Passing for Human: Philip K. Dick in Vancouver (2018)
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bctimeslip.skullcrackersuite.org
> If he could fake being a human so well, how did he know that everyone else wasn’t doing the same?
I have this problem with friendships and relationships. I can pretend to be friends with anyone, while secretly harboring strong dislike of that person. Then when I finally connect with somebody I do like, I have this constant fear that they're the ones pretending, while harboring resentment towards me. (I'm in therapy, and this is something I'm working on.)
We're all pretending; some do it blindly. It's easier to see once one is aware of that which underlies the automaton in all of us.
I have no way of knowing what people really think of me. But how they treat me affects me deeply.
I've had lovers like that, and for all that they're immensely exciting and compelling personalities especially at first, it ends up being every bit as intense a relief to be done with them in the end, because of all the trouble they can't or won't help bringing in train. I think the only true way to know you have the respect of such a man is when you tell him he's out of your life for good, and he listens.
Don't get me wrong - I do love a good Dick! The man wrote beautifully. But I'm just as glad not to have known him in person.
VALIS and the Exegesis are a good look at his end state, but some of his non-sf work also gives a pretty clear insight into the man - “Mary and the Giant” and “Confessions of a Crap Artist” spring to mind. Actually so do “The Broken Bubble” and “In Milton Lumkey Territory”.
They’re all deeply uncomfortable and utterly palpable works - there’s real pain and anguish and alienation graved into the platens, stories of closeness morphing into terror and estrangement as a natural result of intimacy.
His whole thing was Baudrillardian, the real versus the consensus, perception versus reality - and his non-SF works lay it out bare, without any of the allegorical window dressing.
I love the man, and feel real empathy for him, as many of the questions which plagued him are those which are also ever present in my mind.
Should we ever have met, I am certain we would have hated each other, lovingly.
Now, you could easily know if that is true for yourself. I am not sure how easy it is to know it of your friend.
When I'm alone I kind of like... stop existing? It's made me come to the conclusion that our identity hugely depends on social constructs and our relationships with others.
I have thoughts but they're definitely not conversational. It's like, "me hungry, want lasagna" or thinking about mathematical/programming concepts, or "I should read more about this" or "I'm sad/happy this happened."
Somebody help me out here... please give me an example of how you talk to yourself when you are alone? What is that like? You have an actual dialogue with another entity that is also you? It's very hard for me to wrap my head around.
edit: Nevermind found an answer... It's from "psychology today" which I know is not the best, but it seems to cite an actual study and be by an actual psychologist.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/pristine-inner-exper...
Seems the experience of inner monologues/dialogues has a huge amount of variation and isn't well understood. Neat!
I guess we can include Seneca was an inner-monologue-er. So you guys think to yourselves but whenever you change your mind you experience it as some sort of conversation with yourself happening. Cool.
“Monologue” might not be the right word at that point though? I guess it is all me, so the dialogue is a monologue.
Then it's a flutter of little shards of partial thoughts one after the other, trying to solve the A* from shirt stain to self actualization. Then I went and changed my shirt.
All the time.
>When I'm alone I kind of like... stop existing?
That sounds horrible and alien to me. I definitely exist, and talking to myself articulates and reifies my own thoughts. It's me helping myself think something through or overcome something, emotionally.
If anything, there's "less of me" when I'm talking to someone else since then it's like I'm operating in a relationship-appropriate subset of my true self with them.
>Somebody help me out here... please give me an example of how you talk to yourself when you are alone? What is that like? You have an actual dialogue with another entity that is also you? It's very hard for me to wrap my head around.
I don't imagine a second self that I'm talking to and who's talking back. I'm one entity, and I can just be vocalizing thoughts. "Ok, so this code needs to do X..." Or, if I see an HN thread about how people can't get laid and a commenter is talking about low value women, "Haha, they ARE low value -- how many of them can even install Arch Linux? Granted, that's not because they're dumb; it's probably societal pressures stacked against their ever being exposed to things that would predispose them to install Arch. That's good. I think I'll write that and contribute productively to this awesome thread that I can obviously relate to which is why I'm alone right now and able to vocalize these thoughts without it being weird."
Often, it's also motivational. "Ok, dude. I need to take out the trash. What can I do to get me to take out this trash? What's a good reward? Let's make a deal. With myself. Right now. Because I need a reward to carry out basic functions like taking out the god damn trash." And that helps me come to an accord with myself about the trash. The act of verbalizing it makes the thoughts way more powerful. A silent internal monologue would be way less rousing. I can just sit there, in silence, looking at the trash, thinking that, but my mind might just disinterestedly drift into distraction.
I read once that Japanese subway workers physically gesture and speak out loud (to themselves) things they're about to do and that this minimizes their rate of mistakes. I think it works similarly to that.
I can hear the voices with different sounds - just like my friends voices - as I type this I loudly hear this in my own voice.
I always assumed everyone was like this, but of friends I've spoken to about this I'd say it is 50/50.
Sounds so quiet in your head! Must be peaceful. I imagine mine is linked to (or part of my) adhd (though my I don't have a formal diagnosis).
Here's an interview with someone like that which goes into detail on how she experiences the world:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/inner-monologue-...
