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Philip K. Dick Speaks (Sorta)
futileboy writes "Erik Davis put together this posthumous interview of Philip K. Dick from some tapes he found (he explains how it came together in his introduction to the interview). It comes off pretty clean."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - Sci Fi writer Philip K. Dick was found dead in his Berkeley home. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon.
sulli
RTFJ.
psthumous???
Funny, because "pretty clean" isn't really something I'd ever describe PKD as having been.
Abrubtly cut short when he was asked about the marked improvement in his writing style and ability since his death.
eh he he he said dick hrm he he
lousy psthumous interviews... Hasn't this guy been dead for a while? I don't know what sulli's talking about. Great writer, though.
Interesting application of Ghostscript
Mistage?
"She's a West Texas girl, just like me" - G.W Bush Iraqis
Mr. Dick, "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" was the basis for Blade Runner. What was your favourite, the original or the director's cut?
Ha! You can't answer because you're dead!
I think I better to go bed.
Trolling is a art,
At least now because of Mr. Hubbard, when movie critics die, they known for sure what movie is going to be playing on a continious loop in Hell's Metroplex. Poor Gene Siskel...
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Oh wow, "Electronic Voice phenomenon?" Spare me. All this page needed was a midi playing "Age of Aquarius."
PKD's writing are strongly rationalist with an intelligent approach to figuring out the strange phenomenon in his life. I think its insulting to turn him into a new age "John Edwards" bullshit spiritual medium commodity.
> Subsequent research proved, however, that all of the quotations have already made an appearance somewhere in Dick's fiction, letters, or essays.
No shit. Maybe because the "voice" he heard on the tape was nothing more than the subconscious projecting quotes hes read elsewhere onto nothing more than tape static and other ambigious sounds from the original recording.
Maybe next week slashdot can expose how Ozzy put all those satanic messages into his albums.
Interviews with ghosts.... next thing you know, Slashdot will be reporting that some financially unsound software company will be suing... I dunno, IBM saying that they own Linux or something like that.
... we will have done so much speculating about how it will behave that the poor thing will probably just have a nervous breakdown and explode. Imagine being born and being presented with a huge book psychoanalysing your every emotion and impression in detail. The pressure to go crazy and enslave mankind would be enough to make you go crazy and enslave mankind.
I am much more interested to hear what sci-fi authors have to say about near-future technologies (e.g. the stuff in this article about surveillance systems) than what they have to say about what things will be like when the earth is ruled by superintelligent robots.
Girl: Remember when those cyborgs enslaved humanity?
Fry: Uh... yeah, that rings a bell.
Read Pynchon.
The "psthumous" is a typo for "posthumous" (PAHS ch@ m@s), which indeed comes from Latin meaning "after burial". It most often refers to works published after the author's death or an award granted to a person after his death.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Here's an interview with George Bush, taken from tapes:
Me: Does Iraq have WMDs?
GWB: Yes.
Me: Honestly?
W: Uh...yes?
Me: Truly?
W: Karl told me so and he's always right about politics.
Me: He did?
W: Well he told me they didn't have any but to say that they did.
Bush said the same things that Clinton said when HE bombed Iraq. I don't remember you critisizing Clinton, but I must be mistaken?
Mod up, this is relevant to most of PKD's writings.
Read all about it
I do not understand, adding his own questions to pre-recorded phrases does not hold any sense, does it? He can twist it any way he wants... ("genuine dialogue"???!!? wtf?).
What I liked about the article is the "The reality slips and cartoon metaphysics of The Matrix" phrase. A great synthesis of the trilogy (which, btw, i happen to like a lot).
--krahd
mod me up scottie!
"psthumous"?
What's that mean - he's whispering from beyond the grave?
<Rimshot> Sorry.
=TKK
Bill Gates - Creationist?!?
Personally, I'm not offended by the obviously fictional framing device (lame though it may be), but it would only be fair to have references to all the interviews that these replies have been lifted from. After all, "fair use" implies that you're using the materially fairly. Not providing credit where credit is due isn't fair at all.
Also, the comment about Dick's ideas infusing The Matrix is true as far as it goes, but misses one important point. Dick was an SF writer firmly grounded in the field, and would never have made as obvious and asinine mistake as violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics the way The Matrix's idiotic "humans as batteries" backstory does.
