A psychiatrist reflects on Philip K. Dick’s substance abuse and mental health
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His work also features lots of surveillance themes (again, likely due to the nature of his psychosis) and I can't think of anything more relevant to modern society. We've now reached the stage of technology where it's feasible for us all to be living in a panopticon.
Another major theme in PKD's work is "what makes us human" and we're getting close to producing LLMs that seem to behave as though they are human. If we give an AI a sense of personal identity with some fake memories, then would we be able to tell that they weren't human and what would they "think" about it?
While feasible, you can't really call living in a panopticon actually living. You have no control over the inputs as indoctrination primes you to behave, believe, and act a certain way, and any divergence would be destroyed as a threat to the system.
People in those systems are often no better than cattle and threats to the system are secondarily correlated with intelligence. Through selective breeding (multiple steps removed) that too can be removed as a threat.
Don't take that is an indicator, Haruki Murakami often reads similarly and he seems to be a well adjusted person.
Dick's writing was obviously a byproduct of his mental state. That's where writing comes from. Just because someone else made similar works in a different mental state doesn't invalidate that.
Murakami's main schtick, I realized, is to write in the style of a hard-boiled detective novel, like Raymond Chandler (who he has often cited as an influence / obsession)... except that instead of the protagonist being a literal private investigator who wanders the city and meets people to solve the mystery of a murder, it's a disconnected man who wanders the city solving a mystery that's like, how to connect with people or how to get over a sense of loss or something. The world is mysterious, like how in a detective novel with corruption and intrigue and stuff, but it feels like it's that way because of how mysterious human connection is to his protagonists.
Philip K Dick, on the other hand, writes a mysterious world that makes some paranoid idea he had actually real. They're superficially similar but, I think, not really actually coming from the same place at all.
"AUTHOR'S NOTE:
This has been a novel about some people who were punished entirely too much for what they did. They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed--run over, maimed, destroyed--but they continued to play anyhow. We really all were very happy for a while, sitting around not toiling but just bullshitting and playing, but it was for such a terrible brief time, and then the punishment was beyond belief: even when we could see it, we could not believe it. For example, while I was writing this I learned that the person on whom the character Jerry Fabin is based killed himself. My friend on whom I based the character Ernie Luckman died before I began the novel. For a while I myself was one of these children playing in the street; I was, like the rest of them, trying to play instead of being grown up, and I was punished. I am on the list below, which is a list of those to whom this novel is dedicated, and what became of each.
Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to step out in front of a moving car. You would call that not a disease but an error in judgment. When a bunch of people begin to do it, it is a social error, a life-style. In this particular life-style the motto is "Be happy now because tomorrow you are dying," but the dying begins almost at once, and the happiness is a memory. It is, then, only a speeding up, an intensifying, of the ordinary human existence. It is not different from your life-style, it is only faster. It all takes place in days or weeks or months instead of years. "Take the cash and let the credit go," as Villon said in 1460. But that is a mistake if the cash is a penny and the credit a whole lifetime.
There is no moral in this novel; it is not bourgeois; it does not say they were wrong to play when they should have toiled; it just tells what the consequences were. In Greek drama they were beginning, as a society, to discover science, which means causal law. Here in this novel there is Nemesis: not fate, because any one of us could have chosen to stop playing in the street, but, as I narrate from the deepest part of my life and heart, a dreadful Nemesis for those who kept on playing. I myself, I am not a character in this novel; I am the novel. So, though, was our entire nation at this time. This novel is about more people than I knew personally. Some we all read about in the newspapers. It was, this sitting around with our buddies and bullshitting while making tape recordings, the bad decision of the decade, the sixties, both in and out of the establishment. And nature cracked down on us. We were forced to stop by things dreadful.
If there was any "sin," it was that these people wanted to keep on having a good time forever, and were punished for that, but, as I say, I feel that, if so, the punishment was far too great, and I prefer to think of it only in a Greek or morally neutral way, as mere science, as deterministic impartial cause-and-effect. I loved them all. Here is the list, to whom I dedicate my love:
To Gaylene deceased
To Ray deceased
To Francy permanent psychosis
To Kathy permanent brain damage
To Jim deceased
To Val massive permanent brain damage
To Nancy permanent psychosis
To Joanne permanent brain damage
To Maren deceased
To Nick deceased
To Terry deceased
To Dennis deceased
To Phil permanent pancreatic damage
To Sue permanent vascular damage
To Jerri permanent psychosis and vascular damage
. . . and so forth. In Memoriam. These were comrades whom I had; there are no better. They remain in my mind, and the enemy will never be forgiven. The "enemy" was their mistake in playing. Let them all play again, in some other way, and let them be happy."
