Is Philip K Dick the acidgear equivalent of a sci-fi prophet or the living proof that Plato and drugs don't mix? The author had varied and contradictory views of the world and his role within it, but in some writings, he stated that he was living within a Platonic environment. To the Denver Clarion, he said that he had "become an object of interest to the divine beings". He also called upon this unceasing and eternal reality...
There is internal evidence in at least one of my novels that another reality, an unchanging one...underlies the visible phenomenal world of change.
Dick's homage to the Platonic philosophers is evident, as he contemplated the cave. Yet, if a simulation were to be perceived by those living within it, is Dick's literary oeuvre any less indicative of its evidence than any other phenomenon brought up to the light. There is some irony if we did live in a simulation; and its internal meat machines could only perceive this by going batshit crazy.
When people talk about Dick and simulation, they refer to his use of the device and how it has influenced others. Baudrillard cites Dick's novels for his assertion that we live in a society of simulation. From The Man in the High Castle to VALIS, the reader finds wheels within wheels, where the characters are often eternally running to keep these in motion.
Mine is a different and fundamentally unknowable question: was Dick glimpsing the workings of our simulation? If so, no wonder he was unable to grasp this in its entirety. Why ask this question, even as a hypothetical? Because, in a way, it validates Dick's own assertions. All of those who appropriate Dick do so as concept, symbol or metaphor, but never as truth. Dick thought his visions were real. No one else did. But what if they were?
Then, all of us become blind, deaf, mute fools in a gnostic hell.
(All quotations taken from Sci Fi Now, issue 15)
