Having dealt with a few people with schizophrenia, either diagnosed, or clearly exhibiting many of the symptoms and refusing to engage with medical professionals until I cut off relationships for my own safety. I think something really sad was happening here.
In fact, in a bout of lucidness, he tried to take his own life because "Elijah had left him". That's horrid.
The people I have known have hurt themselves and took actions that were designed to hurt others - physically, emotionally, in one case financially - because they believed in a higher order. Sometimes, that higher order was, errr, me. [1]
If the story of saving his son's life is true, that's marvellous and mysterious and wonderful. But the surgery referred to at the start of the surgery sounds like it introduced an infection and/or change in brain function somehow, and he suffered with the consequences the rest of his life.
As an aside, it's weird how many stories of mental hallucinations are tied to the music of the Beatles. Perhaps its popularity, or because it was a step change in how music was written and produced, but I was watching something the other night that mentioned just how obsessed Manson was with the White album. Now this with Strawberry fields. Don't know what to make of it, just an odd data point.
[1] These people felt I was controlling their mind, I could read their mind, I was instructing them, and so on. I was just having a chat down the pub with them, nothing more (but then, if I were a mystic being trying to do my work through others I would say that, wouldn't I?). The common factor in all these men (and they were all men < 35 years old at the time), was heavy cannabis use, particularly in teen years. This is now well documented in literature as being linked to schizophrenia.
The surgery was just the extraction of a wisdom tooth. If Philip K. Dick was brain damaged, it probably wasn't from that, but from the years of heavy drug use (he praised/romanticized LSD, but by most accounts he didn't take it more than a few times - meth was his drug).
I have close family with schizoaffective disorder. It sucks.
A big part of it, is seeing “connections,” in everything.
Every newspaper article, every radio ad, every person glancing your way, is a “message.” Sometimes, it’s good, but usually, it’s bad. They’re “plotting to kill me,” or “spying on me.”
People like that, are uniquely susceptible to suggestions from sycophantic LLMs, which can be disastrous.
I used up my quota of acid, before I was 18. It’s basically “temporary schizophrenia.”
Seeing connections in everything is unsurprisingly marked as illness in The Black Iron Prison (per Philip Dick), while not seeing connections in anything is its reinforcing virtue: the daily grind, the routine, the dittoheadness, the oblivion, you name it. "Normal people".
Of course, it's best to be where these two counterbalance each other. Solve et coagula.
> A big part of it, is seeing “connections,” in everything.
I've lately been wondering if schizophrenia causes this connection-seeing, or if connections cause indicators of schizophrenia/psychosis.
I've lived in cities like New Orleans, where everything seems magically connected through something about the culture and relationship structure imho, which results in intense feelings of synchronicity. There seems to be a high proportion of schizophrenia and general mania in New Orleans.
And now LLMs (which are always making and reinforcing connections, right or wrong) lead me to wonder about this direction of causality once more...
> I've lately been wondering if schizophrenia causes this connection-seeing, or if connections cause indicators of schizophrenia/psychosis.
IANAD, but my reading of the literature is that the genes for schizophrenia cause connection seeing, which on its own is mostly net neutral (slightly negative on average, but positive for many people). But it’s not having the ability to think critically about those connections, along with trauma and lack of social support, that causes this ability to see connections to manifest as mental illness. The genes for schizophrenia on their own though are, on average, only slightly net negative in terms of their impact.
>I was watching something the other night that mentioned just how obsessed Manson was with the White album
IIRC Manson thought the song "Helter Skelter" referred to some sort of apocalypse. In fact, it is just a name for a children's helical slide that used to be popular in British fairgrounds!
PKD remained surprisingly lucid and self aware of the likelihood of suffering from some sort of mental illness. He went back and forth the rest of his life trying to figure out whether he was insane or whether he'd had "real" spiritual experiences. But as the characters in his books learn, there may not even be a clear distinction between the two.
From VALIS (which was largely based on his experiences):
> What he did not know then is that it is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.
> Let it be said that one of the first symptoms of psychosis is that the person feels perhaps he is becoming psychotic. It is another Chinese finger trap. You cannot think about it without becoming part of it. By thinking about madness, Horselover Fat slipped by degrees into madness.
> People suffering nervous breakdowns often do a lot of research, to find explanations for what they are undergoing. The research, of course, fails.
> What struck me was the oddity of a lunatic discounting his hallucinations in this sophisticated manner; Fat had intellectually dealt himself out of the game of madness while still enjoying its sights and sounds.
