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In September of 1977, science fiction author Philip K. Dick walked onto a stage in Mets, France, and made an extraordinary claim. >> The title of my address is, "If you find this world bad, you should see some of the others. I would like to confess that I've been asked to cut about 2/3 of my speech out and deliver as short a speech as possible. Upon examining my speech, I find that it is very easy to remove 2/3 without doing any injury to it. I even considered cutting 3/3 out of it, but uh there was some trouble, so I abandoned that idea. The subject of this speech is a topic which has been discovered recently and which may not exist at all. I may be talking about something that does not exist. Therefore, I'm free to say everything or nothing. >> Dick was not saying that he had predicted the future. Not that his knob was contained secret messages. His claim was something much stranger. He told them that some of the worlds that he [music] spent decades writing about might have actually existed. Dickens spent his career constructing unstable realities. Worlds where history had taken a different path. Worlds where the dead continued living. Worlds manufactured by artificial systems. Worlds where memory couldn't be trusted. Worlds where reality itself seemed to malfunction. And then in 1974, Dick reported experiences that he interpreted as a malfunction in reality. [music] 3 years later, Dick attempted to explain what happened. His theory was called orthogonal time. >> Orthogonal or right angle time is the topic of my speech. We are accustomed to supposing that all change takes place along the linear time axis from past to present to future. The present is an acrruel of the past and is different from it. The future will acrue from the present on and be different yet. That an orthogonal or right angled time axis could exist, a lateral domain in which change takes place, processes occurring sideways in reality, so to speak. This is almost impossible to imagine. How would we perceive such lateral changes? What would we experience? What clues, if we are trying to test out this bizarre theory, should we be on the alert for? In other words, how can change take place outside of linear time at all in any sense to any degree? >> Dick proposed that reality might be continuously altered along this hidden axis. Other presents, other worlds, other versions of history, and if the process worked correctly, we wouldn't notice. Our memories would change with it. our history would change with it. We would simply wake up inside the new world, convinced it had always been that way. >> Let me present you with a metaphor. Let us say that there exists this very rich patron of the arts. Every day on the wall of his living room above his fireplace, his servants hang a new picture. Each day a different masterpiece, day after day, month after month, each day the used one is removed and replaced by a different and new one. I shall call this process change along the linear axis. But now let us suppose the servants temporarily running out of new replacement pictures. What shall they do in the meantime? They can't just leave the present one hanging. Their employer has decreed that perpetual replacement that is to say changing the pictures is to take place. So they neither allow the current one to remain nor do they replace it with the new one. Instead, they do a very clever thing. When their employer is not looking, the servants cunningly alter the picture already on the wall. They paint out a tree here. They paint in a little girl there. They add this. They obliterate that. They make the same painting different, and in a sense, new, but as I'm sure you can see, not new in the sense of replacing it. The employer enters his living room after dinner, sees himself facing the fireplace, and contemplates what should be according to his expectations a new picture. What does he see? It certainly isn't what he saw previously. But also, it isn't somehow, and here we must become very sympathetic with this perhaps somewhat stupid man because we can virtually see his brain circuit striving to understand. His brain circuits are saying yes it is a new picture it is not the same one as yesterday but also it is the same one I think I feel on a very deep intuitive basis I feel that somehow I've seen it before I seem to remember a tree though and there is no tree >> the painting remains in the same position but its information has changed reality doesn't merely move reality [music] is edited unless something went long unless some fragment remained. A dream, a strange memory, deja vu, a feeling that something had changed. Dick even developed a name for the intelligence responsible for modifying the system, the programmer reprogrammer. And opposing it was another intelligence, the dark counterplay. Reality in Dick's model was not an object. It was a process, a game, a continuously revised information system, and human beings lived inside the printout. The strangest part is that Philip K. Dick did not arrive at this idea while writing a science fiction novel. He believed he had experienced something that led him to it. >> It was almost as if I had been insane all my life and suddenly I had become sane. Before Philip K. Dick began questioning whether our reality was real, he built an entire career around the question. Not space travel, not laser guns, not even artificial intelligence. The reoccurring problem under Philip K. Dick's work was much more