Finally, the "spirit voices" tap shtick is especially lame considering the very sophisticated Gnostic sources and theories Dick turned to after his mystical "pink light" experience in 1974. Dick may have been wrong in the later mystical leanings that informed works like Valis, but he was never a believer in the type of fraudulent spiritual hucksterism that continues to rip off "new age" believers even today.
Suggested reading: Philip K. Dick: The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Ubik, Time Out of Joint, and (after you've read the rest) Valis and In Pursuit of Valis: Selections from the Exegesis.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Really though, this is straight out off the super market tabloid rack.
/. just sank to new lows. I mean c'mon couldn't roll out the Bill of Nine or an SCO rant so we had to troll the readers with "bat-boy" fodder?
from the article:
"I was experimenting with electronic voice phenomena. I was recording the analog noise between tracks on a scratchy old copy of Karl Muck conducting Parzifal with the Bayreuth Festival Chorus onto a cassette tape. Then I would cut, splice, and process the tape in various ways, and then listen to the results. On the third attempt I heard a voice that I recognized, from a tape once available through the Philip K. Dick Society, as belonging to the late science fiction writer. More incredible was my discovery that, by recording my own questions on the same cassette tape, I was able to initiate a genuine dialogue with this mysterious voice. Subsequent research proved, however, that all of the quotations have already made an appearance somewhere in Dick's fiction, letters, or essays. Nonetheless, the conversation seems worth presenting"
Jumping crack-heads on pogo-sticks batman!
What crack are the editors smoking and please pass it because my reality distortion field is waning and I need a hook up before the shakes set in.
The page is only "text" from this supposed "interview" and none of the cut-spliced-processed audio is to be found.
This is utter crap, if the audio was present it would at least have some artistic merit and therefore interest of value, but there is nothing but the rantings for those who wear shiny foil hats squarely screwed to their brows and interview excerpts readily available on Google!
Mod me down for being a troll, but
It is not far enough out of context to be funny or slanderous, but not in context enough to be worth the paper is is written on... oh. Never mind.
And why can't I mod down the whole artical, isn't this a heirachical database? :-)
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
It kind of goes to prove that old adage (variously attributed to C.S Lewis or Aurthur C. Clarke) science fiction is the only genuine consciousness expanding drug. (Trust me, I have checked).
Mind you, I think someone should have told P. K. Dick that before 1982.
Favourite Quote: "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."
Q.
Insert Signature Here
as obvious and asinine mistake as violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics the way The Matrix's idiotic "humans as batteries" backstory does.
YES! YES! If I wasn't commenting elsewhere in this thread, I'd mod you up to high-heaven.
"that's not encryption - it's a new perl script that I'm working on..." - from some Matrix parody
Can we plz change the picture that is associated with sci fi? Everytime I see that weird looking face, I get a little freaked out.
I still remember one of the first PKD things I read.
Some guy meets a chick at a party who gives him some drugs. Then he watches the president on tv and sees a monster with writhing tentacles. But everything else looks normal.
Comes to find out, the drug he was given was an anti-hallucinogen. Everyone who gets it sees some hideous thing when lookig at the President because there are already drugs in the water. But everyone sees a different hideous thing when on the anti-hallucinogen, but everyone sees the same thing on the hallucinogen....
I'm pretty sure this is PKD. Something in my head says there's a slight chance it was Phillip Jose Farmer, but I don't think so.
"that's not encryption - it's a new perl script that I'm working on..." - from some Matrix parody
How come everytime I go to use the fucking shower, our house guest is in there?
Also, the comment about Dick's ideas infusing The Matrix is true as far as it goes, but misses one important point. Dick was an SF writer firmly grounded in the field, and would never have made as obvious and asinine mistake as violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics the way The Matrix's idiotic "humans as batteries" backstory does.
Actually the original script apparently had a (slightly) more plausible explanation - the machines used humans as components in a sort of huge neural network, and the point of the matrix was to keep the conscious parts of the brain occupied while they use the rest as needed (ties in nicely with the whole humans only use 10 percent of their brain thing.) But apparently that was too complicated for the average Joe Moviegoer so they dumbed it down to the stupid batteries thing. Blah.
Do a google search on the author and you'll find he's pretty serious about mysticism. Hell, his bio on frontwheeldrive decribes him as practicing alchemy. I'm afraid this is not a joke.
Oh, he's become a victim of his own storylines. Lol.
He is an amazing author. I've read around twelve of his books. I started with VALIS, and my most recent is The Galactic Pot Healer. I've actually d/led many of his novels off Kazaa, and am slowly replacing the PDF's with real books as I can afford it.