What I love is how PKD and Horselover Fat phase in and out of each other throughout the book. Near the beginning, PKD makes it clear that Fat is "him" and that he's narrating the book to give himself clarity on the events. But then PKD the narrator slowly instatiates into the story as a completely separate character. There are scenes with Dick, Fat, and his friends all talking. And then that changes again later in the book.
I see almost 4 versions of PKD in VALIS: the narrator, Fat, the narrator instantiated into the story itself, and then the real life author (who is treating this book as semi fictional, semi autobiographical).
The link isn’t loading for me, but I definitely relate to the title at least. PKD’s stories definitely have a tendency to untether you to reality, and you finish them feeling both extremely creative and kind of mentally lost in space.
The interesting thing though is how it seems like he developed this over time. Many of his stories are just straight up bad, goofy cliche messes. When you read an anthology of his short stories, for example, at least half of them read like bad jokes an AI came up with.
At some point I need to read his works in chronological order, just to observe his growth as a writer more directly.
He also reinterpreted his experiences several times - and was open about it. Crumb gives a mostly Buddhist take, but PKD often gave far more Gnostic Christian takes on it (or surprisingly orthodox Christian ones)
I have a copy of his Exegesis, and I can confirm, he reinterpreted the experience probably hundreds of times. He loved the gnostic interpretation (which is the main focus on VALIS). But also yeah, sometimes just straight up orthodox Christian ones. And he even fell back to interpreting it as just psychosis sometimes.
PKD also invokes Buddhism and Hinduism frequently in the Exegesis. Here's a quote I love from it:
> I have seen the infinities of Judaism, which is morality, of Christianity, which is love, of the Greeks, which is wisdom, and I have seen God’s power as pronoia and charis to rescue me by bending the world itself; but beauty is a perplexing infinity, raising more questions than it answers. It is a puzzle too intricate for me. It spans all else. As I sit across the game board from Krishna I say, “I have found in beauty that which I could not myself have made; thus I have found the benchmarks. I believe, for I have the evidence that I trust; it is sufficient.” There is an infinity of good, of love, of wisdom, of power, but each particular beautiful thing is infinitely beautiful, and there is an infinity of them, so beauty, alone, is an infinity of infinities: ∞2.
His early stories were churned out because he needed money, and if you read them chronologically you'll also see them for on very much in the zeitgeist. E.g. his early stories are dominated by "easy" post-apocalyptic stories with simple structures and a straightforward reveal.
His more complex stuff came later. But then too his need for money would lead to churning out something publishable over something polished.
I think PKD might well have been tickled by the idea of whether he might have been an AI sent back in time to become a sci-fi author.
My local library had them so I read through most of his works in high school. My favorite is Ubik which if I remember correctly follows an anti-psychic contractor who dives into the world of his comatose boss' brain after an explosion on a moon base in order to get some important information, which is trying to communicate itself via in-world advertising.
Sometimes he wrote his worst trash in between some of his best books. He was ultimately a pulp fiction author, and often just pushed stuff out for a paycheck.
Could you explain? A genuine mystic revelation would mean, in my opinion, something that cannot be explained by the laws of physics. Acute schizophrenia would mean the exact opposite.
On the other hand if we broaden the meaning of mystic revelation, a "light" mystic revelation, like being in awe in front of nature for example, would have nothing to do with acute schizophrenia.
If what we think we know about the brain is true, then what we call reality is contingent on the majority of brains agreeing on it. That is, we'll call reality what my brain and your brain can come to believe independently. But that still means that what we know is just what our brains limit us to knowing, and it doesn't preclude something outside of that. You may argue, it's pointless to discuss something that by it's very definition is unknowable, but the fact that we can describe it by something in system (our language) should make us somewhat curious about it.
sigh Forty years later I still miss the dorm room discussions.
Yes but it would mean that the following two are both right, if there really is no difference between a genuine mystic revelation and schizophrenia:
- There exists something that cannot be explained by the law of physics
- a schizophrenia label is always caused by genuine mystic revelation
I wasn't under the impression that the quote meant that a genuine mystic revelation would be labelled as schizophrenia, if that was what the quote meant, that doesn't seem like a great hindsight or particularly deep observation to me.
"It's not possible, everything can be explained by science sooner or later."
I'm not sure there is a good philosophical reason to believe this. I think something like it is certainly true, but its not entirely clear what an explanation even means, for one thing. And then there is the possibility that certain physical outcomes do not actually supervene upon the physical systems which constitute them.
I do not believe in mystical experiences as being informative about the true nature of the universe, and I generally think "science" is a useful set of tools for (at least) predicting the future and designing machines and perhaps even for constructing ontologies, but I don't think "everything" can be explained by science. I can see no powerful reason to think everything has an explanation.