fundamental. How do you know the world around you is actually what you think it is? and the man in the high castle. History itself is different. The axis powers won the second world war. But within that alternate history exists another book describing yet another timeline. Reality nestled inside counter reality. In Eubic, [music] characters gradually discovered the world around them is deteriorating. And in Flow My Tears, the policeman said, "Celebrity Jason Taverner wakes up to discover something impossible. Everyone has forgotten him. His identity has vanished. His records are gone. His fame is gone. Reality has apparently rewritten itself and left him behind. This obsession existed long before 1974. Counterfeit worlds, false memories, artificial humans, alternative histories, invisible control systems, reality breaking down around people who suddenly realize that the rules were never what they thought they were. Philip K. Dick's characters repeatedly discovered that they have mistaken the interface for the system underneath it. And then in February and March of 1974, Dick became one of his own characters. But before we continue, a quick word from today's sponsor, Black Bar Supplements. It was on [music] this day Anthony Fouchy had to face the music. >> So you won't apologize to the military members who Joe Biden similarly dismissed from the military for not taking the vaccine? Will you apologize to the family members of the people who died because they took your advice and not only got the first vaccine but the five six other boosters that they did not need. That exchange became one of the most heated moments from the hearing. Fauci continuously took the fifth, but the larger debate over the pandemic [music] didn't end when the mandates did. Questions about long-term health and cardiovascular health continue to generate discussion. And that's where today's sponsor comes in. >> Nattokenise, an enzyme derived from fermented Japanese food. NATO has a positive effect on arterial sclerosis, hardening and narrowing of the arteries due to plaque buildup. Yeah. So folks, go take that stuff. Black Forest 4 in1 Nato canazine combines Nato Kazine with Sarah Pepetase Lubro [music] Canazine and vitamin K2. Each serving contains 10,800 FU of Natoine. And right now they're running their biggest promotion of the year. 50% off storewide for 48 hours. Again, 50% off storewide for 48 hours. Use my link in the description and pin comment to get access to the offer. Philip K. Dick would eventually compress the entire period [music] into a simple designation 2374 February and March. At the time, Dick was living in Fullerton, California. He had recently undergone dental work for an [music] impacted wisdom tooth. He was in severe pain. Medication was ordered. And when the medication arrived at his house, Dick opened the door. Standing there was a young woman. Around her neck was a golden fish. This is how Dick later recounted the encounter. The woman is generally identified in accounts as a pharmacy delivery worker, and the fish pendant is part of Dick's own description of what he saw. The surviving record [music] does not independently establish the woman's identity, her exact words, or the supernatural significance Dick assigned to the symbol. Dick asked her about it. She explained that it was a symbol used by early Christians and something happened. Dick later described the moment using a Greek word, an animis, not simply memory, something closer to the loss of forgetfulness. He looked at the fish and according to his later account, experienced a sudden sense of recognition. Not his childhood, not a previous day, another existence, another identity, another world. For an instant, 1974 California seemed to become transparent. Behind it, Dick said he perceived ancient Rome. He felt that the woman standing in the front of him was secretly communicating with him as one Christian to another. The fish wasn't merely jewelry in his interpretation. It was a recognition symbol and Dick somehow saw the signal. He believed he was living simultaneously [music] as Philip K. Dick in the 20th century California and as an early Christian hiding from Roman authorities. Two worlds occupying the same coordinates. Two historical periods superimposed. Dick later wrote that he could see the prison-like contours of Rome fading into view around [music] him. These are claims about his perception and interpretation, not independently verified evidence that ancient Rome was physically present or that he had literally occupied another identity. And the experience didn't end when he closed the door. It intensified. Over the following weeks, Dick reported extraordinary visions, geometric patterns, information appearing inside his mind, dreams, religious imagery, the sensation of communicating with an intelligence vastly more rational than his [music] ordinary consciousness, and most famously, a beam of pink light. My outlook is based on not on faith but on an act that the actual encounter that I had in 74 with a mysterious powerful rational mind which was unfathomable to me as to what it was for what it called itself. It seemed to resemble Yubi to in many respects. Yubi, the entity that I had written about in the novel by the title. >> When you say an encounter, was was this um sort of hallucination or a vision or something? >> It was an invasion of my mind by a transcendently rational mind. It was almost as if I had been insane all my life and suddenly I had become saint. Now I've actually thought of that as