Pkd Quotes

Because her general taste appalled him, it annoyed him that he himself constituted one of her favorites. It was an anomaly which he had never been able to take apart.

Consciousness of unconsciousness

God's M.O., he reflected, is to transmute evil into good. If He is active here, He is doing that now, although our eyes can't perceive it; the process lies hidden beneath the surface of reality, and emerges only later. To, perhaps, our waiting heirs. Paltry people who will not know the dreadful war we've gone through, and the losses we took, unless in some footnote in a minor history book they catch a notion. Some brief mention. With no list of the fallen.

The trouble with being educated is that it takes a long time; it uses up the better part of your life and when you are finished what you know is that you would have benefited more by going into banking.

When I consider the brief span of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and behind it, the small space that I fill, or even see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces which I know not, and which know not me, I am afraid.' 'I should think so' I said. 'I am afraid, sir, and wonder to see myself here rather than there. For there is no reason why I should be here rather than then' 'Did you come to any conclusion?' The Stanton cleared its throat, then got out a folded linen handkerchief and carefully blew its nose. 'It seems to me that time must move in strange jumps, passing over intervening epochs. But why it would do that, or even how, I do not know. At a certain point the mind cannot fathom anything further.

If you pet a dog in a PKD novel, get ready for the dog to melt and in the puddle will be a slip of paper that reads "SOFT-DRINK STAND.

That's why their lives are worse than ours; they can't give up and die - they have to go on.

A man can be defined as an animal that carries a pocket handkerchief

Now I created a module from whole cloth. It was concise, not even a hundred lines of code, built in perfect symmetry around a single action. One by one, in exactly the right order, I suspended the arm’s motor control loops. Then I loaded the action directly into the PKD 2891 Stepper Motors, which most people didn’t realize you could do; they all had their own MCUs, with just enough memory for what came next. Then, one by one, I brought the motor control loops back online. I finished my new module, named it, tried to compile, was informed of several embarrassing syntax errors, corrected them, compiled again. I flashed the Vitruvian with the new code and said aloud, “Try again.” It plucked up an egg, moved it lightly into position, paused, and thwacked the egg against the rim of the bowl. Just after the thwack, my new module took over. The motor control loops went dark. The arm wasn’t running blind; it was more like … a blink. Not even a hundred milliseconds, during which my new module said: Just go for it. In the ArmOS codebase, as part of the Control package, I had created something new—a tiny space without feedback or self-awareness—and I had named it Confidence. The yolk flowed out with the albumen while the shell came apart cleanly in the Vitruvian’s six-fingered grip. The arm swiveled and dropped the shell neatly into the small bowl I had set up for that purpose—the bowl that had never before this moment actually been needed. I had solved the egg problem, and I had done so in the simplest way possible: not by adding code, but by taking it away. During the blink, the Vitruvian was no longer caught in a wash of continuous feedback. It was no longer second-guessing its second guesses a thousand times every second.

Psychosis, it seemed to some, was in the air. One unhappy host played Phil a copy of Marshall McLuhan's 1968 LP The Medium is the Massage, an audio collage inspired by the resonating global echo chamber that McLuhan believed formed a new electronic form of “acoustic space.” When the recording began, Dick clapped his hands over his ears and screamed, “Turn it off! Turn it off! It sounds like the inside of my head when I go mad and have to go the hospital.

Não é que as pessoas já não acreditem nela [publicidade] ou a tenham aceitado como rotina. É que, se ela fascinava por este poder de simplificação de todas as linguagens, este poder é-lhe hoje subtraído por um outro tipo de linguagem ainda mais simplificado e, logo, mais operacional: as linguagens informáticas. O modelo de sequência, de banda sonora e de banda-imagem que a publicidade nos oferece, a par com os outros grandes media, o modelo de perequação combinatória de todos os discursos que ela propõe, este contínuum ainda retórico de sons, de signos, de sinais, de slogans que ela domina como ambiente total, está largamente ultrapassado, justamente na sua função de estímulo, pela banda magnética, pelo continuum electrónico que está a perfilar-se no horizonte deste fim de século. O microprocesso, a digitalidade, as linguagens cibernéticas vão muito mais longe no mesmo sentido da simplificação absoluta dos processos do que a publicidade fazia ao seu humilde nível, ainda imaginário e espectacular. E é porque estes sistemas vão mais longe, que polarizam hoje o fascínio outrora concedido à publicidade. E a informação, no sentido informático do termo, que porá fim, que já põe fim, ao reino da publicidade. É isto que assusta e é isto que apaixona. A «paixão» publicitária deslocou-se para os computadores e para a miniaturização informática da vida quotidiana. A ilustração antecipadora desta transformação era o papoula de K. Ph. Dick, este implante publicitário transistorizado, espécie de ventosa emissora, de parasita electrónico que se fixa ao corpo e de que este tem muita dificuldade em libertar-se. Mas o papoula é ainda uma forma intermediária: é já uma espécie de prótese incorporada, mas recita ainda mensagens publicitárias. Um híbrido, pois, mas prefiguração das redes psicotrópicas e informáticas de pilotagem automática dos indivíduos, ao lado do qual o «condicionamento» publicitário parece uma deliciosa peripécia.

I had insight and yet I did not; one part of me knew and understood, the rest seethe like a captured animal that yearns to get back to its own environment, it's own familiar places.

Philip K. Dick could have been Japanese. He seemed to know a lot about how the world is never what it looks like. That’s pretty much Japan through and through.