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PKD was such a fascinating and tragic person. I always recommend the book VALIS if you really want to get inside his mind. Truly brilliant man, but also full of pain, and unfortunately that pain often spilled out and hurt those around him.
> 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.)
Seneca said real friendship has 2 attributes. You trust someone as much as you trust yourself. And you talk with the other person the same way you talk to yourself when you are alone.
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.
Hate to dumb down this interesting conversation, but... You guys talk to yourselves when you're alone?
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.
I have full on conversations when I'm alone, with myself, with other people, maybe with myself as a child or at some point I'm thinking about.
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).
>You guys talk to yourselves when you're alone?
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 have the opposite experience, where I (usually) am more myself when I'm alone.
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.
> 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.
Interesting. Would you describe yourself as more of an extrovert, or more of an introvert?
I strongly suspect that this is not a difference in internal experience so much as it is a difference in expectation, just as with aphantasia (the inability to imagine).
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.
I have an internal monologue. After accidentally dropping a spoon full of ice-cream on my shirt, I ruminated on what it would take for me to look at that event as the catalyst of an abrupt change in the trajectory of my life.
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.
I have no inner monologue (and find the whole idea of one utterly weird) but I’m certainly at times highly introspective. But those introspective analyses are no more linguistic than my thinking about, say, math or sex or programming.
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.
The Onion had a satirical video about a normal guy home alone with nothing to do.
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.
>When I'm alone I kind of like... stop existing?
Wow that's terrifying.
In my personal experience, inner monologue can vary within an individual as well. Some days mine is similar to what you’ve described (“me hungry, want lasagna” - love it!) but other times it can be 2-4 voices all debating a topic from different viewpoints. They’re typically similar to one another but different enough to know which is talking, sort of differences in tone/pitch.
“Monologue” might not be the right word at that point though? I guess it is all me, so the dialogue is a monologue.
I experience both. (Inner monologue and lack thereof) I prefer the company of my nonverbal self (I also think I’m more wise when I don’t think in words). Many of my hobbies are low thinking / high doing activities. Perhaps I simply don’t like the sound of my own inner voice which is weird because I write me speak with no hesitation.
I’m working on pretty much the same thing with my therapist, who I unfortunately seem to enjoy confusing and evading with my freeform personality more than I do being therapised by them. Shit, it’s my money.
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.
I have been thinking about friendship a lot recently. My regrets always center around not treating my friends as well as they deserve.
I’ve decided something that might be of help.
Simply be the friend you would want.
If someone doesn’t like me I wouldn’t want them to pretend. Not in a mean way, but in a clear way. There are 7 B people in the world. No loss of two of them don’t get along. If someone does like me I’d want them to remain steadfast and reliable. I’d want them to take a moment to think of me and do little things that show it.
That’s the friend I’ve decided to try to be. It has simplified and clarified my life. There’s no fear of pretending because I’m not pretending. Somehow that alleviates the fear that others are pretending. There’s no fear people won’t support me when I need it because I embrace the role of unwavering support. When I express the behavior I want to see, I feel it reflected back. Maybe because I’m the one I spend the most time with and I’m becoming better company. I become the thing I want to see in this world. And there’s comfort in that.
Good luck, in all sincerity. I think that feeling of actual connection is something recognized by both parties, and hopefully you can let that fear go.
"Mad, bad, and dangerous to know" - by all accounts including this one, as accurate a description of Dick as of Lord Byron.
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.
FWIW I know two people who did know him, and spent a lot of time with him — Ursula LeGuin (RIP) and my old lit prof at PSU, Tony Wolk. They both reported him to be warm, humane, erratic, brilliant, fascinating and rewarding to be around.
Do you know where to find Ursula's accounts of this? I've always been interested in her writing and life.
Sure, no doubt; I'd say the same of the man I had most in mind while writing my prior comment. It's just that that's not all there is to say.