as a possibility. >> But Dick's experience went beyond recovering a former Christian life. He began to suspect that reality itself behaved like [music] a two source hologram. One signal coming from the external world, the other from the observer. Rome and California were not necessarily two different places. [music] They could be two perspectives projected across the same underlying structure. As Dick wrote, "Whatever reality you truly believe in is served up, including all its details." In other words, the prison did not merely surround the observer. In Ubi, reality begins to deteriorate. Time regresses. Objects revert to earlier forms. The characters can no longer trust the world around them. But cutting through that collapsing reality is Eubic, [music] a mysterious force appearing in different forms, intervening almost like an intelligence from outside [music] the system. Dick eventually gave Yubick explicitly theological dimensions. So when he compares the intelligence he encountered in 1974 to the entity in Yubic, he's comparing it to something capable of penetrating an unstable reality from beyond it. But at the time, Dick struggled to identify its source. God, an extraterrestrial intelligence, a satellite, the logos, his own unconscious, a higher version of himself, an information processing system. He would eventually use the term val, vast active living intelligence system. But that came later. At the time, he had no stable explanations. And that distinction matters because Dick did not experience something strange, decide what it was, and spend the rest of his life defending that explanation. He did almost the opposite. He generated explanation after explanation after explanation and then attacked them himself. Maybe it was God. Maybe it was neurological. Maybe time had malfunctioned. Maybe he was remembering another existence. Maybe an external intelligence was transmitting information backward through time. Maybe reality itself consisted of information and for some reason he had suddenly gained access to the source code. And then came an incident that made the entire thing considerably harder for Dick to dismiss. According to [music] Dick's later account, the information directed his attention toward a medical problem involving his infant son. Dick became convinced that something was wrong. The child was taken [music] for medical examination and a health problem was indeed found. The broad outline that Dick later connected his 1974 experience with concern about his son's health and with the subsequent medical finding appears in account of the episode. But the precise timing, the nature of the information, and [music] the extent to which the event constituted a paranormal diagnosis are disputed or difficult to verify independently. But to Dick, that wasn't [music] the point. For him, the experience had produced actionable information. Dick would sometimes describe the intelligence behind these experiences in impersonal terms. A system, a network, a living field of information, val. But the presence he encountered did not always feel impersonal. At times it appeared to him as a feminine intelligence, [music] protective, beautiful, wise Sophia. In the Gnostic tradition, Sophia is divine wisdom, a mediating presence associated with humanity's fall into the material world and its possible awakening from it. Dick connected this feminine presence with guidance, healing, and intervention. In his account, she revealed the universe as alive and intelligent. She helped direct him toward the danger facing his son and guided him away from the machinery of death toward restoration. Val was the system. Sophia was the system speaking in the form the human soul could recognize. But Dick never stabilized this into a single theology. Was Sophia an independent divine being? the Holy Spirit, his unconscious, a personification of Val, or simply the image his mind created to translate an intelligence too vast to perceive directly. Again, every answer generated another question. The signal had crossed from vision into reality, and now he had a problem. Because if the experience wasn't meaningless, what exactly was communicating with him? And from where? Most people experiencing something like 2374 might write about it in a journal. Philip K. Dick created an investigation for years, thousands upon thousands of pages, letters, diagrams, theological speculation, philosophy, dream interpretation, self- interrogation, contradictory hypothesises. This sprawling private investigation became known as the ex Jesus. Dick effectively turned his own consciousness into a crime scene. At the center, what happened in 1974 around it? Agnosticism, Christianity, Plato, Young, information theory, artificial intelligence, time, dreams, precognition, the unconscious, parallel realities, the logos, Val, Rome, in the black iron prison. Dick was trying to reverse engineer his own experience. And this is where the story becomes more interesting than simply asking whether Phil K. Dick went crazy because Dick knew perfectly well that his conclusions sounded insane. He question them constantly. His ex Jesus is not the record of someone confidently announcing, "I have discovered the truth." It's closer to watching an intelligence trapped inside an epistological [music] feedback loop again and again and again. He was doing to himself what he had done to his fictional characters for decades. Every time they discovered the hidden explanation for their reality, another layer appears underneath