How to build a universe that doesn’t fall apart two days later (1978)

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”<p>A quote that could certainly apply to research on biological systems. Just because you think you&#x27;re smart, doesn&#x27;t mean you can out think the system or even understand it.

Some past threads:<p><i>How to Build a Universe That Doesn&#x27;t Fall Apart Two Days Later, Philip K. Dick</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23500469" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23500469</a> - June 2020 (117 comments)<p><i>How to Build a Universe That Doesn&#x27;t Fall Apart Two Days Later (1978)</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20207585" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20207585</a> - June 2019 (19 comments)<p><i>How to Build a Universe That Doesn&#x27;t Fall Apart Two Days Later (1978)</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9943609" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9943609</a> - July 2015 (12 comments)<p><i>How to Build a Universe That Doesn&#x27;t Fall Apart Two Days Later by Philip K. Dick, 1978</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=451981" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=451981</a> - Jan 2009 (3 comments)

The essay is in general pretty good and I enjoyed the style of it. It swerved way too far into Christianity for me though. I did enjoy the philosophical questions and takes after managing to swallow the religious rhetoric.<p>Having precognition-like situations has happened to a lot of people and I&#x27;ll disagree with other commenters that this makes them close to schizophrenia. That&#x27;s a strange thing to say IMO; most people I ever talked with had weird dreams with very specific details which they proceeded to see&#x2F;hear years later randomly, long after they forgot the dream.<p>Is most of humanity suffering from schizophrenia then? Or maybe time as we have postulated it does not exist indeed? Who knows.<p>&gt; <i>There is something enormously powerful in a child’s ability to withstand the fraudulent.</i><p>I wish that was 100% true. There&#x27;s a whole generation of kids out there who never even played with material objects save for smartphones &#x2F; tablets. I dread what&#x27;s ahead of them after they grow up. But maybe I am a pessimist here; humans have the unique ability to &quot;wing it&quot; whenever push comes to shove. That&#x27;s something I admire in the human race.

&quot;But the problem is a real one, not a mere intellectual game. Because today we live in a society in which 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 the heads of the reader, the viewer, the listener&quot;<p>I wonder what he would think of today&#x27;s world

This is a long read and I fully intend to digest it, but I must say that my favorite thing about the PKD books that I have read[0][1] is usually that part when the universe literally and&#x2F;or figuratively falls apart. In other words, his science fiction novels tend to present a plot that involves radical changes to our understanding of how the world works. Upon skimming this submission, there are also twists in the stories he tells here which subvert our understanding of conventional things.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Ubik" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Ubik</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Valis_(novel)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Valis_(novel)</a>

What an absolutely brilliant, incongruent piece. In the first part of his essay PKD breaks down all the myriad ways we ourselves as well as third parties create fictional narratives, only to jump into one of those narratives in the second part, balls deep. PKD was a mad genius, with the balance tilting in both directions frequently. The central questions of this piece are: &quot;what is real?&quot; and &quot;what does it mean to be an authentic being?&quot;, and the piece seems to fold itself &amp; encompass itself like a piece of recursive code. Was PKD describing the reality as he understood it, giving an authentic description of the world through the lenses of his schizophernic mind, or was he illustrating the point he made in the first part of this piece? I know too little about him to make up my mind, and I wonder if he himself could. Thank you for posting this brillianty insane piece

&gt; So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind.<p>Made me think of the meta verse that I have been hearing so much about lately.

For Heraclitus reality was like random pixels on a screen, constantly changing. Parmenides was looking at the same screen far away, from infinity, a gray homogenous screen. Both were right, and the screen exists.

An interesting connection:<p>&quot;This, to me, is the ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people; they say no to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequences of this resistance.&quot; - PKD (1978)<p>&quot;The ultimate weapon has always existed. Every man, every woman, and every child owns it. It&#x27;s the ability to say No and take the consequences.&quot; - Robert Anton Wilson (1975)<p>I wonder if PKD read Leviathan?

Please, I would appreciate, someone who knows more Philip K. Dick work, is this autobiographical story, or work of fiction?<p>I mean is it like &quot;The Blair Witch Project&quot; where they made horror to deliberately look like a documentary.<p>This to me looks like fiction&#x2F;autobiography made deliberately to like a fiction&#x2F;reality fractal, sentences look like personal experience but again I have a feeling Philip is trying deliberately to push our psyche deep into the spiraling rabbit hole or unknown.

I feel like being lost halfway when the essay went into Christianity and established connections between Bible and his fictions and realities. It does not make much sense to me, probably because the examples and coincidences he refereed to were so &quot;tiny&quot; and insufficient to support his view.<p>I guess if the reader had experienced similar amamnesis as of the author, these ideas would strongly appeal to them then.

Wow that got... weird.

Hmm yesterday the post had PKD&#x27;s name in the description, now it&#x27;s gone. Could be important. I, for one, wouldn&#x27;t have clicked on it without the name.

Ah yes, a knob to adjust the fine constant, another for Pi, and for g and how many more that all seem to have been already tweaked to = now - will there ever be a reboot?

Wild (in a good way).