And Philip K. Dick wept. by Steve Mizrach
Many people have seen Dick as a unique figure in science fiction. I would
argue that some of the themes in his writing anticipated the particular
science fiction movement that so many people now call "cyberpunk." Not
surprisingly, he is often not included in the canons of this genre, but if
his writing were closely examined, there are many reasons why he should
have been. Clearly, Dick frequently dealt with the theme "what is human?"
by introducing characters that dealt with precisely that dilemma - the
replicants of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep - by beginning to
question the difference between man and machine. If in the cyberpunk novel
humans are beginning to cross the man/machine boundary by replacing more
and more of their "meat" with cybernetic implants, then often Dick's
characters - like Commander Data on Star Trek - are frequently seeking to
become more human.
PKD eventually answered this question (it was more easy for him than "what
is real?") by suggesting that the hallmark of humanity was kindness. Palmer
Eldritch did not lose his humanity by his artificial implants ('stigmata')
or even by becoming consumed by an intelligent Fungus from the Prox system.
Instead, PKD hints his humanity was lost when his compassion finally was
also, which is why Leo Bulero triumphs over him. PKD never denied the
possibility that machines might know kindness, and Deckard himself comes to
this conclusion in DADES. All kinds of beings and races inhabit PKD's
bizarre universe, from the insane inhabitants of the Alphane moon to the
stunted survivors of a post-nuclear holocaust. PKD suggested that wherever
compassion might still be found, humanity could be discovered. Machines
became evil (like the Deus Irae) only when their creators failed to implant
a sense of compassion within them.
A frequent theme in cyberpunk fiction is also what Baudrillard calls
hyperreality - how technology has left humans floating about in virtual
worlds and 'consensual hallucinations,' cut off from the real. Virtual
reality plays an important role in many cyberpunk novels as the theatre of
action - but it is also recognized as an important escape from increasingly
dystopian worlds. PKD anticipates the idea of VR in novels like Eye in the
Sky , where the Bevatron forces the various protagonists to caroom through
virtual worlds of their own making. In his novels, the characters are
always struggling to find the real, which 'peeks' through always in the
most unusual and inocuous of places. Unlike postmodern philosophers, who
often try to conflate surface image with deep truth, PKD's characters are
always seeking to unravel the virtual worlds in which they find
themselves... they do not simply move about in their agreed "consensual
hallucination," but instead search for ways out.
PKD's novels are also about drugs and neuropolitics, a theme of deep
concern in most cyberpunk writing. While many of his novels, especially
Through a Scanner Darkly , point to the folly of his drugs, PKD in his own
life frequently believed that neurochemicals made him more productive,
although he denied using hallucinogens to come up with any of his stories.
Interestingly, even before nootropics ("smart drugs") were hot stuff, PKD
tried to take a "cocktail" of water-soluble vitamins to get his two brain
hemispheres working in perfect synchrony. PKD in the end started pointing
to some sort of drug as the answer for mankind's problems - not something
escapist or mood-altering, like Can-D, but something of an altogether
different kind. The anokhi mushroom - the drug that will open the mind to
communion with the Divine - is a prototype of what Phil was looking for.
Something that would "cleanse the doors of perception" as Blake, and Jim
Morrison, would have it. In the final analysis, PKD saw drugs as mere
instruments - the problem with many of his characters is that they began
being used by the drugs themselves. This is not very far from the cyberpunk
depiction of drugs in their stories.
But perhaps the best proto-cyberpunk novel of PKD's is his most
underappreciated - Radio Free Albemuth . It is full of metaphors and
concepts derived from electronics, communication, and information theory,
some of which Phil probably picked up from his stint in a record store. PKD
conceived of the idea of a universal Matrix - something which Gibson was
only beginning to hint at at the end of his first book, Neuromancer - an
information "web" spanning entire galaxies and linking them in rational
harmony. The problem was that this "Network's" links were broken and
therefore the pure signal of the cosmos was being distorted on this planet
by the noise of the smothering Black Iron Prison. The Firebrights
previously travelled openly between their world and ours, descending on
select humans; now the lines of communication had been cut off. Since the
B.I.P arrives in 70 CE, it is clear that PKD considered the main
"communication receiever" on this planet to be the Temple of Solomon. The
three-eyed race of Albemuth took it upon themselves to heal the Matrix and
to restore the Net through VALIS. Clearly, when one node in this cosmic
Matrix is cut off from the rest, they are apparently all disturbed by it.
"Nicholas Brady" (an alter ego of PKD) and Silvio Sadassa overcome the
Empire and its tyrant "Ferris Fremont" through a clever manipulation of
signal and noise. The noise of Fremont's lies will be cut into by the
subliminal signal that they will put into musical recordings telling the
American people he is really a Communist puppet. Similarly, a signal is
sent out at the end of the novel VALIS: a juxtaposition of TV commercials
for Food King and Felix the Cat gives the world the great words: "KING
FELIX," the joyous king. The suggestion is that Zebra/VALIS is constantly
projecting a small, subliminal signal in unsuspecting areas to penetrate
the overwhelming noise of the Empire. Perhaps this "still small voice" can
even be found in the din and confusion of a genre of trash writing known as
"science fiction..." or the great provider of trash called TV. PKD often
heard voices through his radio insulting him and telling him to die. Many
schizophrenics experience the sensation of being "talked" to by electronic
devices or being controlled by electronic beams. But what validated PKD's
VALIS experience for him was the feeling that he was receiving pure,
undistorted, rational information; not irrational urgings or unintelligible
voices. He could not help but feel he was seeing the "invasion" of
rationality and a pure signal into an increasingly cacophonous and
dissonant world.
