Aus Anlass seines mittlerweile sechsundzwanzigsten Todestages

Es kann einem zum Beispiel passieren, dass jemand etwas ganz bestimmtes sagt, und auf dem Weg nach Hause in der Schnellbahn liest man dann eines von Phils Büchern und dort sagt dann eine der handelnden Personen ganz genau dieselbe Sache, die man sich wenige Minuten vorher noch im richtigen Leben anhören musste, zu der Hauptperson. //Und die Hauptperson empfindet dabei ganz genau dasselbe wie man selbst, und ist einem selbst überhaupt sehr ähnlich//

[Deshalb weiß ich jetzt auch, was gute SF ist: Man schreibt einfach über sich selbst; SF ist nicht eine spezielle Gattung von Literatur, sondern das, was Leute mit speziellen Defekten produzieren, wenn sie versuchen, sich über die Welt, sich selbst, und das, was ihnen darin so passiert, klarzuwerden. Und so wie ich das sehe, bin ich entweder so defekt, dass ich solche zwar Sachen gerne lese, aber selbst nicht produzieren kann - oder es doch kann. So oder so muss das endlich ausgetestet werden.]

Ein weiterer Grund ist sein wirklich bösartiger Humor:

Edgar Barefoot, in one of his lectures on KPFA, discussed a form of inferential logic developed in India by the Hindu school. It is very old and has been much studied, not just in India but also in the West. It is the second means of knowledge by which man obtains accurate cognition and is called anumana, which is Sanskrit for: "Measuring along some other thing, inference." It has five stages and I will not go into it because it is difficult, but what is important about it is that if these five stages are correctly carried out - and the system contains safeguards by which one can determine precisely whether he has indeed carried them out - one is assured of going from premise to correct conclusion.
What especially dignifies anumana is step three, the illustration (udaharana); it requires what is called an invariable concomitance (vyapti, literally "pervasion"). The anumana form of inferential reasoning will only work if you can be absolutely certain that you indeed possess a vyapti; not a concomitance but an invariable concomitance (for example, late at night you hear a loud, sharp, echoing popping sound; you say to yourself, "That must be an auto backfiring because when an auto backfires, such a sound is created." This, precisely is where inferential reasoning - reasoning, that is, from effect back to cause - breaks down. This is why in the West many logicians feel that inductive reasoning as such is suspect, that only deductive reasoning can be relied on. The Indian anumana strives for what is called a sufficient ground; the illustration requires an actual - not assumed - observation at all times, holding that no concomitance can be ssumed which fails to be exemplified). We in the West have no syllogism exactly equal to the anumana and it is a shame that we do not, because had we such a rigorous form by which to check our inductive reasoning, Bishop Timothy Archer might well know of it, and had he known of it he would have known that his mistress waking up to find her hair singed does not, in fact, prove that the spirit of his dead son has returned from the other world, from, in essence, beyond the grave. Bishop Archer could and did fling around such terms as hysteron proteron because that logical fallacy is known in Greek - which is to say, Western - thought. But the anumana is from India. The Hindu logicians distinguished a typical fallacious ground that wrecked the anumana; they called it hetvabhasa ("merely the appearance of a ground") and this deals with only one step in the anumana out of five. They found all sorts of ways to fuck up this five-stage structure, any one of which a man with Bishop Archer's intelligence and education would have - or should have - been able to follow. That he could believe that a few weird unexplained events proved that Jeff was not only still alive (somewhere) but communicating with the living (somehow) shows that, like Wallenstein with his astrological charts during the Thirty Years War, the faculty of accurate cognition is variable and depends, in the final analysis, on what you want to believe, not what is so. A Hindu logician living centuries ago could have seen at a glance the basic fallacy in the reasoning that argued for Jeff's immortality. Thus the will to believe chases out the rational mind, whenever and wherever the two come into conflict. This is all I can assume, based on what I now was seeing.

[Philip K. Dick, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, Vintage, Seite 109-111]

Keine Ahnung, inwiefern das stimmt. Irgendwo in der Zweiten Analytik spricht Aristoteles interessanterweise auch von 5 Stufen der Induktion, aber der alte Phil hat sich eigentlich immer eher an die Vorsokratiker gehalten, und in einem beunruhigenden Ausmaß an Platon. Philip K. Dick wäre das traurige Beispiel dafür, was einem passiert, wenn man zu viel von Platons Geschreibe für voll nimmt - wenn klar wäre, in welchem Ausmaß er wirklich beispielsweise an Horselover Fats Tractates Cryptica Scriptura aus Valis geglaubt hat:

14. The universe is information and we are stationary in it, not three-dimensional and not in space or time. The information fed to us we hypostasize into the phenomenal world.
[...]
29. We did not fall because of a moral error; we fell because of an intellectual error: that of taking the phenomenal world as real. Therefore we are morally innocent. It is the Empire in its various disguised polyforms which tells us we have sinned. "The Empire never ended."
30. The phenomenal world does not exist; it is a hypostasis of the information processed by the Mind.
31. We hypostasize information into objects. Rearrangement of objects is change ...

Hätte er mehr Aristoteles gelesen, dann hätte er gewusst, dass wir nicht in einer Matrix leben, und dass nur die konkreten Individuen und individuellen Dinge real sind.

Bester Teil des Ganzen:

41. The Empire is the institution, the codification, of derangement; it is insane and imposes its insanity on us by violence, since its nature is a violent one.
42. To fight the Empire is to be infected by its derangement. This is a paradox; whoever defeats a segment of the Empire becomes the Empire, it proliferates like a virus, imposing its form on its enemies. Thereby it becomes its enemies.

[Ich weiß gar nicht mehr, was ich eigentlich sagen wollte. Egal]