Interesting read. Have always enjoyed Philip K Dicks novels… sadly not surprised he struggled with mental and substance abuse. His books read in a way that often feature a character somewhat removed from reality or in some form of psychosis. The idea of what is real or not real is explored over and over again. I cannot help but think he was writing from his own soul or at least his own experience. He was always the looker peering into the another world that he just didn’t quite fit into. It makes me feel sad like he was often likely very lonely despite his genius and fame :/.
His psychosis allowed him to see reality as being extremely flexible and influenced by often malignant forces. That applies to modern society as more of our "reality" depends on things such as social media and that's clearly able to be influenced by bad actors. It's only going to get worse as we can't believe that a picture or video of someone isn't faked and so all we can do is try to figure out our own narrative.
His work also features lots of surveillance themes (again, likely due to the nature of his psychosis) and I can't think of anything more relevant to modern society. We've now reached the stage of technology where it's feasible for us all to be living in a panopticon.
Another major theme in PKD's work is "what makes us human" and we're getting close to producing LLMs that seem to behave as though they are human. If we give an AI a sense of personal identity with some fake memories, then would we be able to tell that they weren't human and what would they "think" about it?
Highly intelligent people often suffer from these crises because they see more than most people, and have an unfortunate knack for predicting it right.
While feasible, you can't really call living in a panopticon actually living. You have no control over the inputs as indoctrination primes you to behave, believe, and act a certain way, and any divergence would be destroyed as a threat to the system.
People in those systems are often no better than cattle and threats to the system are secondarily correlated with intelligence. Through selective breeding (multiple steps removed) that too can be removed as a threat.
> sadly not surprised he struggled with mental and substance abuse. His books read in a way that often feature a character somewhat removed from reality or in some form of psychosis. The idea of what is real or not real is explored over and over again
Don't take that is an indicator, Haruki Murakami often reads similarly and he seems to be a well adjusted person.
This comment is probably unnecessary but I've been reading tons of Murakami lately so here's a take:
Murakami's main schtick, I realized, is to write in the style of a hard-boiled detective novel, like Raymond Chandler (who he has often cited as an influence / obsession)... except that instead of the protagonist being a literal private investigator who wanders the city and meets people to solve the mystery of a murder, it's a disconnected man who wanders the city solving a mystery that's like, how to connect with people or how to get over a sense of loss or something. The world is mysterious, like how in a detective novel with corruption and intrigue and stuff, but it feels like it's that way because of how mysterious human connection is to his protagonists.
Philip K Dick, on the other hand, writes a mysterious world that makes some paranoid idea he had actually real. They're superficially similar but, I think, not really actually coming from the same place at all.
What about it not being a binary indicator invalidates the analysis?
Dick's writing was obviously a byproduct of his mental state. That's where writing comes from. Just because someone else made similar works in a different mental state doesn't invalidate that.
Philip K Dick's A Scanner Darkly contains an Author's Note at the end of the book on this topic. This is the note from the copy I have:
"AUTHOR'S NOTE:
This has been a novel about some people who were punished entirely too much for what they did. They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed--run over, maimed, destroyed--but they continued to play anyhow. We really all were very happy for a while, sitting around not toiling but just bullshitting and playing, but it was for such a terrible brief time, and then the punishment was beyond belief: even when we could see it, we could not believe it. For example, while I was writing this I learned that the person on whom the character Jerry Fabin is based killed himself. My friend on whom I based the character Ernie Luckman died before I began the novel. For a while I myself was one of these children playing in the street; I was, like the rest of them, trying to play instead of being grown up, and I was punished. I am on the list below, which is a list of those to whom this novel is dedicated, and what became of each.
Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to step out in front of a moving car. You would call that not a disease but an error in judgment. When a bunch of people begin to do it, it is a social error, a life-style. In this particular life-style the motto is "Be happy now because tomorrow you are dying," but the dying begins almost at once, and the happiness is a memory. It is, then, only a speeding up, an intensifying, of the ordinary human existence. It is not different from your life-style, it is only faster. It all takes place in days or weeks or months instead of years. "Take the cash and let the credit go," as Villon said in 1460. But that is a mistake if the cash is a penny and the credit a whole lifetime.
There is no moral in this novel; it is not bourgeois; it does not say they were wrong to play when they should have toiled; it just tells what the consequences were. In Greek drama they were beginning, as a society, to discover science, which means causal law. Here in this novel there is Nemesis: not fate, because any one of us could have chosen to stop playing in the street, but, as I narrate from the deepest part of my life and heart, a dreadful Nemesis for those who kept on playing. I myself, I am not a character in this novel; I am the novel. So, though, was our entire nation at this time. This novel is about more people than I knew personally. Some we all read about in the newspapers. It was, this sitting around with our buddies and bullshitting while making tape recordings, the bad decision of the decade, the sixties, both in and out of the establishment. And nature cracked down on us. We were forced to stop by things dreadful.
