At one point Dick believed that when the last of the homeoplasmates were killed off with the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 C.E., “real time ceased.” The plasmate reentered human history in 1945, when jars stuffed with ancient gnostic codices were discovered in Nag Hammadi, Egypt.

No surprise that Rome time theory is somehow mentioned in relation to PKD.

And since the film *Valis* clearly emerges from the same pulp ghetto that Dick himself wrote for throughout his mostly marginal career, he sly hints that careful readers of his own trashy paperbacks, with their lurid covers and cheesy titles, may pick up far more than they bargained for.

No shit ;)

But Dick never gave up his commitment to the “authentically human,” the “viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new.” He also recognized that simulacra lie deep in our souls, and that we are not so far from the spiritual paradigms of the ancient world, with their camouflage spirits, talking images, and automata gods.

The world is a prison not because of its materiality — which was the opinion of some of the ancient “Gnostics” — but because of the hidden orders of power and control it houses: the various corporate, political, and ideological archons herding us into increasingly compelling synthetic worlds.

We feel compassion for and in his characters, ordinary flawed people struggling with impossible emotional and ethical contradictions; we recognize these people and their slapstick dystopias; they are us. And yet Dick’s point of view was extremely alienated and critical; questioning authority (even the authority of the author), he shifted like an ontological nomad between subjects and truths and positions of power, constantly testing for the trap doors in the theater of the world. His was not a gnosis that knows, but one that seeks to know, or rather dissolves its own convictions into the anxious mysterium.

Good article to start Saturday.

Freeman Dyson’s Disturbing Scientific Theology

Metadata

• Author: John Horgan

• Category: article

  Highlights

Dyson is rejecting the notion that physics can find a “final theory” that solves the riddle of the universe and brings physics to an end. Dyson is also hinting at a solution to the deepest of all theological puzzles, the problem of evil: Why would God create such a painful, unjust world?

It is a subversive laugh, the laugh of a man who insists that science at its best is “a rebellion against authority.”

Dyson was provoked into taking up this final topic by Steven Weinberg’s notorious remark that “the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.”

In *Infinite in All Directions*, Dyson predicts that the entire universe might eventually be transformed into one great mind.

Dyson insists that even a cosmic superintelligence cannot solve the riddle of existence. There will “always be new things happening, new information coming in, new worlds to explore, a constantly expanding domain of life, consciousness and memory.” The quest for knowledge will be--*must* be—“infinite in all directions.”

“Since we know the laws of physics are mathematical,” Dyson says, “and we know that mathematics is an inconsistent system, it’s sort of plausible that physics will also be inconsistent” and therefore open-ended.

“If you go into the future, what we call science won't be the same thing anymore, but that doesn't mean there won't be interesting questions.”