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.
Seconding Baudrillard. His analysis of hyperreality, and how we respond to hyperreality, even though it doesn’t really exist and has no effect on reality (which it is imitating) is really tragic.
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”.
Valis is great, but in terms of general atmosphere and the final (or not so final) revelation Ubik is definitely a better choice, in spite of a spoiler in the article.
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.