To some extent, the role of these ideas in RFA and the novel VALIS cannot
really be appreciated without a consideration of PKD's VALIS experiences.
Though he often contradicted himself about the voice of VALIS, later
calling it feminine or attributing it to various persons (Jim Pike, his
sister Jane, a medieval Rabbi, Sophia, or a 1st century Christian named
Thomas), PKD first indentified it as an "AI voice" which communicated
through a "pink laser beam." Was PKD being jacked into the universal Matrix
broadcast from RFA? He at first felt instinctively that this entity, the
Vast Active Living Intelligence System , was a machine - at least it had to
be, because its mind seemed so beyond human worries and concerns, so full
of pure unimpeded rationality, that it must have been a computer. In both
RFA and the novel VALIS, PKD goes to great pains to identify VALIS as an
extraterrestrial sattelite, perhaps constructed by the three-eyed beings of
Sirius. But it is more than a mechanism, because it has compassion -
kindness enough to prevent Phil's son dying from a fatal disease. It does
not provide just cold facts, but instead living information.
The "Great Soviet Dictionary" defines it thusly:
"A perturbation in the reality field in which a spontaneous
self-monitoring negentropic vortex is formed, tending
progressively to subsume and incorporate its environment into
arrangements of information. Characterized by
quasi-consciousness, purpose, intelligence, growth, and an
armillary coherence."
PKD stressed that too much information could rapidly overload the system;
the little girl Sophia/Mini is overwhelmed because her parents try and
directly implant information into her through a laser (much like VALIS was
doing to Phil.) But in his definition he has stumbled onto one of the great
discoveries of 20th century information theory: the link between
information, energy, and entropy. Maxwell's Demon can reverse entropy
(dispersal) by being given the information of the state of molecules in his
little box; the problem is that every time information is acquired, the
overall entropy of the system increases. Unless that information comes from
outside the closed system. The negentropic vortex that PKD speaks of maybe
similar to the "strange attractors" of chaos theory or the punctuated
equilibria of thermodynamics - a whirlpool of order in the midst of
increasing chaos.
Working in a music store, PKD inevitably encountered the problems of
distortion and bias - for music lovers, this refers to the crackling "white
noise" that cuts into music enjoyment. The source of distortion is not the
musical recording itself, but instead the speakers or equipment it passes
through. A good electrical engineer tries to reduce the bias of equipment.
He also was probably aware of the problems of feedback, when minor sonic
perturbations are amplified to where they overwhelm the music itself.
Communication theorists have noted that the signal/noise ratio is
fundamental to intelligibility, so their goal is also to try and eliminate
distortion as well - linguistic distortion; "doublespeak" of politicians
and tyrants, if you will. Cybernetic theorists like Norbert Weiner, in
examining self-correcting electronic systems, also point out that one of
the problems is that "bottlenecks" in the system arise, where the control
mechanism becomes "frozen." PKD might have had some familiarity with
cybernetics as well, especially its central importance in music
amplification.
It isn't known how much familiarity PKD had with computers. The PC
revolution really followed shortly after his death. But the idea of binary
information is an important theme in his work - so much so that he moves
from analog to digital in the end, pointing to "Ditheon," the dual
principle, as being of key importance to the whole universe. He clearly was
convinced of the mathematical and rational foundations of aesthetics,
becoming obsessed with the Golden Section as a harmonic function
fundamental to the whole cosmos. And he continued to express the theory
that the universe was a hologram in the Exegesis - echoing Pribram's theory
that the brain stores information holographically, so that each sub-part
contains the whole. Computers do not play a large role in PKD's work, but
clearly important ideas from early communication and information theory,
which he was probably exposed to during his stint in the music business,
found their way into his work.
The idea of the plasmate as living information and the homeoplasmate as
such a being bonded to a human being is not altogether far from the
so-called loa of Gibson's Matrix in the novel Count Zero. In that book,
Gibson's Matrix has fractured (like PKD's cosmic Matrix) into several
subprograms and AIs which "possess" people like his character Angie by
entering through neural interfaces. Gibson and Dick are really dealing with
the same thing - the vanishing trace of spirit in the Age of the Machine.
And Gibson's characters live in a dystopian world where multinational
corporations control all matters of governance and guard the flow of
information with deadly defense programs - "ice" - a future not wholly
dissimilar from the dystopias that Phil created in his novels. But Gibson's
characters - the "console cowboys" - thrive in this environment; they
exploit it, they take it as a given and do what they can to survive. PKD's
characters never accept their reality; they are always searching for
another underlying one, over which their bleak present has been
superimposed.
In the Exegesis, Phil became more theological, and insistent on identifying
VALIS with the Divine Presence. In some ways, a vision he had in 1980
convinced him of the folly of his actions. A confrontation he had with God
in this vision led him to a series of infinite stacks of punched cards
being generated each time he attempted to rationalize the vision. The only
thing that could save him from this infinite information regress was not to
rationalize it. Like Aquinas, PKD came to the conclusion (despairingly)
that all his attempts to rationalize his experiences were useless.
Fortunately, unlike Aquinas, he did not burn his theological writings after
his mystical vision. PKD was not the first science fiction writer to
envision the possibility that the Divine might be a machine - this same
notion appears in a story by the late Isaac Asimov ( The Final Question )
in which a series of increasingly powerful computers are asked how to
reverse the entropic heat death of the universe. Each answers with the same
complaint: "insufficient data." After the final heat death of the universe,
the final computer - Cosmic AI - in hyperspace arrives at the answer after
untold aeons, and it is "Let there be Light!"
Steve Mizrach (aka Seeker1)
To find out more about Philip K. Dick, contact pkd-list-request@wang.com
and get on the PKD mailing list.
