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Philip K. Dick Speaks (Sorta)

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the well-assembled dept.

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."

5 of 251 comments (clear)

  1. What is WITH that category picture? by gotr00t · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  2. Bizarre Cool Stuff by fanatic · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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
  3. Re:Thoughts on Philip K. Dick, The Matrix, Mystici by bad_fx · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  4. Re:Insulting to PKD and his fans by JoeBuck · · Score: 5, Interesting

    If you think that PKD's writings are "strongly rationalist", you haven't read much of him.

  5. Too much techno-spin on PKD's worldview here by djembe2k · · Score: 4, Interesting
    A few people here have been a little bit too harsh on Davis for what he's trying to do here. PKD's fiction has been more and more widely read in the last 10 years or so, but other non-fiction expressions of his ideas (his journals, his interviews) are still more difficult to find, and when you find them, they are often somewhat incoherent. Davis here is trying to take bits and pieces of that incoherence and turn it into a sort of summary of what PKD's own words said about what he was trying to say and do. It's a decent attempt to summarize a bunch of difficult-to-summarize writing and speaking.

    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:

    So technology may actually be staging the emergence of a higher state of consciousness. Why is this happening now?

    Information has become alive, with a collective mind of its own independent of our brains.

    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.