If there was any "sin," it was that these people wanted to keep on having a good time forever, and were punished for that, but, as I say, I feel that, if so, the punishment was far too great, and I prefer to think of it only in a Greek or morally neutral way, as mere science, as deterministic impartial cause-and-effect. I loved them all. Here is the list, to whom I dedicate my love:
To Gaylene deceased
To Ray deceased
To Francy permanent psychosis
To Kathy permanent brain damage
To Jim deceased
To Val massive permanent brain damage
To Nancy permanent psychosis
To Joanne permanent brain damage
To Maren deceased
To Nick deceased
To Terry deceased
To Dennis deceased
To Phil permanent pancreatic damage
To Sue permanent vascular damage
To Jerri permanent psychosis and vascular damage
. . . and so forth.
In Memoriam. These were comrades whom I had; there are no better. They remain in my mind, and the enemy will never be forgiven. The "enemy" was their mistake in playing. Let them all play again, in some other way, and let them be happy."
I was talking to a guy who was into drug counselling. He laid out some pretty shocking facts, like children as young as 12 take drugs. This made me absolutely convinced that we should not legalise drugs, except in the case where there legitimate medical uses.
He also said that he got annoyed when the police announced that there was a particularly potent batch of drugs on the streets at the time. His reasoning is that it only encourages drug users.
Also, experience of using drugs is no guarantee of safe drugs practise. If anything, it's the contrary. People become complacent in what they think they can handle, which spells trouble.
Also, drug purity can vary by region. You won't know about it in advance, but if
you take drugs from a less tainted batch then you usually do, then you could well be taking a much higher dosage of the drug than your body is used to. Not good.
And finally, the most chilling part of all. He said that if you were to put some heroin on a table and say that this is the purest heroin on the market. You can take it, but knowing you will die. Many would still take it.
> He also said that he got annoyed when the police announced that there was a particularly potent batch of drugs on the streets at the time. ... Also, drug purity can vary by region. You won't know about it in advance, but if you take drugs from a less tainted batch then you usually do, then you could well be taking a much higher dosage of the drug than your body is used to. Not good.
This would all be improved by legalization and regulation. Nobody dies because a Bud Light is suddenly a lot stronger in one region than another.
> Nobody dies because a Bud Light is suddenly a lot stronger in one region than another.
I'm sure a lot would die if one beer unexpectedly has the potency of 3. A lot of people already drink and drive and they'd be more impaired than usual.
Legalizing drugs can actually reduce number of kids taking drugs. Because you can require shops to ask for ID. Back street dealers won't.
I think people often imagine legalizing drugs means there will be heroin ads in TV. But you can legalize them and still regulate them heavily (no ads, only sell to adults, require warnings on the packaging, finance anti-drug campaigns from the sales taxes, etc.).
Portugal legalized drugs long ago and their drug problems seemed to get a lot better since.
Those all seem like arguments to legalise and regulate drugs. Alcohol is similarly deadly, and we have age related controls to prevent youngsters being able to buy it. There's also regulations to ensure that there's a consistent alcohol percentage (printed on the side) and that the drinks don't contain poisons other than ethanol.
Sadly, alcoholics continue to consume alcohol when they've been told multiple times that it will lead to their death and even sometimes after receiving a liver transplant.
Alcohol and drugs should be treated as a public health issue and not a nonsensical war.
Society is not better off with thousands of Al Capones and moonshine but less drinking over all. It is such a stupid argument. It is just unbelievable in the US that with having so few borders and neighboring countries to worry about that we don't care that Al Capone has taken over one of them. Exactly the result of how much we like to drink and how much we will pay for drinks.
Just the standard bullshit "What about the children" arguments.
Not to mention in 2023 that you have to add in a huge amount of straight up poison moonshine or people think they are drinking moonshine but instead are drinking gasoline.
> He laid out some pretty shocking facts, like children as young as 12 take drugs. This made me absolutely convinced that we should not legalise drugs, except in the case where there legitimate medical uses.
I don't understand the logic that because children as young as 12 are able to obtain and take drugs, we should keep the drug policies under which that occurs in place.
As far as I'm aware, nobody serious is suggesting that 12 year olds should be allowed to buy or use drugs if they're legalized. Given that, the legalization question that matters is how we can do the best job of limiting the damage they do to 12 year olds through a combination of preventing them from acquiring drugs and regulating the drugs themselves, so that if they do get some drugs, those drugs don't contain a bunch of fentanyl.
I'm not going to say that legalizing drugs will certainly result in less harm, but I'm not writing it off as impossible, either. But to cite the fact that a bad thing is happening under your current harm mitigation strategy as a reason that we should absolutely keep that harm mitigation strategy seems like fundamentally flawed logic to me.
12? I believe it. In some cultures (like mine), it's almost a rite of passage if you have older siblings or friends, sadly.
Also, it's hard to say how much is self-medicating from poor living conditions, health problems, heritable diseases, etc. though. There are some areas of the country where there are many deeply poor people.
