Philip K. Dick was an influential sci-fi writer who, while never achieving fame or fortune in his lifetime, ended up receiving a great deal of attention after his death. For those of you not familiar with the sci-fi genre, his writing has also inspired films like Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, the Ben Affleck vehicle Paycheck, and the upcoming A Scanner Darkly (by Waking Life creator Richard Linklater).

It’s always interesting to talk to other readers about Philip K. Dick because it inevitably leads to tangential conversations about identity, reality, and drugs. Last night I had a conversation with my neighbor along these lines. Stephen believes that if it is indeed possible to develop a comprehensive system for modeling the universe, then the probability that we actually exist in a non-simulated reality is basically zero. He says this is because if it’s possible to model a universe, then the system contained in the simulation will also be capable of producing a virtual, meta model of yet another universe. That meta-system in turn can model a meta-meta-universe, and the meta-meta-universe can contain a model of a meta-meta-meta-universe, and on ad infinitum.

Of course, I can expound on the virtues of reading PKD all I want, I have yet to actually read any of the guy’s work. It’s maddening, and to answer my own question posed in the title to this post, No, not yet. Instead, I’ve gotten myself a hundred pages into the epic trilogy The Baroque Cycle, a (sci-fi for subtle reasons) historical fiction masterpiece, eight novels in three volumes, each in longhand with a quill pen. Neal Stephenson is another writer whose name will spawn interesting tangent conversations among the well-read.

When I get through The Baroque Cycle though, it’s on. I’m already pumping to read VALIS