Philip K. Dick's Exploration of Reality

In September of 1977, science fiction author

Philip K. Dick walked onto a stage in Metz, France,

and made

an extraordinary claim.

The title of my address is

If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others.

I would like to confess

that I've been asked to cut about two-thirds of my speech out

and deliver as short a speech as possible.

Upon examining my speech, I find that it is very easy to remove

two-thirds without doing any injury to it.

I even considered cutting three-thirds out of it-

... but, uh, there was some trouble, so I abandoned that idea.

The subject of this speech

is a topic

which has been discovered recently

and which may not exist at all. I may be talking about something

that does not

exist. Therefore, I'm free to say everything or nothing.

Dick was not saying that he had predicted the future, not

that his

novels contained secret messages.

His claim was something much stranger.

He told them that some of the worlds that he spent decades writing

about might have actually existed.

Dick had spent his career constructing unstable

realities, worlds where history had taken a different

path, worlds where the dead continued living,

worlds manufactured by artificial systems, worlds

where memory couldn't be trusted, worlds where reality itself

seemed to malfunction. And then in 1974,

Dick reported experiences that he interpreted as a

malfunction in reality. Three years later, Dick

attempted to explain what happened.

His theory was called orthogonal time.

Orthogonal or right angle time is the topic of my speech.

We are accustomed to supposing that all change takes

place along the linear time axis from past to present to future.

The present is an accrual of the past and is different from it.

The future will accrue from the present on and be different yet.

That an orthogonal or right angle time axis could exist,

a lateral domain in which change takes place,

processes occurring sideways in reality, so to speak, this is

almost impossible to imagine. How would we perceive such

lateral changes? What would we experience?

What clues, if we are trying to test out this bizarre

theory,

should we be on the alert for? In other words, how can change

take place outside of linear time at all in any sense to

any degree?

Dick proposed that reality might be continuously altered

along this hidden axis. Other presence, other worlds,

other versions of history, and if the process worked correctly,

we wouldn't notice. Our memories would change with it.

Our history would change with it. We would simply wake up

inside the new world convinced it had always been that way.

Let me present you with a metaphor.

Let us say that there exists this very rich patron of the arts.

Every day on the wall of his living room above his fireplace, his servants

hang a new picture, each day a different masterpiece,

day after

day, month after month. Each day the used one is

removed and replaced by a different and new one.

I shall call this process change along the linear axis.

But now let us suppose the servants temporarily running out of new

replacement pictures.

What shall they do in the meantime?

They can't just leave the present one hanging.

Their employer has decreed that perpetual replacement, that is to say

changing the pictures, is to take place.

So they neither allow the current one to remain, nor do they replace it

with a new one. Instead, they do a very clever thing.

When their employer is not looking, the servants cunningly alter

the picture already on the wall. They paint out a tree

here, they paint in a little girl there, they add

this, they obliterate that. They make the same

painting different and in a sense new, but as I'm

sure you can see, not new in the sense of replacing it.

The employer enters his living room after dinner, seats himself

facing the fireplace, and contemplates what should be,

according to

his expectations, a new picture.

What does he see? It certainly isn't what he saw previously,

but also it isn't somehow...

And here we must become very sympathetic with this perhaps somewhat stupid

man because we can virtually see his brain circuits striving to

understand. His brain circuits are saying, "Yes, it is a new picture.

It is not the same one as yesterday,

but also it is the same one, I think.

I feel on a very deep intuitive basis, I feel that somehow I've seen it

before. I seem to remember a tree, though, and there is no

tree."

The painting remains in the same position, but its information

has changed. Reality doesn't merely move.

Reality is edited, unless something went

wrong, unless some fragment remained, a dream,

a strange memory, deja vu, a

feeling that something had changed.

Dick even developed a name for the intelligence

responsible for modifying the system, the

programmer-reprogrammer, and opposing it was

another intelligence, the dark counterplayer

Reality in Dick's model was not an object.

It was a process, a game, a continuously

revised information system, and human beings lived

inside the printout. The strangest part is that Philip K.

Dick did not arrive at this idea while writing a science fiction

novel. He believed he had experienced something

that

led him to it.

It was almost as if

I had been insane all my life,

and suddenly I had become sane.

Before Philip K. Dick began questioning whether our reality

was

real, he built an entire career around the

question.

Not space travel, not laser guns, not even artificial

intelligence. The reoccurring problem under Philip K.

Dick's work was much more fundamental.

How do you know the world around you is actually what you think it is?

In The Man in the High Castle, history itself is different.

The Axis powers won the Second World War, but within that

alternate history exists another book describing yet

another timeline. Reality nestled inside

counter reality. In Ubik, characters gradually

discover the world around them is deteriorating.

And in Flow My Tears, the policeman said, celebrity Jason

Taverner wakes up to discover something impossible.

Everyone has forgotten him. His identity has

vanished. His records are gone. His fame is

gone. Reality has apparently rewritten

itself and left him behind. This

obsession existed long before 1974.

Counterfeit worlds, false memories, artificial humans,

alternative histories, invisible control

systems.

Reality breaking down around people who suddenly realize that the

rules were never what-