So did Philip K. Dick, one enthusiastically embraced by a generation of skeptics: "Reality is that which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."
Which was really hilarious, because for PKD, the point was that he couldn't discount his experiences. He couldn't make them go away even though he understood perfectly well that he might simply be crazy.
A great insight? Where is the insight if there is no way to know?
Objectively speaking, you end up exactly the same way you started.
It is as if I said: oh, the app hangs: infinite loop or crash and frozen? It is one or the other, but never both. Yet you do not know if there is no way for further inspection.
It was really great, Phil's old editor, David Brin, and a few other of Phil's friends came to join. I made a play that was from an interview he did before he passed away, describing an unfinished book. The interviewer also attended, (RIP Doris), What If Our World is Their Heaven. Great book if you're a pkd fan!
Having dealt with a few people with schizophrenia, either diagnosed, or clearly exhibiting many of the symptoms and refusing to engage with medical professionals until I cut off relationships for my own safety. I think something really sad was happening here.
In fact, in a bout of lucidness, he tried to take his own life because "Elijah had left him". That's horrid.
The people I have known have hurt themselves and took actions that were designed to hurt others - physically, emotionally, in one case financially - because they believed in a higher order. Sometimes, that higher order was, errr, me. [1]
If the story of saving his son's life is true, that's marvellous and mysterious and wonderful. But the surgery referred to at the start of the surgery sounds like it introduced an infection and/or change in brain function somehow, and he suffered with the consequences the rest of his life.
As an aside, it's weird how many stories of mental hallucinations are tied to the music of the Beatles. Perhaps its popularity, or because it was a step change in how music was written and produced, but I was watching something the other night that mentioned just how obsessed Manson was with the White album. Now this with Strawberry fields. Don't know what to make of it, just an odd data point.
[1] These people felt I was controlling their mind, I could read their mind, I was instructing them, and so on. I was just having a chat down the pub with them, nothing more (but then, if I were a mystic being trying to do my work through others I would say that, wouldn't I?). The common factor in all these men (and they were all men < 35 years old at the time), was heavy cannabis use, particularly in teen years. This is now well documented in literature as being linked to schizophrenia.
The surgery was just the extraction of a wisdom tooth. If Philip K. Dick was brain damaged, it probably wasn't from that, but from the years of heavy drug use (he praised/romanticized LSD, but by most accounts he didn't take it more than a few times - meth was his drug).
I believe this is drug induced psychosis not schizophrenia, but ianad so that's just a guess.
DIS can reverse with cessation, but schizophrenia is not reversible AFAIK.
This is the general consensus, last I checked. PKD was a meth addict, and it absolutely played a major part in his "visions".
I have close family with schizoaffective disorder. It sucks.
A big part of it, is seeing “connections,” in everything.
Every newspaper article, every radio ad, every person glancing your way, is a “message.” Sometimes, it’s good, but usually, it’s bad. They’re “plotting to kill me,” or “spying on me.”
People like that, are uniquely susceptible to suggestions from sycophantic LLMs, which can be disastrous.
I used up my quota of acid, before I was 18. It’s basically “temporary schizophrenia.”
Seeing connections in everything is unsurprisingly marked as illness in The Black Iron Prison (per Philip Dick), while not seeing connections in anything is its reinforcing virtue: the daily grind, the routine, the dittoheadness, the oblivion, you name it. "Normal people".
Of course, it's best to be where these two counterbalance each other. Solve et coagula.
> A big part of it, is seeing “connections,” in everything.
I've lately been wondering if schizophrenia causes this connection-seeing, or if connections cause indicators of schizophrenia/psychosis.
I've lived in cities like New Orleans, where everything seems magically connected through something about the culture and relationship structure imho, which results in intense feelings of synchronicity. There seems to be a high proportion of schizophrenia and general mania in New Orleans.
And now LLMs (which are always making and reinforcing connections, right or wrong) lead me to wonder about this direction of causality once more...
> I've lately been wondering if schizophrenia causes this connection-seeing, or if connections cause indicators of schizophrenia/psychosis.
IANAD, but my reading of the literature is that the genes for schizophrenia cause connection seeing, which on its own is mostly net neutral (slightly negative on average, but positive for many people). But it’s not having the ability to think critically about those connections, along with trauma and lack of social support, that causes this ability to see connections to manifest as mental illness. The genes for schizophrenia on their own though are, on average, only slightly net negative in terms of their impact.
