
Philip K. Dick and the Fake Humans - lermontov
http://bostonreview.net/literature-culture/henry-farrell-philip-k-dick-and-fake-humans
======
madaxe_again
The Empire Never Ended, in a nutshell, to lift PKD's final gnosis.

His view was that we live in the vestiges of the Roman Empire, and I'm
inclined to agree - we live in a gestalt system that receives its symbol-set
from the earliest empire builders, and we are mostly oblivious to our
inherited reality. We just accept it.

Reality is a fungible concept, as he describes - you can exchange one fixed
set of givens for another without changing basic reality one jot, but such can
drastically alter perceived reality.

PKD would argue that the President of the United States is not real - that the
United States is not real - that there is no quantifiable "UnitedStatesness"
about the latter and that the former is only so because we define him as so,
and therefore, neither actually exist. We just collectively agree they do.

His prime argument always arced back to that which so appealed to Baudrillard
- that we have exchange the real for symbols of the real, that we have
exchanged reality for a representation of reality - a map so perfect that it
is indistinguishable from that it describes - yet all of our actions are
constrained to the map, not to actual reality.

Today, we disappear farther and farther up our own reality-hole, as we entrain
and develop systems to further codify and divorce reality from itself - e.g.
computers and the internet - the more we represent and perceive the
representation as real, the less the real pertains to the reality we perceive.

It's really hard to break out, but not impossible - but you have to _see_ the
Black Iron Prison first through gnosis, and it's then purely a mental process.

Reading list: PKD's entire corpus - his non-SF novels ply the same waters -
but the novels listed in the article are a good starting point. VALIS is where
you go once you're prepared to have your mind melted and reformed.

Baudrillard's Simulation and Simulacra

Vonnegut's Galapagos

Anyway. Time for me to go stare at the pink laser beam.

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
> _the more we represent and perceive the representation as real, the less the
> real pertains to the reality we perceive._

Does this comment imply that if we removed the Roman Empire vestiges, and
removed computers and the internet ...

Does this comment imply that people who lived before all that had a more
_real_ reality, or at least a more real perception of reality?

Or am I safe to assume that folk of yore were plagued by their own mythology.
And so it was since time immemorial, and so it shall be forever forward.

~~~
madaxe_again
We’ve been mystics, building false realities in which to inhabit (gods,
daemons, myths and legends) since we had the cognitive capacity to do so.

I find it exciting. We each have within our heads the ability to sculpt
reality not just for ourselves but for the human world as a whole. We just
tend to imagine bad realities - vengeful gods, despotic dictatorships, the
dangerous and unknown “other”.

------
icebraining
A couple of links:

"Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the Charlatans" by Stanislaw Lem:
[https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/5/lem5art.htm](https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/5/lem5art.htm)

"Radical Detours - A Situationist Reading of Philip K. Dick", a master's
thesis by Andrew Raba:
[http://researcharchive.vuw.ac.nz/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1006...](http://researcharchive.vuw.ac.nz/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10063/5348/thesis.pdf?sequence=1)

~~~
twic
Although speaking of Lem, at one point Dick thought he was “probably a
composite committee rather than an individual”:

[http://culture.pl/en/article/philip-k-dick-stanislaw-lem-
is-...](http://culture.pl/en/article/philip-k-dick-stanislaw-lem-is-a-
communist-committee)

~~~
jacobush
Yet again, isn't Dicks' larger point that _each and everyone of us_ are a
composite committee to some degree?

------
dvfjsdhgfv
> Yet the door to Joe’s apartment—which argues with him and refuses to open
> because he has not paid it the obligatory tip—sounds ominously plausible.
> Someone, somewhere, is pitching this as a viable business plan to Y
> Combinator or the venture capitalists in Menlo Park.

And that's the sad reality. When we look at what the Internet has become, who
did it that way - it's us, developers working for small and large companies,
driven by profit, and willing sacrifice a thing or two on the way. And, there
is no way back.

------
zengid
_Dystopias tend toward fantasies of absolute control, in which the system sees
all, knows all, and controls all._

Yeah, I greatly admire works that can show a diverse ecology instead of trying
to say that an entire world is controlled by a single entity. It just feels
stale.

Kim Stanley Robinson (who wrote his PHD thesis on Dick's works [0]) is really
good at building an ecology of interesting elements that interact and create
complexity.

[0] [https://www.amazon.com/Novels-Philip-Studies-Speculative-
Fic...](https://www.amazon.com/Novels-Philip-Studies-Speculative-
Fiction/dp/0835720144)

