The man living in the High Castle
Location: Science and Fiction convention, Metz (FRA)
Date: 1977
This is the story of a man who lived on unseen in a High Castle. A Castle set so high it dominated
many underlying worlds. Worlds often insane in which, one day, he found himself living in.
The visionary American writer, Philip K. Dick is about to speak to an audience of young students
and fiction fans. The title of his talk says it all: “If you find this world bad, you should see some
others.”
You might find unusual this talk however not for a celebrity fiction writer. Indeed, his most notable
novel, “The Man in the High Castle”, is an alternative history where Nazi Germany and Japan rule
over the former United States depicting our daily life under the resulting undemocratic rule.
Let’s hear by his real voice what he says today to a shocked audience:
Changed by whom? Note the passive voice in his sentence. The meaning out of it is that each time a
variable of the computer simulation is changed, “an alternative world be branched off.”
Dick, who was gifted with a bizarre sense of humor, guarantees his audience several times that he is
earnest. In spite of that, looking at the video of this conference, (available on YouTube) you will
notice that the audience appears seemingly embarrassed or puzzled by his speech. The ironic thing
is that just a few decades later scientists and philosophers will repeat the same sentence, but they
will be taken much more seriously.
Whatever people thought when they first heard this weird hypothesis, it seems evident that Dick
surely had a gift for imagination at a time when our digital entertainment was, to use Elon Musk
words, just “two rectangles and a dot.”
In his stories and novels, Dick often wrote about counterfeit worlds. Semi-real worlds as well as
insane private worlds, often inhabited by few persons. He never had a theoretical or conscious
explanation for his caring about these alternative pseudo-worlds. According to his memories,
however, something suddenly happened: one day he claimed to remember not past lives but a
“different, quite different, present life.”
The consequence of these visions was that Dick came to believe that, quoting him, “some of my
fictional works were in a literal sense true”. Could it be that he was actually able to perceive the
existence of other realities? Recent discoveries in Quantum physics (the study of the physics of
subatomic particles) and in cosmology shed new light on how consciousness interacts with matter.
These findings call for acceptance of the idea that there far more universes exist than the one we are
dealing with: this is the so-called Multiverse theory and numerous physics theories independently
point to this conclusion. In a Multiverse, space and time would go on forever, yet it must start iterating at some point because there are a limited number of ways subatomic elements can be arranged in space and time.
By looking far enough, you would then see another version of you reading this book just with a
different pair of shoes. In another, you would see Dick’s Universe where the Nazi won the second
World War and landed their Swastika first on the Moon or maybe even one where the Roman
Empire didn’t ever fall.
Empowered by the Multiverse theory, every conceivable arrangement of matter and energy,
however improbable, is postulated to exist as a separate Universe. The peculiar elegance of this
argument is that there is not one single absolute reality, but an interaction of every single person's
perception with it.
To summarize, in the pantheon of thinkers, who recognized our Universe as a product of our
imagination, there was also an American sci-fi writer with a weird sense of humor. Today very few
people remember that crazy speech. Instead, the majority of the sci-fi fans owe him a debt of
gratitude for inspiring the cult movie “Blade Runner.”
Staged in the 21st century, this movie tells us of a corporation which develops human clones,
identified as replicants, to be enslaved in colonies outside the Earth. In 2019, a former police
officer, played by a young Harrison Ford, is hired to chase a fugitive group living undercover in Los
Angeles.
Blade Runner remains a leading example of neo-noir cinema and has been highly influential on
many subsequent science fiction films and video games. His most significant award was assigned to
his amazing soundtrack from Vangelis, which reveals the unexpected coldness held by the future. I
urge you to listen to it on headphones in the dark. Can you feel a sense of ...Matrix?
Date: 1977
This is the story of a man who lived on unseen in a High Castle. A Castle set so high it dominated
many underlying worlds. Worlds often insane in which, one day, he found himself living in.
The visionary American writer, Philip K. Dick is about to speak to an audience of young students
and fiction fans. The title of his talk says it all: “If you find this world bad, you should see some
others.”
You might find unusual this talk however not for a celebrity fiction writer. Indeed, his most notable
novel, “The Man in the High Castle”, is an alternative history where Nazi Germany and Japan rule
over the former United States depicting our daily life under the resulting undemocratic rule.
Let’s hear by his real voice what he says today to a shocked audience:
“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. These alterations feel just like deja
vu, a sensation that proves that a variable has been changed".
Changed by whom? Note the passive voice in his sentence. The meaning out of it is that each time a
variable of the computer simulation is changed, “an alternative world be branched off.”
Dick, who was gifted with a bizarre sense of humor, guarantees his audience several times that he is
earnest. In spite of that, looking at the video of this conference, (available on YouTube) you will
notice that the audience appears seemingly embarrassed or puzzled by his speech. The ironic thing
is that just a few decades later scientists and philosophers will repeat the same sentence, but they
will be taken much more seriously.
Whatever people thought when they first heard this weird hypothesis, it seems evident that Dick
surely had a gift for imagination at a time when our digital entertainment was, to use Elon Musk
words, just “two rectangles and a dot.”
In his stories and novels, Dick often wrote about counterfeit worlds. Semi-real worlds as well as
insane private worlds, often inhabited by few persons. He never had a theoretical or conscious
explanation for his caring about these alternative pseudo-worlds. According to his memories,
however, something suddenly happened: one day he claimed to remember not past lives but a
“different, quite different, present life.”
The consequence of these visions was that Dick came to believe that, quoting him, “some of my
fictional works were in a literal sense true”. Could it be that he was actually able to perceive the
existence of other realities? Recent discoveries in Quantum physics (the study of the physics of
subatomic particles) and in cosmology shed new light on how consciousness interacts with matter.
These findings call for acceptance of the idea that there far more universes exist than the one we are
dealing with: this is the so-called Multiverse theory and numerous physics theories independently
point to this conclusion. In a Multiverse, space and time would go on forever, yet it must start iterating at some point because there are a limited number of ways subatomic elements can be arranged in space and time.
By looking far enough, you would then see another version of you reading this book just with a
different pair of shoes. In another, you would see Dick’s Universe where the Nazi won the second
World War and landed their Swastika first on the Moon or maybe even one where the Roman
Empire didn’t ever fall.
Empowered by the Multiverse theory, every conceivable arrangement of matter and energy,
however improbable, is postulated to exist as a separate Universe. The peculiar elegance of this
argument is that there is not one single absolute reality, but an interaction of every single person's
perception with it.
To summarize, in the pantheon of thinkers, who recognized our Universe as a product of our
imagination, there was also an American sci-fi writer with a weird sense of humor. Today very few
people remember that crazy speech. Instead, the majority of the sci-fi fans owe him a debt of
gratitude for inspiring the cult movie “Blade Runner.”
Staged in the 21st century, this movie tells us of a corporation which develops human clones,
identified as replicants, to be enslaved in colonies outside the Earth. In 2019, a former police
officer, played by a young Harrison Ford, is hired to chase a fugitive group living undercover in Los
Angeles.
Blade Runner remains a leading example of neo-noir cinema and has been highly influential on
many subsequent science fiction films and video games. His most significant award was assigned to
his amazing soundtrack from Vangelis, which reveals the unexpected coldness held by the future. I
urge you to listen to it on headphones in the dark. Can you feel a sense of ...Matrix?