Valis is good but I wouldn’t start with it. I tell people to get their feet wet with A Scanner Darkly
> 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.
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.
A supplementary point of view: as we all pretend, blindly or not, what matters is how we relate to each other and treat each other.
I have no way of knowing what people really think of me. But how they treat me affects me deeply.
But how do you explain what happened to Kevin's cat?
There are also 2 PKD flavors: before and after Valis. Almost a completely different PKD.
As a glimpse into the man’s mind, here’s a 1977 speech PKD gave on the nature of time.
The Christian cross-pollination is fascinating/odd.
There is much of interest in Christian and especially Catholic mysticism, I find - the latter especially; there are many mansions in the house of the Bishop of Rome, and some of them are strangely inhabited indeed.
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.
He seemed to favor a Gnostic view of Christianity in particular. He talks a lot about it in VALIS and the Exegesis. There's quite a bit about the Demiurge, and how we're stuck in something called the "Black Iron Prison".
The Empire Never Ended. We live upon a very detailed map that was crafted in the millennium following the Bronze Age collapse — not in the “real” world, by any stretch.
Philip K. Dick's untimely death by stroke likely robbed the world of a least a few more great works. He seems to have come out of his earlier period of amphetamine addiction and tumultuous female relationships, and had written some interesting material like The Transmigration of Timoth Archer, which features a sympathetic female narrator. Apparently Ursula K LeGuin influenced him to some degree here:
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.
Just to clarify, A Scanner Darkly was not one of his earlier works, it was one of his last. It was written in 1973 (double checked, publication date was 1977, though) which was 21 years after he was first published and 9 years before his death. He only wrote 5 more novels after it.
Only :)
> Philip K. Dick's untimely death by stroke likely robbed the world of a least a few more great works.
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.
Where did you read this? The Sutin biography reports that he died of a stroke, and his Wikipedia page says nothing about cancer. Are you confusing him with the Sherri Solvig character in VALIS?
I think the statement "A Scanner Darkly is certainly one of the first major dystopian sci-fi works" needs some qualification. There were major dystopian sci-fi works dating at least back to the previous century. The Island of Dr. Moreau by HG Wells comes to mind.
i really don't see any similarities with brave new world, it's not particularly dystopian, and your dates are a bit off.
there is a realy interesting film of scanner darkly, with a great cast:
> On the second day of the convention, having made public his desire to remain in Vancouver, Phil had been invited to stay with Michael Walsh, a journalist for the Vancouver Province, and his wife Susan, at their home in the city.
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.
Good read. Interesting how there hasn't been a connection made between his stimulant abuse and clear manic symptoms -- high emotion, sex drive and narcisissm.
Perhaps if this is the only article you ever read about him. But any biography on him includes notes on his personal drug abuse.
I wish PKD could be here to play with the GPT-N AIs.
I wonder if he’d find them very interesting at this point when he predicted something similar half a century ago.
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.
To be fair PKD predicted a lot of things that make our current dystopian present.
Checkout Vulcan's Hammer for a PKD on AI story.
That's the best summary of what I find disappointing about the recent swift and enthusiastic uptake of AI generated content. Crystalised something for me.
It's a nicely written article, but I have to take issue with the attempt to attach a psychiatric diagnosis to PKD, more than 40 years after his death. By all accounts he was increasingly mentally unstable — the heavy drug and alcohol use did him no favours — and certainly had episodes of deep clinical depression and what would probably qualify as narcissistic traits. But to armchair-diagnose him as a psychopath seems wrong.
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.
Is there some author you'd say is a living incarnation of PKD? Hope this is not seen as unseemly but curious to what degree he might be "continued" somehow
Peter Watts, perhaps? https://rifters.com/real/shorts.htm
Peter Watts is a lot more dystopian and brutal in his works.
> Susan likened his attention-seeking to that of a two-year old child who throws something to the ground, watches the adult pick it up, and then thinks:
What we're saying here is, Philip k Dick was a dick?