The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick by R. Crumb (1986)
philipdick.com
philipdick.com
In fact, in a bout of lucidness, he tried to take his own life because "Elijah had left him". That's horrid.
The people I have known have hurt themselves and took actions that were designed to hurt others - physically, emotionally, in one case financially - because they believed in a higher order. Sometimes, that higher order was, errr, me. [1]
If the story of saving his son's life is true, that's marvellous and mysterious and wonderful. But the surgery referred to at the start of the surgery sounds like it introduced an infection and/or change in brain function somehow, and he suffered with the consequences the rest of his life.
As an aside, it's weird how many stories of mental hallucinations are tied to the music of the Beatles. Perhaps its popularity, or because it was a step change in how music was written and produced, but I was watching something the other night that mentioned just how obsessed Manson was with the White album. Now this with Strawberry fields. Don't know what to make of it, just an odd data point.
[1] These people felt I was controlling their mind, I could read their mind, I was instructing them, and so on. I was just having a chat down the pub with them, nothing more (but then, if I were a mystic being trying to do my work through others I would say that, wouldn't I?). The common factor in all these men (and they were all men < 35 years old at the time), was heavy cannabis use, particularly in teen years. This is now well documented in literature as being linked to schizophrenia.
A big part of it, is seeing “connections,” in everything.
Every newspaper article, every radio ad, every person glancing your way, is a “message.” Sometimes, it’s good, but usually, it’s bad. They’re “plotting to kill me,” or “spying on me.”
People like that, are uniquely susceptible to suggestions from sycophantic LLMs, which can be disastrous.
I used up my quota of acid, before I was 18. It’s basically “temporary schizophrenia.”
I've lately been wondering if schizophrenia causes this connection-seeing, or if connections cause indicators of schizophrenia/psychosis.
I've lived in cities like New Orleans, where everything seems magically connected through something about the culture and relationship structure imho, which results in intense feelings of synchronicity. There seems to be a high proportion of schizophrenia and general mania in New Orleans.
And now LLMs (which are always making and reinforcing connections, right or wrong) lead me to wonder about this direction of causality once more...
IANAD, but my reading of the literature is that the genes for schizophrenia cause connection seeing, which on its own is mostly net neutral (slightly negative on average, but positive for many people). But it’s not having the ability to think critically about those connections, along with trauma and lack of social support, that causes this ability to see connections to manifest as mental illness. The genes for schizophrenia on their own though are, on average, only slightly net negative in terms of their impact.
I can def see LLMs changing the strength of one's ability to resist and critique this connection-seeing. We live in strange times
Can mental illnesses be caused by fungal infections? I wonder.
Of course, it's best to be where these two counterbalance each other. Solve et coagula.
IIRC Manson thought the song "Helter Skelter" referred to some sort of apocalypse. In fact, it is just a name for a children's helical slide that used to be popular in British fairgrounds!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helter_skelter_(ride)
First known appearance on Blackpool Pleasure Beach in 1906.
I think it's just an economies of scale thing. The Beatles _were_ THAT big. If everyone listens to them, there's going to be increased incidences of the Phillip K. Dick's and the Charles Manson's.
From VALIS (which was largely based on his experiences):
> What he did not know then is that it is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.
> Let it be said that one of the first symptoms of psychosis is that the person feels perhaps he is becoming psychotic. It is another Chinese finger trap. You cannot think about it without becoming part of it. By thinking about madness, Horselover Fat slipped by degrees into madness.
> People suffering nervous breakdowns often do a lot of research, to find explanations for what they are undergoing. The research, of course, fails.
> What struck me was the oddity of a lunatic discounting his hallucinations in this sophisticated manner; Fat had intellectually dealt himself out of the game of madness while still enjoying its sights and sounds.
I see almost 4 versions of PKD in VALIS: the narrator, Fat, the narrator instantiated into the story itself, and then the real life author (who is treating this book as semi fictional, semi autobiographical).
DIS can reverse with cessation, but schizophrenia is not reversible AFAIK.
I think Lennon once made the claim that he had taken acid 1000 times. So it lines up.
As somebody with mental health issues himself, I was not aware of other people's sensitivities on this, only my own.
Personally, I'm still dealing with fallout from temporary cannabis-induced psychosis.
Keep the downvotes coming. Points matter.