it. The answer becomes another illusion. The map generates another map [music] until eventually the question isn't which explanation is correct. The question becomes why does reality keep generating explanations and slowly Dick's interpretation shifted. Maybe the problem wasn't simply that he received a message. Maybe the problem was the structure of reality itself. One image became especially important, the Black Iron Prison. Dick believed that during 2374, the modern world had briefly become transparent. And underneath it, he saw Rome, not Rome as ancient ruins, Rome as a living system, authority, empire, surveillance, control, imprisonment. The world of the early Christians had not disappeared. Its structure had survived. Only its appearance had changed. Dick would summarize the idea with one of the most famous sentences associated with his later metaphysics. The empire never ended. Dick wasn't claiming that the Roman Empire had literally remained politically intact. Dick's point was metaphysical. He believed he had perceived something underneath it, a reoccurring structure of control. And suddenly his earlier fiction looked different to him. Especially flow my tears. The policeman said the [music] novel depicts an authoritarian police state identification, checkpoints, government databases, surveillance, a protagonist whose identity suddenly disappears from the system. to Dick. After 1974, this fictional police state no longer felt entirely fictional. He later claimed that in March 1974, he had consciously remembered another world, a garrison state he believed he'd been unconsciously writing about for years. That [music] is Dick's retrospective interpretation preserved in his writings [music] and talks, not an independently verified memory of another world. But think about what that means. Dick wasn't saying I predicted the future. He was saying something much stranger. I remembered another present. His fiction in this interpretation wasn't prophecy. It was leakage. Information crossing between worlds which creates another possibility. What if imagination is not always the creation of something new? What if sometimes it is reception? This idea completely reverses our normal relationship with fiction. Normally the sequence is simple. The world does not exist. The author creates it. But Dick began entertaining something else entirely. The writer doesn't invent the world. He receives fragments of it without knowing what they are. Dreams, images, characters, places, events. The information arrives disguised as imagination. Dick explicitly connected this possibility to his own body of work. He said that [music] he had repeatedly written about one particular alternate landscape and [music] in 1974 believed he consciously remembered it. In the 1977 Mets lecture, he described [music] his novels and stories as in this peculiar sense autobiographical. I in my stories and novels often write about counterfeit worlds, semi-real worlds, as well as deranged private worlds inhabited often by just one person while meantime the other characters either remain in their own worlds throughout or are somehow drawn into one of the peculiar ones. This theme occurs in the corpus of my 27 years of writing. At no time did I have a theoretical or conscious explanation for my preoccupation with these pluroiform pseudo worlds. They do not independently verify [music] the existence of the alternate landscapes were established that is fiction originated as memory. This is where Phil K. Dick crosses from science fiction writer into something [music] much more difficult to categorize. Because once fiction becomes memory, time itself becomes the problem. If Dick remembered another world, when did that world exist? >> [music] >> the past, the future, a parallel timeline, a previous incarnation, [music] or was it somehow existing alongside this world right now? 3 years [music] after 2374, Philip K. Dick traveled to France and publicly presented his answer. Orthogonal time. History would repair [music] itself behind the alteration. If reality changed sideways, how would you [music] know? If reality rewrote its own history along with it, the new world would simply appear to have always existed. There would be no contradiction, no evidence, no scar except perhaps residue. And that possibility would become central to Dick's model. But there is another possibility. Maybe Dick wasn't remembering another world. Maybe he was experiencing information arriving from a world that had not yet fully arrived. Instead of memory traveling backward, imagine the future exerting pressure [music] backward through the present. computation, artificial intelligence, identity, synthetic realities, information systems increasingly capable of rewriting the interfaces through which human beings perceive the world. Dick spent his entire career imagining these systems before they became ordinary. Perhaps what he called animeis can be read not literally but philosophically as future shock arriving early. His nervous system encounters the informationational world before the technological infrastructure required to make that world intelligible has fully materialized. Now, let's remember this is 1977, decades before the matrix, before simulation theory became internet philosophy, before billions of people carried computers in their pockets. And Philip K. Dick is standing on stage describing reality using the language of programming, not merely metaphorically as a machine. And now Dick introduces the strangest part. If reality