~~~
edanm
Any recommendation of where to start with his books?

~~~
zengid
His latest, _New York: 2140_ is pretty dang great. Its a stand-alone novel
with well developed characters set in a super-Venice New York.

Neal Stephenson also has excellent worlds. _The Diamond Age_ is my favorite.

------
lobster_johnson
Speaking of, I was quite disappointed with the new "Philip K. Dick's Electric
Dreams" show, now on Amazon. They are decidedly not faithful to the short
stories they're based on, and in several cases choose a conclusion that is
diametrically opposite to what PKD intended.

In "Impossible Planet" they go for a weirdly romantic ending that is the
opposite of the story, and turns it into some kind of wish fulfillment
fantasy.

"Autofac" starts great, but then introduces a twist that makes no sense.
Dick's story is extremely dark (taking the automatic, unstoppable factory idea
to its logical next step), and the final ending essentially makes the whole
premise pointless, turning a smart comment on runaway consumerism and
automation into a cheap thriller about love conquering all.

Film adaptations have generally been unable to make something faithful to PKD.
I just wish someone would have the balls to do it, because it could be
fantastic.

~~~
jandrese
See, I had a very different reading of the end of the Impossible Planet. The
old lady and the guy died but in their dying brains they finally "went to
Earth", the imperfectly remembered yet angelic place of her rose tinted
memories.

The one I didn't like was the one where the smartphone helpdesk gaslights the
teenager. I'm willing to suspend disbelief a bit that the teenager won't
recognise what's happening, but the end didn't work. She should have died!
Every day that she's alive is another day where she might talk about her
experience and have someone else go "Wait, that doesn't make sense..." Instead
she's doing presentations and inviting people to hear her story!

My only minor quibble is that the ending is a little too easy to guess on most
of them. The Lesbian Space Cop/Distraught CEO episode was the best for this,
it kept you guessing for a right long time.

~~~
madaxe_again
Yeah, but in the short story the dead planet actually was earth - ends with
him finding a copper disk and going “e pluribus unum? What does _that_ mean?”
before throwing it away and getting back on ship. Very definitely not the same
as the garbage TV series.

I recommend reading the short stories - the series absolutely lost the meaning
of every single one of them.

~~~
jandrese
I have to admit this is what I thought was going to happen once the old
android started messing with the navigational controls. The twist being that
he was telling the truth at the end when he was talking about Earth being hit
by some gobbldygook that messed it up.

------
qualitytime
"In his novels Dick was interested in seeing how people react when their
reality starts to break down. A world in which the real commingles with the
fake, so that no one can tell where the one ends and the other begins, is ripe
for paranoia."

Reminds me of the recent Hawaii false missile alert.

------
westoncb
TL;DR — Phillip K. Dick's writing anticipated fake news.

:P

Alright, that's too much of a simplification, and the article is worth a
read—but I'd warn that it's plagued by the annoying (and all too common) use
of 'reality' in place of 'belief' or 'theory' or other more appropriate
options, which magically makes all kinds of statements sound more interesting
than they really are.

> _... Yet they were also based on a keen interest in the processes through
> which reality is socially constructed. Dick believed that we all live in a
> world where “spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by
> governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups—and
> the electronic hardware exists by which to deliver these pseudo-worlds right
> into heads of the reader.”_

Now imagine if instead it were simply said that, "the media, governments, big
corporations, religious groups, and political groups attempt to conceal the
truth and tell their own versions instead."

The term 'reality' is kind of useful because 'creating a reality' isn't quite
a simple as telling a lie, since it's more like a network of lies used to
present an alternate account of the state of things. But, it also carries with
it the implication that there isn't any objective reality, and that when a
political group 'creates a new reality', that it is somehow ontologically
equivalent to any other 'reality' available.

I know this is kind of a side rant, but seriously, I can't wait for the day
when it's no longer socially acceptable to talk about 'constructing reality'
in random contexts, whether the reader is aware of its particular meaning
(it's jargon from Sociology and spread to other areas) or not. I can just
imagine how it would have felt to read the article if I didn't happen to know
the origin of that phrase ('social construction of reality')—it would seem
mostly coherent and would appear to be talking about something of the utmost
significance, and yet with some kind of vagueness I couldn't quite place
(that's my recollection of running into it years ago).

~~~
gumby
> use of 'reality' in place of 'belief' or 'theory'

Which was of course a fundamental subject explored by PKD.

Most disappointingly, the Amazon Man in the High Castle adaptation tossed all
of that overboard (though it was the primary theme of the book) in favor of
the frisson of Nazi porn.