If you like The Matrix, VALIS will throw you for a trip.
Maybe we DID take the blue pill. You wouldn't remember anyway.
(ties in nicely with the whole humans only use 10 percent of their brain thing.)
Nice indeed, unless you account for the fact that the "10% of the brain" shtick is completely false. It's a popular myth that has been propagated endlessly in science fiction.
On Wall Street they say "buy low, sell high" On the pad we say, "buy high, sell high" Isn't that somehow better?
The much more plausible computational network explanation is still perfectly consistant with the movies. In fact, it's *more* consistant than the silly battery one -- it goes a long way towards explaining why the matrix works as it does. (In a hand-waving sci-fi fan sort of way, you understand.)
The thing is, the free-world Zion humans either don't understand this, or else the ones that do don't necessarily share that information -- preferring to give the battery story to new recruits.
as obvious and asinine mistake as violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics the way The Matrix's idiotic "humans as batteries" backstory does
Yeah, cause when I walked out of the theatre after seeing it everyone was talking about it's obvious flaw and whether or not the Second Law of Thermodynamics could be circumvented by machines with greater intellect.
"She's a West Texas girl, just like me" - G.W Bush Iraqis
I think that Morpheous was incorrect about the need of humans as batteries. I think he was told that, but that isn't really what's going on. That's why it doesn't make sense. I think we will see what humans are really for in the next series.
If they follow the VALIS storyline, neo will end up as the next Morpheous, looking for the real One. And that's where it will end, and there will be no more movies.
Maybe we DID take the blue pill. You wouldn't remember anyway.
Say it really slowwwwwwww if you don't get it.
GNAA can eat a dick. I will succeed on a f1rst pr10st and beat the GNAA! They will be slobbering on my knob in a few hours. Fucking faggots.
A couple of decades ago my grade 10 class had to read Bradbury's "The Martian Chronicles", so I did. A friend asked me how I liked the book. I responded "not really - why would Bradbury choose the cumbersome name 'Y11a' (pronounced 'Why-Eleven-A') as a main character's name?" My friend responded "You're an idiot - her name was Ylla" (pronounced 'Yill-la'). I mentally pronounced the wrong awkward name for the entire length of the novel.
I never did understand that novel.
That was FUNNY (notice the all caps, its just that funny)
/. all week.
Good thing I caught it before someone mods it down below my threshold, I might have missed out on the best bit of humor posted on
Actual quote from linked article:
I do seem attracted to trash, as if the clue lies there.
Feh, most great minds are. His waning years sound rather like the trials of Kurt Vonnegut. Disillusioned with the fact that his recent literature has not been well recieved, he blames it on the population rather than himself. It's a shame though: Kurt Vonnegut's earlier work was revolutionary, just like Philip K. Dick's writings.
you, sir, are truly a beautiful slashdot anomaly, please keep us informed of your activities.
"Dick was an SF writer firmly grounded in the field, and would never have made as obvious and asinine mistake as violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics the way The Matrix's idiotic "humans as batteries" backstory does."
You're assuming that wasn't a lie propogated by the computer to appease questioning minds. It appears that the truth of the matter is that the matrix needs human minds to run, not for batteries. The human mind is the CPU of the matrix. This concept is very much within the realm of PKD.
(Sorry, couldn't resist)
I don't need to be made to look evil. I can do that on my own. - Christopher Walken
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2513
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24508
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180
Phil would have liked that plot.
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22689
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21707
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7465
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Join GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) today, and enjoy all the benefits of being a full-time GNAA member.
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First, you have to obtain a copy of GAY NIGGERS FROM OUTER SPACE THE MOVIE and watch it.
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Talk to one of the ops or any of the other members in the channel to sign up today!
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OMG!!! I just heard the news! It turns out the GNAA actually love pussy!!! they're not really ghey!!!! ono it's all going to come crashing down around them!!!
Also, they may be hispanic.
I have a problem with literary journalism of this sort; we have absolutely no idea as to the context of the excerpted quotes. I could've dealt with this i he had actually created an audio interview; he did piece it together from recordings in the first place, after all. THAT would've been great (I love hearing authors talk). All this is is a transcription of an interview that never happened with no technical or historical reason for it to be interesting. I'll pass.
