aftermath was really an achievement. Of course, as always, a lot of the reason for successful predictions was that the people who constructed the future had read the predictions for inspiration.

According to archive.org this piece has been around since at least 2017. Not sure if it was written before then though.

Seeing how author died in 1982 it would be a miracle or some really odd circumstance if original article was from 2017.

PKD used the Ubik line of typewriters. They are well suited for writing and publishing content after death.

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