"Dick,_Philip_K._I hope I shall arrive soon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dick Phillip K)

changes. If you superimpose their two views, you get this result: Nothing is real. There is a fascinating
next step to this line of thinking: Parmenides could never have existed because he grew old and died
and disappeared, so, according to his own philosophy, he did not exist. And Heraclitus may have
been right-let's not forget that; so if Heraclitus was right, then Parmenides did exist, and therefore,
according to Heraclitus' philosophy, perhaps Parmenides was right, since Parmenides fulfilled the
conditions, the criteria, by which Heraclitus judged things real.
I offer this merely to show that as soon as you begin to ask what is ultimately real, you right away
begin to talk nonsense. By the time of Zeno, they knew they were talking nonsense. Zeno proved
that motion was impossible (actually he only imagined that he had proved this; what he lacked was
what technically is called the "theory of limits"). David Hume, the greatest skeptic of them all, once
remarked that after a gathering of skeptics met to proclaim the veracity of skepticism as a
philosophy, all of the members of the gathering nonetheless left by the door rather than the window. I
see Hume's point. It was all just talk. The solemn philosophers weren't taking what they said
seriously.
But I consider that the matter of defining what is real-that is a serious topic, even a vital topic.
And in there somewhere is the other topic, the definition of the authentic human. Because the
bombardment of pseudo-realities begins to produce inauthentic humans very quickly, spurious
humans-as fake as the data pressing at them from all sides. My two topics are really one topic; they
unite at this point. Fake realities will create fake humans. Or, fake humans will generate fake realities
and then sell them to other humans, turning them, eventually, into forgeries of themselves. So we
wind up with fake humans inventing fake realities and then peddling them to other fake humans. It is
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just a very large version of Disneyland. You can have the Pirate Ride or the Lincoln Simulacrum or
Mr. Toad's Wild Ride-you can have all of them, but none is true.
In my writing I got so interested in fakes that I finally came up with the concept of fake fakes. For
example, in Disneyland there are fake birds worked by electric motors which emit caws and shrieks
as you pass by them. Suppose some night all of us sneaked into the park with real birds and
substituted them for the artificial ones. Imagine the horror the Disneyland officials would feel when
they discovered the cruel hoax. Real birds! And perhaps someday even real hippos and lions.
Consternation. The park being cunningly transmuted from the unreal to the real, by sinister forces.
For instance, suppose the Matterhorn turned into a genuine snow-covered mountain? What if the
entire place, by a miracle of God's power and wisdom, was changed, in a moment, in the blink of an
eye, into something incorruptible? They would have to close down.
In Plato's Timaeus, God does not create the universe, as does the Christian God; He simply finds
it one day. It is in a state of total chaos. God sets to work to transform the chaos into order. That
idea appeals to me, and I have adapted it to fit my own intellectual needs: What if our universe
started out as not quite real, a sort of illusion, as the Hindu religion teaches, and God, out of love and
kindness for us, is slowly transmuting it, slowly and secretly, into something real?
We would not be aware of this transformation, since we were not aware that our world was an
illusion in the first place. This technically is a Gnostic idea. Gnosticism is a religion which embraced
Jews, Christians, and pagans for several centuries. I have been accused of holding Gnostic ideas. I
guess I do. At one time I would have been burned. But some of their ideas intrigue me. One time,
when I was researching Gnosticism in the Britannica, I came across mention of a Gnostic codex
called The Unreal God and the Aspects of His Nonexistent Universe, an idea which reduced me to
helpless laughter. What kind of person would write about something that he knows doesn't exist, and
how can something that doesn't exist have aspects? But then I realized that I'd been writing about
these matters for over twenty-five years. I guess there is a lot of latitude in what you can say when
writing about a topic that does not exist. A friend of mine once published a book called Snakes of
Hawaii. A number of libraries wrote him ordering copies. Well, there are no snakes in Hawaii. All
the pages of his book were blank.