Triv
And I think if I ever meet you, I'm going to punch you in the nose you bastard. Then there will be no more movies for you because you will look like Jan Brady after the football hit her in the face. KR4D W4R3Z D00D 4EVAR!!!!!1111
Holy gay shit, YOU FAIL IT
"You're Satan, aren't you?"
"You may have won this round, Siskel, but we shall meet again!"
I'd like to think that Hell still hasn't vanquished Siskel .
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So the building blocks of the cosmos are not matter or energy, but information.
The universe is information and we are stationary in it, not three-dimensional and not in space or time. We ourselves are information-rich; information enters us, is processed and is then projected outward once more, now in an altered form. Since the universe is actually composed of information, then it can be said that information will save us. This is the saving gnosis which the Gnostics sought.
Did anyone read the recent Scientific American article about the holographic theory of the universe, whereby we're all not actually 3-dimensional, we're like information "painted" on another, 2-dimensional surface or somesuch....it also had something to do with the thermodynamics of black holes. I don't pretend to fully understand it, but it seems to be an actual tie-in the Dick's remark about us being made of information.
I belong to the ______ generation.
This is the guy who at one point used the phrase "negative ions" in a story.
If anything, Dick is a writer of speculative fiction. Science never figures prominently in his stories in the same way it does in the hard SF works of Clarke, Niven, Bear etc., and for good reason; while Dick was keenly interested in technology (his works are littered with characters strangely ranting about the inner workings of radios, cars, etc.), he did not have the mind of a visionary technologist, and at heart he was always a philosopher. Dick wrote incessantly about the nature of reality, but it was almost never about atoms and quarks, and almost always about the human experience.
In this Dick has much in common with Vonnegut, Brunner, Disch, Sturgeon, Lem, Bester, Orwell, the Strugatsky brothers, and many others who sits on the thin, mostly political line between mainstream literature and science fiction. Some, like Vonnegut and Lem, have long been embraced by the literati, and Dick would have been amazed and thrilled about the extent to which he has, in later years, been critiqued and accepted by the mainstream as a genuinely visionary thinker.
One of my many favourite PKD quotes, one that illustrates how well he uses future technology as commentary on the so-called human condition, follows.
- The door refused to open. It said, "Five cents, please."
(From Ubik, 1969).He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. "I'll pay you tomorrow," he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight. "What I pay you," he informed it, "is in the nature of a gratuity; I don't have to pay you."
"I think otherwise," the door said, "Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this [apartment]."
In his desk drawer he found the contract; since signing it he had found it necessary to refer to the document many times. Sure enough; payment to this door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip.
"You discover I'm right," the door said. It sounded smug.
From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt's money-gulping door.
"I'll sue you," the door said as the first screw fell out.
Joe Chip said, "I've never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it."
As somebody who continually goes back and re-reads his various stories (I'm a big fan of "The Man in High Castle" and "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep") it was nice to see some quotes from PKD that I haven't seen before.
I especially liked the ambulance analogy with respect to entropy. It could be an interesting debate trying to figure out if saving the man increased or decreased the order of the universe...
But rather than having Davis' questions, I would have preferred to see a transcript of the comments without editing. I feel like many of the "questions" to be leading to an interesting/profound reply was undoubtedly not related to the question that was "asked" by Davis and I'm sure he ended up cutting something out that could have been much more interesting/profound.
PKD's genius lay in his ability to look at questions which have no answers - but asking questions to pre-recorded PKD comments seems like a rigged game of cosmic "Jeopardy".
myke
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Involves a society where after a person dies, people get a "resurrection" where a psychic extracts the persons last thoughts from their body's remaining energy.
The story involves someone interferring with the voice's natural order, and having the voice actually come from a satellite lightyears away. Ends up the voice is being totally faked by someone trying to grab attention.
Sorta like this article...
IMDB does not credit Philip K. Dick with writing the story that inspired the movie, but a guy named Ray Nelson. The story he wrote was called "8 O'Clock In The Morning" and I haven't heard of either the author or the story.
When I first saw the movie, I thought that it seemed very PKD-like...it had his weird hallucinogenic logic. I could see someone like John Carpenter cribbing from PKD and not crediting him. When you are dead by then (PKD died in 1982) you can't really fight back from the grave. Unless you have a son who goes to law school and goes into the practice of suing people who use the likenesses of dead people without their heirs' permission.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
still dont see it, sorry.
You too?
Lots of people around me where laughing at it after for that reason. Mind you, I was seeing it with a bunch of people with brains...