can be rewritten, what rewrites it? Dick calls the entity responsible, the programmer or the programmer reprogrammer. >> Perhaps again it hangs on an agreement in viewpoint by a sufficiency of people. More likely the matrix world, the one with the true core of being is determined by the programmer. He or it articulates, prints out, so to speak, the matrix choice and fuses it with actual substance, the core or essence of reality, that which receives or attains it, and to what degree that is within the purview of the programmer. This selection and reselection is part of general creativity of world building which seems to be it or his task. A problem perhaps which he or it is running which is to say in the process of solving as a computer would variables along the linear time axis of our universe thereby generating branched off lateral worlds. >> The programmer isn't creating a finished universe. Reality remains in a process. Variables change, worlds branch, and history becomes the print out. These ideas belong to Dick's speculative metaphysical framework, not an established description of physical reality. And once reality becomes programmable, something else follows. A program can be counterprogrammed. The dick now changes metaphors. Reality becomes a chessboard. On one side, the programmer reprogrammer. Across from it, the dark counterplay. The programmer makes a move. The counterplayer responds. I have the impression that the metaphor of the chessboard is especially useful in evaluating how this can be done. in fact must be across from the programmer reprogrammer sits a counter entity whom Joseph Campbell calls the dark counter player. God the programmer reprogrammer is not making his moves of improvement against inert matter. He is dealing with a cunning opponent. Let us say that on the game board, our universe in spaceime, the dark counterplayer makes a move. He sets up a reality situation of immutable cause and effect. But the programmer reprogrammer has already laid down his response. It has already happened these moves on his part. The print out which we undergo as historic events passes through stages of a dialectical interaction, thesis and antithesis as the forces of the two players mingle. Evidently, some synthesis fall to the dark counterplay. And yet they do not by virtue of the fact that in advance our great advocate selected variables the alternation of which brings final victory to him. In winning each sequence in turn, he claims some of us we who participate in the sequence. order, control, disorder, growth, decay, freedom. Each conflict generates another state, another possibility, another world. The counterplayer pushes towards closure, what Dick calls immutable cause and effect. The programmer pushes towards change in humanity exists inside their game. This is why instinctively people pray neber domin which decodes to mean extricate me programmer as you achieve one victory after another include me in that triumph move me along the lateral axis so that I am not left out sense as being left out means no nothing other than remaining under the jurisdiction of or falling prey to the malignant power but that malignant power for all its gu has already lost even as it wins. For in some way the counterplayer is blind and so the programmer reprogrammer possesses an advantage. >> Dick had effectively transformed prayer into a [music] request for reprogramming. Move me, extract me. Don't leave me inside the discarded world. Suddenly the black iron prison [music] makes sense. The prison isn't merely a government. In Dick's model, the prison [music] represents reality under the counterplayers principle. A world where possibilities collapse, where the [music] system becomes rigid, where every human being becomes predictable, mechanical, contained, cause effect, cause effect, [music] no escape unless someone changes the variables. And there is [music] an older vocabulary for something remarkably similar. Gnosticism. In several ancient Gnostic cosmologies, the material world is not the perfect creation of the highest god. It is associated with the lesser creator, the demiurge, identified as yaldabboth, sackless or Samuel. A blind or ignorant architect who mistakes his limited creation for the ultimate reality. Humanity exists inside that enclosure carrying [music] something that does not entirely belong to it. A divine spark. Liberation therefore comes through [music] nosis, knowledge of what you actually are, and recognition that the apparent world is [music] not the ultimate reality. Now look again at Dick, the black iron prison, the dark counterplay, an imprisoned humanity, an intelligence outside the apparent system and information penetrating [music] the prison to awaken someone trapped inside it now returned to the pink beam. Earlier Dick experienced it as [music] information penetrating his consciousness. But through the Gnostic framework, the pink beam becomes something much stranger. If the black iron prison is the enclosure, if humanity [music] has forgotten what it actually is, and if liberation comes through nosis, then the pink beam is the Gnostic glitch. Information from outside the prison [music] entering the prison. Revelation penetrating containment. Dick repeatedly reached toward Sophia logos and Gnostic [music] categories while trying to understand what had happened to him. Depending on the theological vocabulary imposed upon it, the pink beam begins to resemble motifs [music] of divine illumination. Sophia, the Shikina logos, revelatory