>I was watching something the other night that mentioned just how obsessed Manson was with the White album
IIRC Manson thought the song "Helter Skelter" referred to some sort of apocalypse. In fact, it is just a name for a children's helical slide that used to be popular in British fairgrounds!
Huh:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helter_skelter_(ride)
First known appearance on Blackpool Pleasure Beach in 1906.
Yes, hardly apocalyptic!
Thank you for your contribution to the ongoing stigma surrounding mental illness. Never forget, you are the hero of this story.
Is saying it's sad and suicide is horrid a stigma? Apologies.
As somebody with mental health issues himself, I was not aware of other people's sensitivities on this, only my own.
PKD remained surprisingly lucid and self aware of the likelihood of suffering from some sort of mental illness. He went back and forth the rest of his life trying to figure out whether he was insane or whether he'd had "real" spiritual experiences. But as the characters in his books learn, there may not even be a clear distinction between the two.
From VALIS (which was largely based on his experiences):
> What he did not know then is that it is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.
> Let it be said that one of the first symptoms of psychosis is that the person feels perhaps he is becoming psychotic. It is another Chinese finger trap. You cannot think about it without becoming part of it. By thinking about madness, Horselover Fat slipped by degrees into madness.
> People suffering nervous breakdowns often do a lot of research, to find explanations for what they are undergoing. The research, of course, fails.
> What struck me was the oddity of a lunatic discounting his hallucinations in this sophisticated manner; Fat had intellectually dealt himself out of the game of madness while still enjoying its sights and sounds.
For those unaware, Horselover Fat is a direct self insert - the name is intentionally referring to his own.
What I love is how PKD and Horselover Fat phase in and out of each other throughout the book. Near the beginning, PKD makes it clear that Fat is "him" and that he's narrating the book to give himself clarity on the events. But then PKD the narrator slowly instatiates into the story as a completely separate character. There are scenes with Dick, Fat, and his friends all talking. And then that changes again later in the book.
I see almost 4 versions of PKD in VALIS: the narrator, Fat, the narrator instantiated into the story itself, and then the real life author (who is treating this book as semi fictional, semi autobiographical).
> it's weird how many stories of mental hallucinations are tied to the music of the Beatles
I think Lennon once made the claim that he had taken acid 1000 times. So it lines up.
The link isn’t loading for me, but I definitely relate to the title at least. PKD’s stories definitely have a tendency to untether you to reality, and you finish them feeling both extremely creative and kind of mentally lost in space.
The interesting thing though is how it seems like he developed this over time. Many of his stories are just straight up bad, goofy cliche messes. When you read an anthology of his short stories, for example, at least half of them read like bad jokes an AI came up with.
At some point I need to read his works in chronological order, just to observe his growth as a writer more directly.
He also reinterpreted his experiences several times - and was open about it. Crumb gives a mostly Buddhist take, but PKD often gave far more Gnostic Christian takes on it (or surprisingly orthodox Christian ones)
Here's a link to a video of PKD in Metz, France in 1977 where he reviews the material: https://youtu.be/P3TXfwGV8LQ?is=09XaeMgMDZaRChGT
I have a copy of his Exegesis, and I can confirm, he reinterpreted the experience probably hundreds of times. He loved the gnostic interpretation (which is the main focus on VALIS). But also yeah, sometimes just straight up orthodox Christian ones. And he even fell back to interpreting it as just psychosis sometimes.
PKD also invokes Buddhism and Hinduism frequently in the Exegesis. Here's a quote I love from it:
> I have seen the infinities of Judaism, which is morality, of Christianity, which is love, of the Greeks, which is wisdom, and I have seen God’s power as pronoia and charis to rescue me by bending the world itself; but beauty is a perplexing infinity, raising more questions than it answers. It is a puzzle too intricate for me. It spans all else. As I sit across the game board from Krishna I say, “I have found in beauty that which I could not myself have made; thus I have found the benchmarks. I believe, for I have the evidence that I trust; it is sufficient.” There is an infinity of good, of love, of wisdom, of power, but each particular beautiful thing is infinitely beautiful, and there is an infinity of them, so beauty, alone, is an infinity of infinities: ∞2.
His early stories were churned out because he needed money, and if you read them chronologically you'll also see them for on very much in the zeitgeist. E.g. his early stories are dominated by "easy" post-apocalyptic stories with simple structures and a straightforward reveal.
His more complex stuff came later. But then too his need for money would lead to churning out something publishable over something polished.
I think PKD might well have been tickled by the idea of whether he might have been an AI sent back in time to become a sci-fi author.