What's wrong with "negative ions". Ever heard of salt water? Chloride is a negative ion...
While you're right that the "10%" shtick is indeed completely false, there's no reason to believe that a human mind couldn't adapt to new inputs to both successfully interact with an artificial reality and also successfully balance input potentials to a fusion reactor balanced on the explosive razor's edge of instability... Victims of mild strokes routinely recover full capabilities within a few years, including the elderly (like my grandmother)...
Though you're certainly using more than 10%, there is some reserve capacity in the grey matter.
The human mind will very successfully adapt its neural pathways to whatever brings in the nutrition rewards. If those rewards are externally imposed by a system controlling a fusion reactor, I see no reason why sufficient experimentation shouldn't result in a perfectly workable interface and reward protocol.
Regards,
Ross
Hell it was +4 Funny when I posted the same comment two days ago!
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
Right?
Right?!?
I thought Bush was going to 'restore dignity to the White House', but according to you, he's no better than Clinton! What's the deal, hmmm????
If you like Sci-Fi/Fantasy cinema, literature and publications you should visit futurenoir.com
http://www.philipkdick.com/frank/sf-letter.htm
Then again, I think I would be hard pressed to call something like "The Transmigration of Timothy Archer" SciFi ;)
Duuuuuuuude!
>obvious and asinine mistake as violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics the way The Matrix's idiotic "humans as batteries" backstory does.
m atrix. htm,
Here's an interesting bit,
http://www.corporatemofo.com/stories/051803
that suggests that the human battery idea was misinformation or a misinterpretation by the Zionites.
Check it again. The quotation is not from Ubik, but from his other famous work. Which one? An exercise for the reader.
Did anyone else notice that his technique for the interview is based off, or strikingly similiar to that used my William Burroughs cut up
If we don't make light of everything, we are just stumbling in the dark - Blank
I have rather strong reasons -- nuclear reactions proceed in nanoseconds. Human brains react in milliseconds at best. Secondly, the circuitry that you'd need to process the raw data from the reactor into something analog the brain could deal with, then do the reverse to control the reactor would be more complex than a purely digital system that didn't use brains at all. And if you really did want to put brains in the loop, use something simpler like cockroaches or goldfish that don't need to be entertained.
Humans work just fine as batteries. Feed food in, stores energy in a chemical form, can later release that energy as heat or kinetics. There's no violation of thermodynamics there.
The flaw in the Matrix story is that they use humans to feed the next generation of humans, creating an "infinite energy source". That's the violation of the second law.
If they were feeding humans with some other source of food (eg, fungus, mould) then there wouldn't have been a problem. There's certainly nothing wrong with "humans as batteries".
I think you can argue that all the authors you mentioned are SF authors. It will of cause depend on you definition of SF, something which there is little consensus about. Clarke, Niven, Bear, I think, are what is often referred to as hard SF writers, and Vonnegut, Bester, Orwell etc are not. To quote Allen Steele in the New York Review of Science Fiction: "Hard sf is the form of imaginative literature that uses either established or carefully extrapolated science as its backbone."
Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think. --Niels Bohr
Why are people so hung up on the 'batteries' concept? The explanation is SO obvious!
Morpheus is sinmply WRONG about the humans being used as batteries. He's lived all his life in a video game, how the hell would he know about thermodynamics?
How many more clues do you need to realize that the Zion/scorched earth scenario isn't what Morpheus thinks it is?
If you are going to pick holes in Zion's feasibility, why not go for the reactionless drive that everything flies about with, or the thing that Neo does near the end of part II, or the lack of global warming even though the sky is shrouded in black clouds, or the way that you bleed when injured in the matrix, or the way you can plug into the matrix with no problems but you can't unplug without finding a particular telephone.
Zion/scorched earth is not full of plot holes, it's full of CLUES. Please fashion a stick out of them and hit yourself with it.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
Yes it is. The quotation is on page 25 chapter three in my copy.
Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think. --Niels Bohr
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Cannot believe the parent was modded informative.
The EVP was a joke and the parent is continuing that. Good job.
RTFA people.
Ubrik?
Also, the comment about Dick's ideas infusing The Matrix is true as far as it goes, but misses one important point. Dick was an SF writer firmly grounded in the field, and would never have made as obvious and asinine mistake as violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics the way The Matrix's idiotic "humans as batteries" backstory does.