It is that voice that is always pulling my thoughts in different directions (or just narrating the journeys my inner mind is taking).
I used to play music to drown out the 'noise' and focus, but these days I either 'use' it by myself narrating what I am doing or wanting to do, or tune it out through activities like walking or cycling alone. When I talk (in person) to others it goes away, also.
I am the same.
I’ll have follow on conversations from when I was 8 years old!
Interesting. Would you describe yourself as more of an extrovert, or more of an introvert?
Wow that's terrifying.
2. Can you read in your head?
3. How are you writing your comments?
Which I partially attribute to the inner voice feeling like the main consciousness. There's often a disconnect of having to semi-verbally think through something before responding. It takes a conscious effort to switch to speaking naturally without the mental rehearsal.
Edit: >You have an actual dialogue with another entity that is also you?
If I'm working through an idea in my head or trying to catalogue my knowledge of something, it's often framed as a one-sided conversation with someone in my life. Sometimes because it is something I'm likely to speak to that person about, but just as often I know it's just irrelevant junk I'd never actually burden another human with listening to.
Guy talks to himself, visits fridge multiple times for no reason, makes faces in the mirror. The talking-to-himself performance is somewhat common with the people I've known.
I find it humoursly similar to some boring covid moments for me.
The pull to not exist or whatever it's best named, happened to me when I wanted complete freedom from other people and rented an airbnb to get some space. When there's no desire and no expectation to meet people soon, I have gone quiet before.
I don’t know if it’s related but I only recently realized (in my 50s) that some people hear the sound of words when they read. Also utterly weird to me, and I imagine it would massively slow down reading. OTOH the big insight for me is that that is probably how some people are able to take pleasure from reading poetry or puns. For me poetry often feels like “annoyingly written prose” unless read aloud.
Imagine a bicycle.
How many sections does it have? Where do the pedals connect? Which bar supports the seat? What color is it? What shape of handles does it have? What kind of tires? Does it have lights? Does it have luggage rack?
Some people look at their internal version of a bicycle and say "oh, I must have aphantasia. I think of a bicycle and a photograph of a bicycle doesn't appear in my mind."
Other people are perfectly satisfied with the blurry sort-of bicycle that they imagined until you start asking about specifics.
I think the inner monologue question is similar.
The inner monologue is a ((set of echoes)(set of impressions)(series of words)) that move back and forth ((in time) (in your mind))(((competing for expression) (attempting to be expressed) (expressed only to you (to your internal ear))) in bits and pieces that you can ((experience)(hear)(perceive)(decide to treat) as) a coherent whole.
Sometimes it feels like a book unspooling, sometimes it feels like the paragraph I just wrote.
When a person compares their internal talk to the internal talk in a movie, sometimes the person feels the movie is accurate, sometimes the person feels the movie is inaccurate, but the actual internal experience is probably very similar in both cases.
What differs is the person's expectations of an "internal conversation." If you expect it to sound like a voiceover you will be disappointed and you will think "everybody else must be different from me".
That's not (I suspect) the case. I think we mostly just have different ideas of how to process our fictional abstractions of the concept.
There are also 2 PKD flavors: before and after Valis. Almost a completely different PKD.
Thomas Merton is a good example. Back when Ratzinger still ran the CDF, you'd sometimes find Merton's books shelved in Catholic bookstores in shrinkwrap, bearing an orange warning label cautioning the devout reader against being led astray by the contents.
I thought about getting "The Empire Never Ended" as a tattoo once. Also considered a Ubik tattoo. I can never actually commit myself enough to actually getting a tattoo though.
https://blog.loa.org/2010/12/what-philip-k-dick-learned-abou...
Dick's earlier works do have a particularly bleak flavor, the story of A Scanner Darkly is certainly one of the first major dystopian sci-fi works, which contrasts with a lot of the more utopian sci-fi published in the 50s and 60s. Could have been influenced by Brave New World, some themes are similar.
there is a realy interesting film of scanner darkly, with a great cast:
He had lymphatic cancer, and had fallen for the Laetrile scam (traveling to Mexico for “treatment”) so the stroke did him a favor. As with the cancer he initially refused treatment.
I was just a kid at the time and only met him once, in passing, so take my statement as you will.
And instantly my alarm bells were ringing. So I shouted back into the time portal: "Don't do it! He's going to make a play for your wife!"
As is often cited, sometimes you don't want to meet your heroes.
Fundamentally these models look backward. They’re a sum of what the Internet contained last year and can write you anything from that viewpoint. But an author like PKD was always looking forward. He might nod to GPT and go back to thinking about how much further things can go.
Checkout Vulcan's Hammer for a PKD on AI story.
The Vancouver period retold in this article is interesting and tragic because it marks the nadir of his 1970s drug addiction; after his suicide attempt, he was able to enter a recovery program (albeit an unfortunately cultish one with parallels to Scientology), weaning himself off heavy amphetamine use, moving out of the drug house and to Orange County, then starting to try write more "adult" novels (he wrote "A Scanner Darkly" during this time), which would lead to his significant international recognition towards the end of his life. But just as things got better, the VALIS incident happened, and he relapsed and started drinking whiskey every day, which contributed to his early death.
What we're saying here is, Philip k Dick was a dick?