My local library had them so I read through most of his works in high school. My favorite is Ubik which if I remember correctly follows an anti-psychic contractor who dives into the world of his comatose boss' brain after an explosion on a moon base in order to get some important information, which is trying to communicate itself via in-world advertising.
> who dives into the world of his comatose boss' brain
This isn't quite what happens. It's actually left extremely ambiguous what's happening and where they are after the explosion.
Yeah I decided not to Google it and rely on my own fuzzy decades old memory of it, which seemed more PKD-esque
I'm going through this collection right now, and loving it: https://www.loa.org/books/311-the-philip-k-dick-collection-3...
Sometimes he wrote his worst trash in between some of his best books. He was ultimately a pulp fiction author, and often just pushed stuff out for a paycheck.
"Onset of acute schizophrenia, or a genuine mystic revelation, or is there a difference?"
That's a great insight.
Could you explain? A genuine mystic revelation would mean, in my opinion, something that cannot be explained by the laws of physics. Acute schizophrenia would mean the exact opposite.
On the other hand if we broaden the meaning of mystic revelation, a "light" mystic revelation, like being in awe in front of nature for example, would have nothing to do with acute schizophrenia.
If what we think we know about the brain is true, then what we call reality is contingent on the majority of brains agreeing on it. That is, we'll call reality what my brain and your brain can come to believe independently. But that still means that what we know is just what our brains limit us to knowing, and it doesn't preclude something outside of that. You may argue, it's pointless to discuss something that by it's very definition is unknowable, but the fact that we can describe it by something in system (our language) should make us somewhat curious about it.
sigh Forty years later I still miss the dorm room discussions.
> A genuine mystic revelation would mean, in my opinion, something that cannot be explained by the laws of physics
Exactly this can happen, whilst also being labelled schizophrenia.
Yes but it would mean that the following two are both right, if there really is no difference between a genuine mystic revelation and schizophrenia:
- There exists something that cannot be explained by the law of physics
- a schizophrenia label is always caused by genuine mystic revelation
I wasn't under the impression that the quote meant that a genuine mystic revelation would be labelled as schizophrenia, if that was what the quote meant, that doesn't seem like a great hindsight or particularly deep observation to me.
Give me an example.
It's not possible, everything can be explained by science sooner or later.
We have plenty examples of this throughout history: lunar eclipse as "omens", plague as "divine wrath", rainbow as a "sign of flood", etc.
“What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence." - Christopher Hitchens
"It's not possible, everything can be explained by science sooner or later."
I'm not sure there is a good philosophical reason to believe this. I think something like it is certainly true, but its not entirely clear what an explanation even means, for one thing. And then there is the possibility that certain physical outcomes do not actually supervene upon the physical systems which constitute them.
I do not believe in mystical experiences as being informative about the true nature of the universe, and I generally think "science" is a useful set of tools for (at least) predicting the future and designing machines and perhaps even for constructing ontologies, but I don't think "everything" can be explained by science. I can see no powerful reason to think everything has an explanation.
Its not new. its been a question for centuries, probably millennia.
William James suggested a criterion to tell these two apart.
So did Philip K. Dick, one enthusiastically embraced by a generation of skeptics: "Reality is that which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."
Which was really hilarious, because for PKD, the point was that he couldn't discount his experiences. He couldn't make them go away even though he understood perfectly well that he might simply be crazy.
A great insight? Where is the insight if there is no way to know?
Objectively speaking, you end up exactly the same way you started.
It is as if I said: oh, the app hangs: infinite loop or crash and frozen? It is one or the other, but never both. Yet you do not know if there is no way for further inspection.
Not everything in real life distills to a programming analogy.
The insight is not into either state but toward the relation of the states.
Crumb is awesome, he let me use this work in a Philip k Dick event I put on years ago
https://www.shipinthewoods.com/owl-in-the-daylight
Looks like a great event!
It was really great, Phil's old editor, David Brin, and a few other of Phil's friends came to join. I made a play that was from an interview he did before he passed away, describing an unfinished book. The interviewer also attended, (RIP Doris), What If Our World is Their Heaven. Great book if you're a pkd fan!
David Brin who is an accomplished scifi author himself? Awesome (also because of dolphins in space).
A lot of the behavior people point to as schizophrenia was heavily driven by his prolonged amphetamine.
Amphetamine psychosis is almost indistinguishable from paranoid schizophrenia.
It causes severe paranoia, delusions, visual hallucinations, and a complete break from reality.
I really want to read this. But the resolution is just so insanely low. I don't know how anyone can read this. I downloaded the .cbr and its the same.
Just start reading PKD and you'll find that Crumb comic to be the "lite" experience.
The ai version of this story is going to slap.