I wonder how many of the people commenting on this essay read all the way through. It starts out quite lucid and makes some seemingly insightful points, but as the essay goes on he starts to descend into some strange metaphysical ideas about time not being real and reality being a retelling of parts of the Bible.
I’m not familiar with much of PKD’s works or his life story, but I honestly can’t tell if he had mental health problems or if this essay is supposed to be a sort of self-aware self-referential story about reality breaking down.
> I honestly can’t tell if he had mental health problems or if this essay is supposed to be a sort of self-aware self-referential story about reality breaking down.
Yes.
Less ellipticaly, Dick abused drugs at various points in his life and definitely struggled with his mental health.
He also had mystical experiences that massively influenced his view of reality (beyond just the ones mentioned in this essay, actually - he reported a pink laser telling him his son had a deadly illness, which turned out to be true when he took his son to the hospital, IIRC).
Whether those facts are all the same thing is left as a nontrivial exercise for the reader.
It seems obvious to me that Dick was very aware of the amorphous unverifiability of so many of his life experiences, and that he loved to write about precisely the intersection of such nebulous experiences and the fact that reality is "that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."
He seems to have understood better than most that the standard he defined says nothing about falsifiability or knowability. Many possible things could in fact be part of reality without being knowable or falsifiable.
I think our fundamental inability to Know Reality is precisely the theme of most of Dick's glorious fever-dream fiction.
> I’m not familiar with much of PKD’s works or his life story, but I honestly can’t tell if he had mental health problems
Oh he almost certainly had mental health problems. He experienced hallucinations and delusions[1], including an intelligent pink beam of light. He wrote about some of these in an autobiographical way in VALIS[2].
> who the heck knows what is even real. We're here now, whatever this is. YOLO.
I don't disagree, but in this essay PKD seems to say that there is no objective reality, rather everybody has their own experiential reality that is at most somewhat connected to others' experiential realities.
This is a far cry from saying, as I believe, that there is an objective reality and we each experience it subjectively and with whatever fidelity to the underlying reality we're capable of.
The former view seems a lot more hopeless / nihilistic -- what's the point of striving for anything if it mostly only affects our own reality?
For me it’s selfish reasons I guess and I think it’s like that for all life. If it is indeed my reality then I’m gonna do everything and anything to make that reality work for me. But I’m a good person (definition mine) so I operate in a way that is synergy with others.
Why sit on the sidelines when I’m the main subject of the movie or book or whatever this thing my brain is rendering for me
I’m not familiar with much of PKD’s works or his life story, but I honestly can’t tell if he had mental health problems or if this essay is supposed to be a sort of self-aware self-referential story about reality breaking down.