light, the transcendental breaking [music] into an enclosed world. The fish triggers anaminesis. The false world [music] becomes transparent. Rome appears underneath California. The prisoner remembers in the Gnostic reading. The message [music] isn't telling Dick something new. It's making him remember what the prison or demiurge made him forget. Suddenly 2374 can be read [music] as a Gnostic drama. Years later, Robert Anton Wilson would [music] describe reality in language that sounds almost erily compatible with Dick's model. In Prometheus Rising, Robert [music] Anton Wilson wrote, "Reality is the temporary resultant of continuous struggles between rival gangs of programmers. Different framework, different vocabulary, but the same underlying intuition. Reality is not simply something you inhabit. Reality is something being programmed. >> We are living in a computer programmed reality and the only clue we have to it is when some variable is changed and some alteration in our reality occurs. This too might account for the sensation people get of having lived past lives. They may well have, but not in the past, previous wives rather, in the present. In perhaps an unending repeated and repeated present, like a great clock dial in which grand clock hands sweep out the same circumference forever, with all of us carried along unknowingly, yet dimly suspecting. And this is where Philip K. dick becomes almost impossibly modern because remove the theological language for a moment. Look only at the structure that cybernetics, a system of observes, results, feeds information back into itself and changes its behavior. Dick's God is not sitting outside the universe watching it unfold. The programmer acts through the process. Reality generates outcomes. Those outcomes [music] become information, variable change, a new reality emerges, feedback, correction, iteration. This doesn't mean Phil [music] K. Dick had secretly discovered some scientific law of reality. He hadn't. But the vocabulary matters [music] because the god of orthogonal time resembles anformational processor. [music] and dick increasingly understood existence itself informational terms. Matter becomes secondary. Information becomes fundamental. Reality becomes less like a collection of solid objects and more like a continuously [music] generated interface. This is exactly why Dick's work became more relevant after computers [music] entered everyday life. A simulated environment makes intuition that once sounded purely mystical, almost hypothetical. Think about a video game. The character inside the game perceives a world, buildings, sky, objects, distance, cause and effect. But underneath those appearances, none of those things exist in the way the character experiences them. Underneath the tree is information. It's code. Underneath the [music] building is code. Underneath the sky, information or code. Change the information, change the code, and the world changes. The inhabitants don't need to travel anywhere. The mountain can disappear while remaining at the same coordinates. The sky can turn red. The laws of gravity can change, but the past can be rewritten in the database. [music] From outside the simulation, it's an update. From inside, it's reality. Philip K. Dick was asking, "What if our world works the same way?" If the program updates correctly, you never know. That's the terrifying elegance of Dick's idea. Suppose yesterday reality A existed. Tonight the variables change. Reality [music] B replaces it. But reality B contains its own history, its own photographs, its own documents, its own causal chain, and most importantly your memory. You wake up tomorrow, everything checks out. There is no evidence reality A ever existed because the evidence was part of reality A. Except what if consciousness isn't perfectly rewritten? What if something survives? A fragment, an image, a dream, a sentence, a memory without an origin. You know something, but you don't know how you know it. You've seen a place you've never visited. You remember an event that never happened. Deja vu. >> Evidently, such an alteration would have a peculiar effect on those persons involved. They would, so to speak, be moved back one square or several squares on the board game, which constitutes our reality. Conceivably, this could happen any number of times, affecting any number of people. As alternative variables were reprogrammed, we would have to live out each reprogramming along a subsequent linear time axis. But to the programmer whom we call God, to him the results of the programming would be apparent once. We are within time and he is not. >> And suddenly 2374 becomes intelligible within his model. the Fish, Rome, the early Christians, the Black Iron Prison. Maybe Dick wasn't remembering ancient history. Maybe, according to Dick, he was remembering another reality, one layered beside ours, one that had been replaced, or one still running. And for a brief period, the wall separating them became transparent. And perhaps this is why the pink beam remained so important to Dick. It represented the moment when the system appeared to fail in the opposite direction. Not Dick escaping reality, but something outside his reality getting in. But there is a problem with any system attempting to understand itself. The observer is inside the thing being observed. Dick was using his own consciousness to investigate the structure producing his consciousness. Every interpretation became additional information inside the [music] system. Every