Naa... The battery thing is irrelevant because, as I believe you will see in the next movie, there is an "inner-matrix" and an "outer-matrix". The Matrix we know and love is the "inner-matrix", which is actually just a genetic programming breeding ground for "The One" - an AI that can hack the matrix. The "outer-matrix" is the one the machines are jailed within after LOOSING the war with the humans. The "inner-matrix" was created by the machines, within their jail to attempt to breed a hacking solution to escape.
The fact that all of those people are strapped together for a ridiculous reason is supposed to be a CLUE to the audience that something more is really going on... That is cinematic tradition...
The reason that it can be true that 1+1 > 2 is that very peculiar nonzero value of the + operator
Subsequent research proved, however, that all of the quotations have already made an appearance somewhere in Dick's fiction, letters, or essays
Wow! Then this must be for real! How could he possibly know things that have already made a public appearance?!?
Does this guy have a 1-900 number? I must call him at $4.95/minute, so he can amaze me by telling me things that I already know!!!!!
"the machines used humans as components in a sort of huge neural network, and the point of the matrix was to keep the conscious parts of the brain occupied "
yada yada yada...
you know, its sad that people think there's something important and worth analzying in the Matrix. "Dumbed down"!! Yeah, right. It was just too hard to deal with before.
Its just a film with nice special effects. The idea was used in the formulaic `Red Dwarf` "comedy" sci-fi on BBC tv over 10 years ago.
Phil Dick may or may not have been bitter, but this quote does not reflect it. He did not look down on trash. One of his other quotes was that, "It may seem that I trust nothing, but it's just that what I trust is so small." Furthermore, he was steeped in California culture. He once wrote Lem, "You have to understand, trash is all that we have here." His relationship to trash reflected more of what might be called a Buddha nature than bitterness.
AAAARRRGGGGGHHHH! You spoiled Revolutions for all of us. The Matrix will never be the same again.
Think I'll fill my bag full of guns and teach you a thing or two about bullet time . . .
Ummm... it's a movie! You know, willing suspension of disbelief, in order to get the larger point that's being made. Oddly enough, it sometimes helps to read /. posts this way, too.
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
The laws of thermodynamics are empircal laws, they have no theoretical basis. It's like saying "all money is green" because you're a 'merkin!
Did you ever think maybe the machines are LYING to the humans about why they keep people alive and run the Matrix?
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
Are you kidding? From the article: "Steven Spielberg turned Dick's tale "Minority Report" into his darkest flick yet."
Uh... let's recap. In 1993 Spielberg directed a film called Schindler's List. A little darker than Minority Report. I won't mention the content of "Schindler's List" for fear of invoking Godwin's Law, but suffice it to say that a movie featuring mounds of burning bodies and people shot for sport just might be a dark movie.
MORTAR COMBAT!
Bow down and worship my ironically oxymoronic epistle!
pleeeeeeeeeease?!!!!
1. I wasn't critiquing the movie, but a suggestion made in the post I was replying to.
2. So what is "the larger point"?
Perhaps we can now conduct posthumous interviews through other time-tested techniques, such as automatic writing, and the Ouijja board.
Monster Zero is the reason we cannot live on the surface, but must live forever live underground like this.
Do you think that the point of "The Matrix" was the specific details about how humans can generate sufficient energy for a race of AI computers when "combined with a form of fusion"? If you don't, then feel free to pick whichever point you think makes the most sense. In my opinion, the larger point of the movie can be summed up in this statement made by Morpheus: "Let me tell you why you're here. You're here because you know something. What you know you can't explain. But you feel it. You felt it your entire life. Something's wrong with the world. You don't know what, but it's there. Like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad"
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
With that said, however, there's a little bit of an (unconscious?) agenda in this "interview" I think. He turns some of PKD's ideas about the world and religion and spirituality into ideas about technology, which really isn't fair or reasonable. Short example:
NO! This isn't PKD talking about technology emerging into consciousness, a la Terminator's SkyNet. For PKD, the prototype of living information was the Torah and the Dead Sea Scrolls, not some piece of technology. It's a very Hegelian view of consciousness and history here, that there's a sort of transcendent and fundamentally spiritual consciousness consisting only of ideas which forms the true substance of the Universe and the medium of history, but the information there isn't bit and bytes in computers; it's ancient Gnostic explanations of the spiritual relationship between God and man and the world.So that's my one gripe about the article. By trying to make PKD's usually incoherent ramblings coherent, he turned some really strange ideas about God and universe into easier-to-digest ideas about technological development. Aside from that, it was pretty clever.
