How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later

      "Maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a private world, a world different from those inhabited and experienced by all other humans. And that led me wonder, If reality differs from person to person, can we speak of reality singular, or shouldn't we really be talking about plural realities? And if there are plural realities, are some more true (more real) than others? What about the world of a schizophrenic? Maybe, it's as real as our world. Maybe we cannot say that we are in touch with reality and he is not, but should instead say, His reality is so different from ours that he can't explain his to us, and we can't explain ours to him. The problem, then, is that if subjective worlds are experienced too differently  there occurs a breakdown of communication... and there is the real illness."

~Phillip K. Dick, "How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later"

http://deoxy.org/pkd_how2build.htm#top

       For some reason, I took the crazy, outlandish ideas in The Man in the High Castle seriously and tried to analyze them, even though they were presented as fiction. However, as soon as I read in an essay that Dick believed we were living in a metaphysical bible plate, I instantly discounted his ideas, just because they were proposed more realistically. This, ironically, made them more preposterous. 

To Dick, however, I don't think there is a real difference between his fiction and his world; he even states that an author of "supposed fiction might write the truth and not know it." Many of his stories are based around 'real' encounters he had, most of them paralleling biblical stories. But he says that he read the corresponding parts of the bible years after his books were finished.  He writes about how he feels that "that somehow the world of the Bible is a literally real but veiled landscape, never changing, hidden from our sight, but available to us by revelation." Even though most of his personal philosophies are downright ludicrous, he raises a good question: what is reality? (He always raises that question)

       Now the idea of reality is blurry already, and it gets even more so when you're under the influence of Sodium thiopental, a barbiturate that induces hallucinations, comas and death, as Dick was during one of his most influential religious experiences. But his drug-hazes may help us understand what we understand as reality, whether at a higher, philosophical level, or simply in terms of our social and political world. We perceive the world as a series of stimuli. These stimuli are reality, which is defined by Dick as "that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." Though they are constant and real, they don't make a picture of our reality; they really make a connect-the-dots. We draw conclusions and build our own personal worlds from these connect-the-dots. Do we all connect our dots differently? The shape all depends on your perception. Politicians, it seems, can use the same statistics and facts to prove totally opposite points, all based on the way they frame it. We can do the same things in our political views, or even in our view of existence.

      What Dick is trying to do is implant the idea that we can't always assume our reality is the only one. There is the possibility that everyone could have a different reality, whether it's a simple interpretation of facts from the TV or the interpretation of the meaning of life.

http://www.theaunicornist.com/2010_06_01_archive.html