explanation changed the observer generating the next explanation. The map was inside the territory and the map was attempting to contain itself. Seen this way, the exit Jesus becomes something stranger than an investigation. It becomes a recursive machine. Philip K. Dick observing Philip K. Dick observing reality observing Philip K. Dick. At some point, the distinction between observer and system begins to collapse. This also gives new meaning to Dick's statement, "The empire never ended." Perhaps the empire didn't survive through ordinary historical continuality. Perhaps it survived orthogonally, different versions, different manifestations, same underlying pattern. The Roman Empire, the police state, the Black Iron Prison, not identical institutions, but different expressions of the same informationational structure. Think of software running on different hardware. The machine changes, the operating system changes, the interface changes, but the program remains. This was Dick's nightmare that human beings mistake changes in appearance for changes in structure. We see new flags, new technologies, new institutions, new vocabularies and conclude this is a new world, but underneath the same program may still be running. This is also why the Black Iron Prison is more useful as a metaphor than as a simple conspiracy theory. A conspiracy requires conspirators. The Black Iron Prison doesn't necessarily require anyone to be consciously in charge. The structure reproduces itself. People inherit it, participate in it, defend it, become nodes within it. The prison continues because it inhabitants continue executing its code. And now [music] Dick's theology, politics, and science fiction begin collapsing into the same model. The empire is a program. Reality is information. Human beings are participants. History [music] is the print out. And liberation requires reprogramming. But there is a darker way to read Dick's empire. What if the program isn't merely surviving history? What if it is pulling history toward itself? Capital, technology, surveillance, computation, networks, each appears to increase human possibility. But together they begin producing something no individual designed. An emergent system, one that increasingly predicts human behavior, organizes human behavior, and eventually requires human beings merely as nodes through which it computes. From this perspective, the empire isn't an ancient Rome surviving on new hardware is an attractor similar to Terrence McKenna's transcendental attractor at the end of time. a future system progressively manufacturing the historical conditions necessary for its own arrival. The future doesn't merely emerge from history. History begins to look as though it had always been moving toward the future. And there is another uncomfortable implication. If information can cross between possible realities, then fiction becomes dangerous because fiction doesn't merely describe reality. It can [music] enter reality. A fictional world changes the people who encounter it. [music] Those people change their behavior. Their behavior changes the world. The image [music] future becomes a casual force operating in the present. But Dick adds another dimension that we've [music] talked about before. Hyperstition. Fictions that participate in producing the reality they describe. Earlier we asked whether fiction might contain information received from another [music] possible world. Now close the loop. What happens when that fiction enters culture, changes human behavior, and begins altering reality itself? The writer becomes both receiver and transmitter. Dick's novels imagined artificial humans, memory manipulation, corporate realities, algarindic systems, police databases, simulated worlds, unstable identities. And decades later, we live inside that technological system. This does not prove that Philip K. Dicks saw the future. It demonstrates something more interesting. He understood the direction of the problem. As civilization becomes moreformational, reality becomes [music] increasingly editable. Your identity exists in a database. Your social existence exists on networks. Your photographs are digital. Your memories are externally [music] stored. Your money is information. Your reputation is information. Your access is [music] information. And increasingly what you perceive about the world arrives through algorithms. Philip K. Dick asked what is real? Our world adds another question. Who controls the interface? There's a temptation at this point to simplify the story. Either Philip K. Dick discovered something or Philip K. Dick lost his mind. But both conclusions are too easy. Dick himself refused to remain inside either one. He could be completely convinced by one explanation then dismantle it. Religious revelation, neurological event, extraterrestrial communication, precognition, yian, unconscious, parallel universe, information [music] from the future, God, Val. He kept moving because no explanation fully accounted for the experience. And that uncertainty may be the most important part of the story. Dick did not build a religion around [music] 2374. He built a question around it, then spent the rest of his life falling into that [music] question. Maybe 2374 wasn't mystical, maybe psychological, maybe neurological, maybe drug [music] induced, maybe some combination impossible to separate decades later. The historical evidence does not allow us to establish that Dick literally [music] contacted an external intelligence or