~~~
madaxe_again
Not sure how much of it you’ve seen, as while it does diverge substantially
from the book, it does go off down a belief-powers reality route.

~~~
gumby
The book used the I Ching as a gateway between worlds, producing the Man's
book as well of course the insights of the trade minister, who starts to doubt
the assumptions and foundations of reality early.

In the TV show there are mysterious films with no explanation, and though the
wonderful Embarcadero freeway scene from the end of the book is shown at the
end of the first season, without the slow build up it isn't at all insightful.

Admittedly it's just a film, so not expected to be able to express the
subtleties possible in text, but I feel they don't even get to the heart of
the book at all.

~~~
madaxe_again
I know - the second season employs the I Ching world interchange too - it's
how it concluded. The trade minister becomes pivotal, as written.

I'm bearing with it - I think it's hit closer to the mark than electric dreams
did - but the only PKD anything which has been faithfully produced was A
Scanner Darkly, in my opinion.

------
drawkbox
> the bombardment of pseudo-realities begins to produce inauthentic humans
> very quickly, spurious humans—as fake as the data pressing at them from all
> sides. My two topics are really one topic; they unite at this point. Fake
> realities will create fake humans. Or, fake humans will generate fake
> realities and then sell them to other humans, turning them, eventually, into
> forgeries of themselves. So we wind up with fake humans inventing fake
> realities and then peddling them to other fake humans.

People love a good story and Philip K. Dick knows this well, he writes stories
to convey these thoughts through fake realities. Entertaining stories, movies,
narratives and 'fake news' essentially, simplifies the world into a good/bad
structure and let's you in on the good side. People love a tub of confirmation
bias to bask in.

It is the same situation as to why good news doesn't end up on the nightly
news. Good news can make people feel worse. Watch HGTV for a while then look
at your house and you can't help but feel less than, same with too much good
news.

People like a story, stories sell, facts and the entropy of existentialism is
too much for some people all the time or many. Same reason religion exists, it
is a simplification that allows people to be 'good' and frees up mindspace to
think about less jarring things.

Whether the story is lying and fake or entertainment, people like it because
life can take you into areas that are reality which is messy and sometimes
completely out of your control, a good story is a gift.

America and the world, could also be going through a Hypernormalisation
moment. [1]

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation)

------
totalperspectiv
At those who scroll the comments first, this was well worth the ten minutes to
read. I don't think I've wrapped my head around all the ideas enough to
summarize it yet. But it really describes everything I love about the medium
of scifi.

~~~
Eupolemos
I just wanted to second this - it is def. worth the short time to read.

I decided to finally read "Do Androids..." after watching Blade Runner 2049
and have tried reading some of Dick's other work. It is a weird discrepancy
between the low quality of writing and high quality of thinking.

This essay will give you the reasons why Dick is worth reading; maybe you
haven't read any yet, or maybe you can't explain (to yourself or others) why
you think he was worth reading.

Either way, my time was well spent.

~~~
Udik
As a side note I was really disappointed in Blade Runner 2049. The script
seems to lack completely that dark feeling of confusion and uncertainty of the
original movie. Actually, a lot in it seems to be built around rigid
dichotomies: humans and replicants, good and evil, physical and virtual. While
in the original replicants were heralds of a new synthetic reality replacing
the current one (and the final doubt about the nature of Deckard showed that
it was already impossible to tell the one from the other), in the sequel all
is reduced to a fight between opposing factions, as if the problem was "who is
gonna win in the end?".

~~~
empath75
The plot was pants, but the experience of watching he movie unfold was
brilliant. Just the cinematography and the music alone was worth spending that
time and money on.

~~~
Udik
If the plot was terrible, the visual aspects didn't impress me at all (it
looked way too shiny and polished, some elements were trite - the snowy-white
locations, the red desert ones; or taken from previous movies, for example
Spielberg's AI). The music was generic but bombastic. The kung-fu fights
completely unnecessary and pointless.

------
Animats
_Nor have we been lulled by Soma and subliminal brain programming into a hazy
acquiescence to pervasive social hierarchies._

Oh? That's what legal marijuana legalization is for.

~~~
qwerty456127
Marijuana (as well as serotonergic psychedelics) generally makes people feel
more united and similar in the positive sense, I don't know about any credible
studies that would confirm this (although there probably are some) but I
really doubt it can promote social hierarchization. Cocaine and alcohol,
however, are known to stimulate aggressive-dominant behavior in individuals
prone to it though cocaine will surely not stimulate obedience, it will
stimulate people to resist propaganda/populism/nonsense and question more. The
only well-known psychoactive substance that makes masses easier to manipulate
is booze.

