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Feeding the Macrobrain



Winding my way through Philip K. Dicks, “In Pursuit of Valis: Selections from the Exegesis”, I came across this interesting passage (page 86). He is here talking about his novels being “literally” true and how his understanding of their purpose modulated:

I assumed that the purpose of my writing is to acquaint us with our situation, that my novels and stories function like the inbreaking messages in UBIK (such as the graffiti on the bathroom walls), but now I am given to understand that actually my writing is a report on the situation hee outgoing - meant to leave our irreal world, to break out, not in, and acquaint the actual world (macrobrain) of our plight. They are then appeals for help, by a salvific entity we can’t perceive. […] My writing is information traffic fed into the macrobrain, which continually processes such information. This information traffic between stations of the macrobrain is itself what we call “The Logos.”

Counter-culturalists are always talking about “raising consciousness,” and this understanding would cast that into a whole new light. It would almost make it so that our communications to one another are not to “wake us up” but to wake God up, and get him to get his ass down here and fix things. We could think of it as more messages in a bottle, thrown out into the ocean, waiting to be picked up so that a rescue mission could be mounted.

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4 Reader Responses

  1. Ktulu Says:
    March 12th, 2006 at 10:27 pm

    That sounds eerily familiar to Scott Adam’s “God’s Debris: A Thought Experiment”. It’s a story in which a wise, old man (the Avatar) discloses the secrets of the universe to a postal delivery guy, and one of the secrets is that we are all parts of God’s Debris, molding together in an attempt to reactivate God’s consciousness. Really interesting.

    Anyone who is interested can download it for free here.

    It’s a quick read, probably no more than 3 hours, and it’s quite interesting to see Scott Adams apply the skeptic’s creed of simplicity, or as Wikipedia says:

    The central character, according to the introduction, knows “literally everything”, and Adams, whose knowledge is as relatively limited as the next man, had to come up with a way around this. He used the aforementioned “simplest explanation” for each concept raised in the book because, while “in this world of complications, the simplest explanation is usually dead wrong,” there’s something more comfortable and more convincing in the simplest explanation than in anything complicated

  2. channel null Says:
    March 12th, 2006 at 10:56 pm

    That’s the point, to wake this party up.

    Although sometimes I wonder whether we’re less part of “god’s brain” and more kidneys and sweat glands.

  3. alistair Says:
    March 13th, 2006 at 12:06 am

    if we didn`t know everything, on some level, we couldn`t recognise what adams was trying to say.
    r.a.w. says clearly that no matter what we can imagine, no matter how bizzare, is actually occuring somewhere. so by inference, pkd`s work is real. somewhere.

  4. Benway Says:
    March 15th, 2006 at 12:36 am

    What interests me is more the question of “Is it real here right now where I am?” I wonder, also how many people are crying for help from god right now. And who hears? Is there a way of directing it, and does it matter? Does the Demiurge hear me? Does he hear them? And if The Demiurge believes itself god, is he stealing god’s mail?



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