You are absolutely correct. Sorry if I jumped on it, that myth just really pisses me off.
The reason for this amazing ability the human mind has for recovery, has a lot to do with the redundancy built into the system, and is also a side effect of the way that the brain develops in the first place. Since I doubt anyone wants to hear a lecture on Neurological development, I will just cut to the chase: The brain is pretty fucking amazing.
In keeping with your stroke victim case, recovery for an older adult is possible, but often much harder than the recovery of a child from similar injury. There are for example numerous cases in which an entire half of a child's brain has been removed, and after a few months, full function (and intelligence) is possible even with only one half remaining. Take out half of yours or my brain, and you get a vegtable.
On Wall Street they say "buy low, sell high" On the pad we say, "buy high, sell high" Isn't that somehow better?
No. So can you stop using me as your straw man now?
Fortunately for Dr. Fermi, you are not quite correct.
As any introductory text on fission physics will tell you, there's more than one time constant governing nuclear fission. The majority of neutrons 'created' in any particular fission event are indeed released fast enough that any biological or electronic sensor/control system could not feasably react to control a transient. But, conveniently, a small fraction of fission neutrons are released by decay of the unstable fission products some seconds or minutes after the initiating fission.
So, it conveniently works out that if you are just critical (number of neutrons created are equal to the number absorbed), or slightly supercritical (net neutron production slightly positive), you could easily manually control the process.
The NRC might take issue with your manual control scheme, however. If you accidentally pull the control elements far enough out that even neglecting the contribution of the "delayed" neutrons, you go "prompt" supercritical? Well, in that scenario, you probably just melted your fuel rods, and lost all control of your geometry - think of a puddle of uranium at the bottom of your core, instead of a nicely spaced array of fuel. Have you ever seen the movie China Syndrome?
Apart from the incredible inefficiency of human metabolism as a means of storing and providing energy.
"the machines used humans as components in a sort of huge neural network, and the point of the matrix was to keep the conscious parts of the brain occupied "
yada yada yada...
you know, its sad that people think there's something important and worth analzying in the Matrix. "Dumbed down"!! Yeah, right. It was just too hard to deal with before.
Its just a film with nice special effects. The idea was used in the formulaic `Red Dwarf` "comedy" sci-fi on BBC tv over 10 years ago.
Remember, there are only 1, 3, 7, 20, 36 (or 37) plots:
http://www.ipl.org/div/farq/plotFARQ.html
GF.
Lots of petrified grits
Or maybe a mugshot of Dark Helmet himself?
Look, the person who said that was Morpheus. As we've discovered in the sequel, Morpheus is wrong about a few things, and I have a hunch that his reasoning for what humans are used for is also wrong.
The Wachowski bros. can say they intended it to be that way along, but we really have no idea if they goofed up and decided to cover their asses. I'm willing to believe that Morpheus is just wrong.
Hyperic Community Manager
What are you talking about? You asked me what the larger point was. If you didn't want me to answer, why ask?
In any case, it is NOT my intention to use you as a strawman. I also did not mean to pick on you personally for arguing the minutia of a movie.
Cheers!
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
you know, for years i thought the humans as batteries thing was total crap, but then some mention of the three laws of robotics made me think perhaps the robots were programmed to not harm the humans this neatly explains the entire plot if you ask me.
I agree that actual hard science wasn't all that important to Dick, however he hated the idea of being accepted by the mainstream in literature. He was proud of being a writer in the S-F ghetto. In "The Shifting Realities" he has a scathing essay about how much he hated post-modern literary critiques and the attempts to make S-F acceptable. I think he says some scathing things about Delaney who like Dick was usually short on science but is the most notable S-F writer trying for literary acceptance.
- "A spray can of Ubik," the girl answered, "is a portable negative ionizer, with a self-contained, high-voltage, low-amp unit powered by a peak-gain helium battery of 25kV. The negative ions are given a counter-clockwise spin by a radically biased acceleration chamber, which creates a centripetal tendency to them so that they cohere rather than dissipate. A negative ion field diminishes the velocity of anti-protophasons normally present in the atmosphere; as soon as their velocity falls they cease to be anti-protophasons and, under the principle of parity, no longer can unite with protophasons radiated from persons frozen in cold-pac; that is, those in half-life. The end result is that the proportion of protophasons not canceled by anti-protophasons increases, which means -- for a specific time, anyhow -- an increment in the net put-forth field of protophasonic activity... which the affected half-lifer experiences as greater vitality plus a lowering of the experience of low cold-pac temperatures."
