The Lost AI Codex: PKD's Divine Interference
Channel: Infinite Imaginarium Community
Date: 2024-04-08

It was February of 1974, and the American science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick was in pain. The man whose darkly comic novels of androids, weird drugs, and false realities stand as some of the most brilliant and visionary in the genre had just had an impacted wisdom tooth removed, and the sodium pentathol was wearing off. A delivery woman arrived with a package of Darvon, and when the burly, bearded man opened the door, he was struck by the beauty of this dark-haired girl. He was especially drawn to her golden necklace, and he asked her about its curious fish-shaped design. “This is a sign used by the early Christians,” she said, and then departed.

Most of us who hit the freeways in the U.S. know this fish well, as its Christian and Darwinian mutations wage a war of competing faiths from the rear ends of BMWs and Hondas. As a Christian logo, the fish predates the cross, and its Piscean connotations of baptism and magical bounty (the miracle of loaves and fishes) reaches back to the time when the harshly persecuted cult secretly gathered in the catacombs of Alexandria. Ichthus, the Greek word for fish often inscribed within the symbol, is also a code, an acrostic of the phrase “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior.” One apocryphal story claims that Christians would secretly test the spiritual allegiance of new acquaintances by casually drawing one curve of the fish on the ground. If their companion was “in the know,” he or she would complete the fish shape.

For Dick, the ichthus was a secret sign of an altogether different order: it was a trigger for gnosis. As he wrote later in a personal journal,

The (golden) fish sign causes you to remember. Remember what?…Your celestial origins; this has to do with the DNA because the memory is located in the DNA…You remember your real nature…The Gnostic Gnosis: You are here in this world in a thrown condition, but are not of this world.[1]

Following this event, Dick experienced a remarkable series of visions, hallucinations, and dreams, many of which centered around VALIS, a “Vast Active Living Intelligence System” that he defined in his 1980 novel of the same name as a “spontaneous self-monitoring negentropic vortex…tending to progressively subsume and incorporate its environment into arrangements of information.” Not a bad definition of the Internet, though Dick experienced this incoming information web far more intensely than today’s online grazers. Sometimes it struck him as a pink beam of esoteric data, or as a compassionate feminine “AI [Artificial Intelligence] voice” speaking to him from outer space. Other times, Dick felt he was in telepathic communication with a first-century Christian named Thomas, and once “the landscape of California, U.S.A. 1974 ebbed out and the landscape of Rome of the first century C.E. ebbed in.”[2]

Like many an acid casualty (Dick himself preferred amphetamines), Dick also picked up strange signals from electronic devices, and for a time he received “die messages” from the radio. This should be no surprise; radios, stereos and TVs feature prominently in a number of his novels, where the war of signal and noise often takes on metaphysical connotations. But Dick’s paranoia could turn itself inside-out and become divine intervention, and once when listening to the Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever,” the strawberry-pink light informed him that his son Christopher was about to die. Rushing the kid to their physician, Dick discovered that the child indeed had a potentially fatal inguinal hernia, and was soon wheeled into the operating room.

Many more fantastic events played themselves across Dick’s nervous system, and he would sometimes refer to the whole barrage simply by its date, “2-3-74.” As Dick himself recognized, 2-3-74 avails itself equally to the language of religious experience and psychological pathology. And yet the events seem too fractured for the one, too resonant and rich for the other. As has often been noted, 2-3-74 reminds one of nothing so much as the ontological paradoxes of a Philip K. Dick novel, where the spurious realities that often surround his characters can collapse like cardboard in the face of disruptive information coming from another order of reality beyond the local simulation. Even if Dick underwent something like a temporal lobe epilepsy (which Lawrence Sutin argues is the most likely somatic explanation), earlier books like Ubik, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and A Maze of Death provide more than enough evidence that 2-3-74 erupted from his own creative daemon.

based on Erik Davis, PKD's Divine Interference:
https://www.burningshore.com/p/pkds-divine-interference