"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away" - PKD
Which always suggested to me, that despite his paranoia he actually was quite a critical thinker. It's easy to let his extreme vision and his life experience after 2-3-74 and his mysticism, obscure the sharpness of his observations about life.
He believed in all kind of weird things, he had visions and was extremely paranoid. But he also knew that likely he had mental issues (possibly because of his drug abuse) and that there was at least the possibility that it was all a figment of his own imagination. Not surprisingly this is often (always?) a theme of his own books.
The VALIS trilogy really explores this. The first book (VALIS) is about two protagonists (who are really the same person and really represent PKD himself), one who has visions and suffer from delusions and the other much more grounded. The second book (Divine invasion) is a oniric sci-fi/mithical story, with little grounding in reality. The last book, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (which is not even sci-fi), is narrated in first person by an atheist, skeptical person investigating possibly paranormal events.
You could read that quote the opposite way, to suggest that schizophrenic hallucinations or other unwanted mental disturbances are "reality" (which in a way of course they are, for the person experiencing them).
From the stuff of his I've read he seems a smart cookie, and the more obvious interpretation of that remark seems somewhat beneath him.
I didn't actually intend a definitive statement on what he meant by that remark. The context is interesting: http://deoxy.org/pkd_how2build.htm
My point, if there as one, was just that I enjoy the balance. I like his mysticism because I know just how powerfully logical he could also be. I don't like to see him boxed-in, or presented as one thing or the other.
Assuming we are all spawned in our own reality, schizophrenia wouldn't be a problem at all assuming there was no observation made of us by a consensus majority.
As it is the CAP theorem (under the constraint of the fixed speed of light) mandates that there will never be a single truth, and all we can hope for is eventual consistency. Presumably under the constraints of the second law of thermodynamics eventual consistency will be an existential crisis at which point no further observation can occur.
okay time to re-read some of his classics I guess.
Which always suggested to me, that despite his paranoia he actually was quite a critical thinker. It's easy to let his extreme vision and his life experience after 2-3-74 and his mysticism, obscure the sharpness of his observations about life.