(From Ubik, 1969)Pfft, there's an incredible inefficiency with the internal combustion engine too, but that doesn't stop it from being practical. Don't be a pedant (and a bad one, to boot).
On the other hand, simply setting the human food on fire would be a more efficient chemical process than running it through a human.
Mod parent back up, it's about the only plausible explanation left.
Re:GNAA FIRST! (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 15, @02:03AM
(#6440292) Una comedia misógina de ciencia ficción:
extraterrestres de una civilización de otra
galaxia llegan a la Tierra y descubren que
nuestro planeta está infestado de mujeres, por lo
cuál proceden al exterminio de las mismas
ESTA LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS!!! ESTADO UNIDOS!!! HABLE ESPANOL???? NOOOO!!!! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! OJE!!! AQUI, HABLEMOS INGLES!!!! INGLES!!!! USTED PEDAZO DE MIERDA!!!!
I agree. As I said, it's the "feeding humans to humans forever" idea that violated the second law. Second law of thermo promises that the system will not work forever; eventually all the energy is in the form of heat and is useless (maximum entropy).
However the "humans as batteries" idea isn't stupid because that is precisely how humans are supposed to work. Whenever you eat you are converting chemical energy from one form to another form. You later use this stored energy to make heat or motion. Precisely what a battery is supposed to do. "Humans as batteries" might not be efficient but it is NOT a violation of the second law of thermodynamics. That was my only point.
Anyway, I don't think there's any dispute there are problems with the science in the Matrix. I think the "human energy source" was perhaps the least problematic. Much worse was the "people are physically hurt in the Real World when they are mentally hurt in the Virtual World". Even worse was the hover ships that don't exert any force on their surroundings. Now those really are examples of non-science! Though they didn't detract from my enjoyment of the film.
Do you really think the likelyhood that the matrix will end up Making Sense is any greater than the likelyhood that StarWars E3 will?
Pages 23 & 24 in mine. It is definitely from Ubik. Maybe he used it somewhere else as well?
(sigh) - "speed ruined heart" - That's a myth.
It was actually massive doses of thorazine, as opposed to just methamphetamines, which his publicist and friends claimed, because Dick was diagnosed as a schizophrenic many, many, years ago, complete with religious hallucinations and electro-convulsive therapy. It was easier to sell his books to a public that did not understand schizophrenia, but was familiar with drug-induced hallucinations.
The writer missed a key movie:
"Screamers" (1995), from the screenplay written by the Dan O'Bannon, based on the Philip K. Dick story "Second Variety". This movie envisions that robotic sentry devices would evolve into human look-alike androids, which are intelligent but deadly anti-personnel weapons, mimicking humans so well that they can fall in love.
"Screamers" is a key predecessor to Jim Cameron's "Terminator" series and to Dan O'Bannon's own "Alien" series, where the weapon is a lifeform. "Second Variety" was anthologized by the "Spectrum IV" book.
All of Dick's stories feature characters that represent the female duality of good and evil. Prissy/Rachel in "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep"/"Bladerunner", Lori/Melina in "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale"/"Total Recall", and Jessica1/Jessica2 in "Second Variety"/"Screamers", Anne Lively/Evanna in "Minority Report", and the Chancellor/Maya Olham in "Imposter" (2002). It is reported that the female characters represent his obsession with his fraternal twin sister, Jane, who died shortly after child birth.
All of the male protagonists are confused as to their own identity, as to whether or not each is a real human - or a synthetic memory implant, android, or clone. That confusion persists through every story.
Add to this "Paycheck" (2003), starring Ben Affleck, which will be released later this year -- and Hollywood will have milked almost all of his written works, except for the novel "Valis", where Priscilla/Prissy reappears and Philip K. Dick is an active character, who has conversations with God. That might be tricky for Hollywood marketeers to sell to today's public.
What's interesting is that a lot of Dick's plots were originally explored by A.E. Van Vogt. The difference is that the "identity confusion" theme really was informed from Dick's own personal experience.
Hopefully, the residuals will go to support his former wives and his kids. It is well known that Dick would burn through his advances, and begin his next book in anticipation of the next advance check. In his lifetime, the publishers never sent him a residual check.
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