To be clear, the people I encountered who had these interactions with me were very ill over a long period of time. At least one of them was sectioned after a failed suicide attempt (that involved trying to roll his car down the motorway and jumping off a bridge - thankfully nobody was hurt and he came away with just a few bruises). I was asked to go to the secure unit he was sent to, to convince him I was not controlling his brain, by his wife, who was acting on his request.
Another refused to get help after I urged him to talk to his doctor and became threatening enough I had to start forwarding emails and texts he was sending me to others as "witnesses" in case anything happened to me.
I am not the hero of these stories. I'm just part of them. When people you know behave like this towards you, it is deeply unsettling. Almost all cognitive changes in people you know can be disturbing. Talking about that is not me making myself the victim: it's saying how it affects me.
If I'd known PKD while all this was going on, and was aware of it, I think I'd be both saddened and terrified. That was my point.
Good luck with dealing with your own recovery, and I hope you're well soon.
The interesting thing though is how it seems like he developed this over time. Many of his stories are just straight up bad, goofy cliche messes. When you read an anthology of his short stories, for example, at least half of them read like bad jokes an AI came up with.
At some point I need to read his works in chronological order, just to observe his growth as a writer more directly.
This isn't quite what happens. It's actually left extremely ambiguous what's happening and where they are after the explosion.
PKD also invokes Buddhism and Hinduism frequently in the Exegesis. Here's a quote I love from it:
> I have seen the infinities of Judaism, which is morality, of Christianity, which is love, of the Greeks, which is wisdom, and I have seen God’s power as pronoia and charis to rescue me by bending the world itself; but beauty is a perplexing infinity, raising more questions than it answers. It is a puzzle too intricate for me. It spans all else. As I sit across the game board from Krishna I say, “I have found in beauty that which I could not myself have made; thus I have found the benchmarks. I believe, for I have the evidence that I trust; it is sufficient.” There is an infinity of good, of love, of wisdom, of power, but each particular beautiful thing is infinitely beautiful, and there is an infinity of them, so beauty, alone, is an infinity of infinities: ∞2.
His more complex stuff came later. But then too his need for money would lead to churning out something publishable over something polished.
I think PKD might well have been tickled by the idea of whether he might have been an AI sent back in time to become a sci-fi author.
Looking for more good books if you have any to recommend!
That's a great insight.
On the other hand if we broaden the meaning of mystic revelation, a "light" mystic revelation, like being in awe in front of nature for example, would have nothing to do with acute schizophrenia.
sigh Forty years later I still miss the dorm room discussions.
that's just ordinary consciousness
Exactly this can happen, whilst also being labelled schizophrenia.
- There exists something that cannot be explained by the law of physics
- a schizophrenia label is always caused by genuine mystic revelation
I wasn't under the impression that the quote meant that a genuine mystic revelation would be labelled as schizophrenia, if that was what the quote meant, that doesn't seem like a great hindsight or particularly deep observation to me.
We have plenty examples of this throughout history: lunar eclipse as "omens", plague as "divine wrath", rainbow as a "sign of flood", etc.
“What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence." - Christopher Hitchens
I'm not sure there is a good philosophical reason to believe this. I think something like it is certainly true, but its not entirely clear what an explanation even means, for one thing. And then there is the possibility that certain physical outcomes do not actually supervene upon the physical systems which constitute them.
I do not believe in mystical experiences as being informative about the true nature of the universe, and I generally think "science" is a useful set of tools for (at least) predicting the future and designing machines and perhaps even for constructing ontologies, but I don't think "everything" can be explained by science. I can see no powerful reason to think everything has an explanation.
Which was really hilarious, because for PKD, the point was that he couldn't discount his experiences. He couldn't make them go away even though he understood perfectly well that he might simply be crazy.
Objectively speaking, you end up exactly the same way you started.
It is as if I said: oh, the app hangs: infinite loop or crash and frozen? It is one or the other, but never both. Yet you do not know if there is no way for further inspection.
Absolutely not.
You end up feeling you're unable to explain x86_64 instruction set you just saw and understood not only to your fellow tribesmen gathered around the campfire and waiting for your trip report in a language which lacks even a remote possibility to explain that, but even to yourself.
Yet, the knowledge of the fact of seeing and understanding persists.
Amphetamine psychosis is almost indistinguishable from paranoid schizophrenia.
It causes severe paranoia, delusions, visual hallucinations, and a complete break from reality.
The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick by R. Crumb - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16434721 - Feb 2018 (39 comments)