* In this passage, Dick anticipates some of the most revolutionary physics of the late twentieth century, especially Edward Fredkin’s idea that underlying quantum mechanics and particle physics is a digital substructure, from which the former phenomena emerge as a result of its computations. There is an interesting tension between imagining the computer as the lowest, most fundamental level of reality, which is Fredkin’s position, and Dick’s vision here that the computer is somehow above the phenomenal world. While one may suppose that Dick’s meta-computer would be the ultimate cognitive machine (hence Dick’s identification of it with “God”), the implication of intentionality and meta-consciousness would not be a necessary (or even a possible) consequence of Fredkin’s notion of a computer at the lowest level of reality. In both cases, however, the positing of a digital machine leads to the important consequence that reality is fundamentally discrete rather than continuous. Time and space, in Fredkin’s view, operate like the frames of a movie. Rather than the continuous fabric of reality we think we experience with time and space, both are actually discrete, and the illusion of continuity is created because the frames flash too fast for us to detect.—NKH
* With this folder, Dick returns to handwriting, and from here on out the folder contents are increasingly scattered. One folder may include chunks of several distinct entries, suggesting an indeterminate amount of missing material. At least some of the rearranging is clearly deliberate: several long folders (81, 89, 90, 91) continue to use the Roman numerals that started with folder 1, as if he is picking and choosing from Exegesis entries with some editorial purpose (though the logic of these choices is, unsurprisingly, enigmatic). He also begins to introduce alphabetic letters to his numbering system, which significantly help the work of sequencing, though questions remain: there are at least three distinct alphabetical sequences in 1981 and ’82, none of them complete. Rather than attempt to reconstruct the scattered entries, we have opted in almost every case to present existing folders as is; exceptions will be noted.—PJ
† Throughout this folder, Dick reflects on VALIS in light of the novel’s publication in February 1981.—PJ
‡ Dick’s claim for the “revolutionary and political purpose in the style” strikes me as astute, if immodest. This reminds us again how Dick’s late-life novelistic triumphs in VALIS and Transmigration, as well as in A Scanner Darkly earlier, depend on his reintegration of his abandoned mainstream aspirations and therefore display “anamnesis” of his earlier study of his would-be midcentury cohort. In a 1962 letter he advised an aspiring science fiction writer: “Read great writers like James Joyce and Pascal and Styron and Herb Gold and Philip Roth.” He added: “Avoid other people interested in writing.”—JL
* Dick is no more a philosopher or theologian than were Vincent van Gogh or L. Ron Hubbard. Dick was one of the most important American novelists of the last half of the twentieth century, and what he offered wasn’t the clarity and rigor of a philosophical vision but the imagination and ambiguity of a literary one. The “philosophy” is erratic, even crackpot; but joined to the act of storytelling—and more importantly, joined to the act of creating characters as fucked up as their author—the result was a synthesis of imagination and idea that spoke more profoundly than any “philosophy” to the questions of Dick’s work: What’s the nature of reality? What’s the nature of humanity? What’s the nature of God?—SE
† There is something deeply illuminating about Dick’s declaration that he is not a novelist but a fictionalizing philosopher whose concern is not art but truth. We are here in an apparent paradox, where the concern with truth, the classical goal of the philosopher, is not judged to be in opposition to fiction, but a consequence of fiction and a work of fiction. I think this puts Dick in the same neighborhood as that other self-consciously fictionalizing philosopher: Nietzsche.—SC
* After seven years of spinning an astonishing plethora of theories, the fact that Dick can now admit to his “failure” to provide a “workable” explanation is remarkable. His insight here that the abstract emerges from the noisy particulars of the world, rather than, as in the Platonic model, from an ideal reality of which empirical reality is a flawed copy, is a growing realization in science studies as well. In How the Laws of Physics Lie (1983) Nancy Cartwright argues that all that ever actually exists is the noise of the world, from which scientific “laws” are abstracted. In a very different sense, contemporary interpretations of quantum mechanics provide similar insights. Nobel Prize winner Murray Gell-Mann and his collaborator James Hartle have proposed that in the “quantum fog” represented as probability clouds, certain consistent world histories “decohere” (assume definite trajectories) and stabilize at a coarse-grained level of reality larger than the quantum scale. We might analogize their vision to tiny demons knitting the fabric of the universe according to different instructions. As such, the stabilities that constitute scientific “laws” emerge from a probabilistic froth at the quantum level in which different kinds of world trajectories are encoded. In this view, the froth counts as the ultimate reality and the stability as the epiphenomenon, as Dick intuited.—NKH
* This passage presents a supernaturalist theory of divine action: Christ acts on the world only by miracle, and never as a result of predictable, materialist, or mechanical causes. More fundamentally, however, it shows Dick’s preoccupation with freedom from determinism: Christ is not constrained by the same forces that limit created beings and objects. He is an effect without a cause. We see this same rejection of determinism throughout the Exegesis: even when presenting reality as a moral test with a “right” answer, Dick is concerned to show that we must not be aware of the test, lest our actions be guided by the knowledge of a reward. For all his searching for the rules that govern reality, Dick is deeply dubious that God would impose unappealable rules on his creations. This issue will arise again later in Dick’s consideration of the replacement of the Creator’s rigid law with Christ’s merciful love.—GM
* Dick here refers to Charles Hartshorne, who developed Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy into a full-fledged school of theological thought. Whitehead described a reality made up not of things but of a procession of events. Hartshorne, picking up from Whitehead’s own theological exploration of this idea, depicts God as an absolute being in constant flux, relationally connected with and constantly affected by the universe. Dick’s conception of the dialectical nature of both reality and deity dovetails strongly with process theology. But Hartshorne also insisted on the absolute free will of the universe and all within it—an idea that the more deterministic Dick does not seem to carry over into his subsequent exploration of reality as a binary system.—GM