He also said that he got annoyed when the police announced that there was a particularly potent batch of drugs on the streets at the time. His reasoning is that it only encourages drug users.
Also, experience of using drugs is no guarantee of safe drugs practise. If anything, it's the contrary. People become complacent in what they think they can handle, which spells trouble.
Also, drug purity can vary by region. You won't know about it in advance, but if you take drugs from a less tainted batch then you usually do, then you could well be taking a much higher dosage of the drug than your body is used to. Not good.
And finally, the most chilling part of all. He said that if you were to put some heroin on a table and say that this is the purest heroin on the market. You can take it, but knowing you will die. Many would still take it.
I think people often imagine legalizing drugs means there will be heroin ads in TV. But you can legalize them and still regulate them heavily (no ads, only sell to adults, require warnings on the packaging, finance anti-drug campaigns from the sales taxes, etc.).
Portugal legalized drugs long ago and their drug problems seemed to get a lot better since.
This would all be improved by legalization and regulation. Nobody dies because a Bud Light is suddenly a lot stronger in one region than another.
I'm sure a lot would die if one beer unexpectedly has the potency of 3. A lot of people already drink and drive and they'd be more impaired than usual.
Sadly, alcoholics continue to consume alcohol when they've been told multiple times that it will lead to their death and even sometimes after receiving a liver transplant.
Alcohol and drugs should be treated as a public health issue and not a nonsensical war.
Society is not better off with thousands of Al Capones and moonshine but less drinking over all. It is such a stupid argument. It is just unbelievable in the US that with having so few borders and neighboring countries to worry about that we don't care that Al Capone has taken over one of them. Exactly the result of how much we like to drink and how much we will pay for drinks.
Just the standard bullshit "What about the children" arguments.
Not to mention in 2023 that you have to add in a huge amount of straight up poison moonshine or people think they are drinking moonshine but instead are drinking gasoline.
I don't understand the logic that because children as young as 12 are able to obtain and take drugs, we should keep the drug policies under which that occurs in place.
As far as I'm aware, nobody serious is suggesting that 12 year olds should be allowed to buy or use drugs if they're legalized. Given that, the legalization question that matters is how we can do the best job of limiting the damage they do to 12 year olds through a combination of preventing them from acquiring drugs and regulating the drugs themselves, so that if they do get some drugs, those drugs don't contain a bunch of fentanyl.
I'm not going to say that legalizing drugs will certainly result in less harm, but I'm not writing it off as impossible, either. But to cite the fact that a bad thing is happening under your current harm mitigation strategy as a reason that we should absolutely keep that harm mitigation strategy seems like fundamentally flawed logic to me.
Also, it's hard to say how much is self-medicating from poor living conditions, health problems, heritable diseases, etc. though. There are some areas of the country where there are many deeply poor people.
What we get is a random psychiatrist performing armchair psychoanalysis on someone he knows very little about.
If you want to get a handle on PKD and his problems, it's so much better to read his work and get his own perspective. Radio Free Albemuth is interesting as a kind of precursor to Valis, but I must admit to not wanting to read Exegesis as it looks too in depth.
It really is amazing to read after you've gone through VALIS.
> The brain is one multiperson ajna chakra, which one day as a unitary totality will open, discerning and annihilating (the 3rd eye of Shiva). (Herdsman of the souls.) All who participate in it will then see as I saw; they will be inside the eye; everything outside will be blasted, “burned like chaff,” i.e., cease to exist. At that point the brain will generate its own world out of itself. It, collectively, will totally control its world—the PTG.
> Ah! In Ubik locating the Ubik messages in cheap commercials was absolutely right on. I couldn’t have “guessed” more accurately. It’s obvious that the real author of Ubik was Ubik. It is a self proving novel; i.e., it couldn’t have come into existence unless it were true.