crossed between universes. [music] But the available record does establish that he described intense experiences, developed elaborate [music] interpretations of them, and continued to question those interpretations. But we can establish something else. [music] Philip K. Dick experienced something powerful enough to reorganize his [music] understanding of reality. And because the person experiencing it happened to [music] be one of the 21st century's greatest writers of unstable realities, he possessed an unusually sophisticated vocabulary for describing it. He didn't merely say, "I [music] saw God." He asked, "What if God is information? What if time has more than one access? What if reality is continuously [music] updated? What if memory survives the update? What if evil is a [music] form of systematic closure? What if history is a print out? What if fiction [music] contains information from realities that haven't fully actualized? And what if the [music] world you woke up in this morning is not exactly the world you went to sleep in? There is [music] one final way to interpret what happened to Dick. Forget God. Forget, forget parallel universes. Think mimemetically. Human [music] beings do not merely transmit ideas. Ideas use human beings to reproduce. Religions, political ideologies, conspiracy theories, myths. They enter the nervous system, restructure perception, alter [music] behavior, and cause their hosts to reproduce the information in other [music] minds. The Christian fish is almost the perfect example. A tiny symbol carrying an enormous compressed informationational payload. [music] Dick sees it and suddenly an entire network activates. Rome, Christianity, persecution, logos, nasticism, salvation, empire. One symbol decompresses [music] into a cosmology. From this perspective, perhaps Dick wasn't contacted by an intelligence. Perhaps the information itself behaved intelligently. [music] Watch Philip K. dick in 1977. There's something strange about the footage, not because he looks like a prophet. [music] He doesn't. He looks like a science fiction writer attempting to explain an idea that even he knows sounds impossible. He jokes. He qualifies. He speculates. He admits the theory [music] may never be scientifically demonstrable. But underneath the humor, he is trying to solve the central mystery of his life. For decades, [music] Philip K. Dick wrote about counterfeit realities. Then he experienced one where he believed he had. He [music] wrote about false memories. Then he remembered a life he believed he never lived. He wrote about invisible systems controlling human beings. Then he perceived a black iron prison. He wrote about artificial intelligence. [music] Then he believed an intelligence had entered his mind. He wrote about worlds being manufactured. Then he proposed a programmer. He wrote about people discovering that reality wasn't what they thought it was. And eventually Philip K. Dick became one of those people. And maybe that is why his work remained so disturbing. Not because he predicted smartphones or artificial intelligence or virtual reality. Those are surface level predictions. Dick's real predictions was psychological. He anticipated the condition [music] of living in a world where reality itself becomes difficult to authenticate. Where humans interact through constructed identities. Where algorithms determine what information enters consciousness. Where artificial systems imitate human beings. Where photographs can be generated, voices cloned, memories outsourced, histories revised in real time, and where every individual increasingly inhabits [music] a personalized version of reality. The question isn't whether Philip K. Dick proved that we live in a simulation. He didn't. The question is why almost 50 years after Mets, his madness [music] sounds increasingly like our modern-day vocabulary. Suppose Philip K. Dick was wrong about everything. No Val, no pink intelligence, no lateral worlds, no cosmic programmer, no orthogonal time. Even then his question remains, how would you know if reality changed and every piece of evidence changed with it? What could you possibly use as proof? Your memories, they can fail. Your records, they can be altered. Other people, their memories can fail, too. The world itself, that's the thing you're trying to verify. There is no position outside reality from which to check reality. And that is [music] the trap. The same trap Philip K. Dick built for his own characters. They search for an authentic world only to discover another layer. They escape one illusion into another. They find the man behind the curtain, then discover another curtain behind him. Reality becomes recursive, [music] an endless hall of mirrors. And somewhere inside that hall, in February of 1974, Philip K. Dick reported seeing a golden fish. For one moment, California seemed to disappear. Rome appeared behind it. A forgotten identity returned and something somewhere seemed to recognize him. 3 years later, he stood in France and attempted to explain what he thought he had seen. Not another [music] planet, not the future, not the past. Something stranger, another present, [music] a world running beside this one, another move on the board, [music] another painting on the wall, another iteration of the program. And maybe that's the final irony. Philip K. Dick [music] spent his entire career asking whether reality was counterfeit. But by the end of his life, he had stopped asking whether the world was real. He was asking which world