amplified humanity

Schizoid or Android? How do you know? Amplified humanity...

We are a society of androids. The human body, every cell, is essentially a machine, especially at a nano-level.

I hope the new machines will be better than us. Amplified humanity.

Luminary Philip K Dick says:

These creatures are among us, although morphologically they do not differ from us; we must not posit a difference of essence, but a difference of behavior. In my science fiction I write about about them constantly. Sometimes they themselves do not know they are androids. Like Rachel Rosen, they can be pretty but somehow lack something; or, like Pris in We Can Build You, they can be absolutely born of a human womb and even design androids - the Abraham Lincoln one in that book - and themselves be without warmth; they then fall within the clinical entity "schizoid," which means lacking proper feeling. I am sure we mean the same thing here, with the emphasis on the word "thing." A human being without the proper empathy or feeling is the same as an android built so as to lack it, either by design or mistake. We mean, basically, someone who does not care about the fate which his fellow living creatures fall victim to; he stands detached, a spectator, acting out by his indifference John Donne's theorem that "No man is an island," but giving that theorem a twist: that which is a mental and a moral island is not a man.

"Man, Androids and Machine" (1975)
reprinted in The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick (1995) Lawrence Sutin, ed.

VALIS =Vast Active Living Intelligence System

VALIS (1981)
Philip K Dick

* We hypostasize information into objects. Rearrangement of objects is change in the content of the information; the message has changed. This is a language which we have lost the ability to read. We ourselves are a part of this language; changes in us are changes in the content of the information. We ourselves are information-rich; information enters us, is processed and is then projected outwards once more, now in an altered form. We are not aware that we are doing this, that in fact this is all we are doing.

* Sometimes the appropriate response to reality is to go insane.

* A lot can be said for the infinite mercies of God, but the smarts of a good pharmacist, when you get down to it, is worth more.

* To fight the Empire is to be infected by its derangement ... Whoever defeats the Empire becomes the Empire; it proliferates like a virus ... thereby it becomes its enemies.

* The Empire Never Ended

* Mental illness is not funny.

* Crazy people do not apply the principle of scientific parsimony... they shoot for the baroque.

* Helping people was one of the two basic things Fat had been told to give up; helping people and taking dope. He had stopped taking dope, but all his energy and enthusiasm were now totally channelled into saving people. Better he had kept on with the dope.

* Fish cannot carry guns.

* It is amazing that when someone else spouts the nonsense you yourself believe you can readily perceive it as nonsense.

* Certainly it constitutes bad news if the people who agree with you are buggier than batshit.

* Madness has its own dynamism. It just goes on.