> This is a sinister life form indeed. First it takes power over us, reducing us to slaves, and then it causes us to forget our former state, and to be unable to see or to think straight, and not to know we can’t see or think straight, and finally it becomes invisible to us by reason of what it has done to us. We cannot even monitor our own deformity, our own impairment.
> Axiomatically, if you derange the brain in precise ways, not only will it be deranged, but if you have affected precisely the correct circuits it will be unaware that it is impaired and so not seek to rectify the damage.
> It’s like deciding something is real by comparing it with itself. So it’s a fool-proof simulation,
> No, damn it, it is like Ubik! The outside macrobrain is signaling us to wake up, we are like the characters in Eye, asleep—not on the floor of the bevatron—but while watching for Christ to return. We were made toxic—i.e., put into “half life”—as if killed. Fuck! I know it; Ubik is the paradigm! The half-life, the messages, Ubik itself, Runciter—we are in a sort of bubble of irreality: spurious world generated by—the plenary powers, astral determinism, whatever the fuck that is.
This idea he has of wickedness being some kind of abscess in an otherwise perfect hermetically sealed bubble, and that the second coming of christ would be an event in which the evil is removed from the pure buble---- it explains concepts in christianity with concepts from other world religions and does so in an exceptionally vivid fashion. Quite terrifying.
There's a large literature 'out there' about extraordinary, inner, life-changing experiences that people have have reported and recorded throughout history. Plenty of their neglected works were re-printed in the middle of the last century - for a reason. They're easy to discover once you are motivated to look. Until then, it's easy to assume that it's they who are imbalanced.
Edit: Dick's 'Tractates: Cryptica Scriptura':
https://dickiangnosticism.wordpress.com/2017/10/28/tractates...
Train up a GPT from his writing, and have a dialogue with himself?
https://slate.com/culture/2012/06/philip-k-dick-robot-an-and...
> "Hi, Kindly Dad," he said without enthusiasm. Setting down his tool case he began unscrewing the back plate of the Teacher.
> Kindly Dad said in a warm, sympathetic voice, "What's your name, young fellow?"
> "My name," Jack said, as he unfastened the plate and laid it down beside him, "is Jack Bohlen, and I'm a kindly dad, too, just like you, Kindly Dad. My boy is ten years old, Kindly Dad. So don't call me young fellow, O.K.?" Again he was trembling hard, and sweating.
> "Ohh," Kindly Dad said. "I see!"
> "What do you see?" Jack said, and discovered that he was almost shouting. "Look," he said. "Go through your goddamn cycle, O.K.? If it makes it easier for you, go ahead and pretend I'm a little boy." I just want to get this done and get out of here, he said to himself, with as little trouble as possible. He could feel the swelling, complicated emotions inside him. Three hours! he thought dismally.
> Kindly Dad said, "Little Jackie, it seems to me you've got a mighty heavy weight on your chest today. Am I right?"
> "Today and every day." Jack clicked on his trouble-light and shone it up into the works of the Teacher. The mechanism seemed to be moving along its cycle properly so far.
Conceiving this as an LLM with a "kindly dad" prompt doesn't seem too far a stretch. PKD nicely catches the interpersonal "uncanny valley" into which his protagonist has wandered.
1: https://the-eye.eu/public/Books/ManyThings/PDF/Martian%20Tim...
Looks like PKD wrote (at least) 87 short stories [1]- any recommendations or under-appreciated favorites from HN folks?
EDIT:
A few that have been recommended on Reddit [2] that look interesting include "The Exit Door Leads In", "The Golden Man", and "Autofac".
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Short_stories_by_Phil...
2. https://www.reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/a0blwl/rank_your_t...
here's a summary of Philip K. Dick's 'highest truths'
"18. Real time ceased in 70 C.E. with the fall of the temple at Jerusalem. It began again in 1974 C.E. The intervening period was a perfect spurious interpolation aping the creation of the Mind. 'The Empire never ended,' but in 1974 a cypher was sent out as a signal that the Age of Iron was over; the cypher consisted of two words: KING FELIX, which refers to the "
These events can mimic psychosis and other mental illnesses, but they are anything but. They signal the start of an inner metamorphosis, likely biochemically driven, though we don't yet know the biomarkers. It's like a second puberty, you have all these weird urges to meditate and whatnot, and if you do it right you grow and come out the other side a different person with a different experience of the world than the pre-pubescent .
Because of the general cultural lack of understanding and guidance, PKD, while brilliant, could only guess as to what was happening to him and had no idea what to do about it. In other times and other cultures, perhaps he could have been guided through the process, just as parents guide their children through puberty. It can take years to unfold and can easily go off the rails, see: Gopi Krishna, Living With Kundalini.
Unfortunately substances are one of the things that can make it go off the rails, and his propensity for them may have contributed to his untimely death instead of the preferred outcome of an "enlightened" individual. Again laugh all you want, until we figure out consciousness we have no basis to assume the non-existence of higher consciousness. But granted this whole space is polluted with new age crap, so unless you've had this happen to you it's understandable to paint it all with the same brush.
His Exegesis is a wonderful work, one of his best. Highly recommend reading.
"I experienced an invasion of my mind by a transcendentally rational mind, as if I had been insane all my life and suddenly I had become sane."
This has to be experienced. (It's like Jimmy Hendrix says.) I'm not sure I would compare it to puberty, or an invasion. Definitely a visitation, however. It seems the historical successful travellers on the path were in the main fortunate to be born into families of adepts. In many cases it was the father who initiated the son. For others, the cultural milieu typically seeded the necessary symbolic guide posts.
> Reality is that which, even when you downvote it, doesn't go away. ;)
You have perhaps forgotten your own initial encounters with such topics. It is a healthy response of the unprepared psyche to recoil from such content to protect itself; it can be dangerous, as you must know. The third rail is very much alive.
The word "abuse" is pretty strong. If I'm abusing substances it's not like I'm just having a puff now and then do I?
The term "substance" is a bit generic, I grant you that. But does that make it an euphemism just because the exact substance is not specified?
we can agree on that, but the phrase has been bandied around in the legal/law-enforcement community enough that it's clear that the definition is generally : if it's illegal, it's always abuse. If it's legal it's only abuse if Uncle Bob is nodding off at x-mas dinner and stumbling into the tree.
There seems to be a strong inclination to 'help' the people that are generally a nuisance to other people -- which is to say that the 'help' provided is a way to keep the social status quo for others, not to provide the 'substance abuse victim' with support.
An euphemism is a mild word substituted for what you'd consider a harsh word.
What you're describing is the use of a harsh word to reference a specific thing that is frowned upon by sole group and they don't want to use a too loaded word to protect themselves from being labeled bigots or whatnot.
Consider this:
A blind person can be called visually impaired. That's an euphemism. There do exist visually impaired people who are not blind. Technically a blind person is also visually impaired. Calling a blind person visually impaired is a way to soften the language.
On the other hand, if every time you say "visually impaired" you only mean "blind" and all the non-blind people that are nevertheless visually impaired you no longer call them visually impaired, then that's no longer an euphemism, but the word just changed the meaning (as words do, often through the mechanism of euphemisms).
For examples "odour" is not an euphemism nowadays, although when the word got borrowed from french it was
"Spoiler alert for anybody who hasn't seen this movie from 1980: the dog did it!"
Ugh.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/08/opinion/spoilers-successi...
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/acp.4070'
> they were just as immersed even though they knew the outcome. In follow-up questionnaires, they also reported the same levels of engagement and enjoyment as those who didn’t know the ending.
Somehow I feel their conclusions might be a bit overly broad.
One of my favourite films, Stalker as a scene referred to as "the meat grinder". I knew how it went before I first watched it, and have always wished that I didn't. In general, I find it much more enjoyable to go into a film with as little foreknowledge as possible.
Nevermind I took a quick look at the plot and although the concept is close it seems different enough, at least at the ending. I guess I should watch it already after postponing it for years.
The questionnaires were only used with the study that tested intact, scrambled story and non-monetary incentive. They were not used for the study that tested spoilers (at least I can't find it). Instead they assumed that inmersion equals enjoyment because of the results of an earlier study by them.
All studies were performed using a highly suspenseful short film with a high capacity to engage and a simple spoiler: Telling them if the characters were or not hurt in the movie. This could well be one of the genres more prone to engage you even if you know the outcome. Even more so with a non specific spoiler like that.
I can't find individual data of the study to search for outliers. In my experience some people don't care or even seek spoilers while others avoid them like the plague.