American novelist, and the writer who put the idea that reality is manufactured into the culture decades before anyone tried to argue it in a journal.
The Metz address
In September 1977, at a science fiction convention in Metz, Dick delivered a talk titled “If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others”, in which he told the audience, not as fiction, that we are living in a computer-programmed reality, and that the only clue we have that a variable has been altered is the sensation of déjà vu. The talk drew on the experiences of February and March 1974 that he spent the rest of his life writing about and that produced VALIS.
Why he belongs in the file
Not as evidence. As the origin of the vocabulary. The Simulation Argument arrives in 2003 into a culture that had been thinking in these terms for a generation, largely because of Dick and the films made from his work, and The Simulation Hypothesis cites the Metz address directly. He is also the clearest case in the record of the boundary the Experiencers literature works on: a man with an unexplained experience, no framework to hold it, and enough talent to build one, who never decided whether he had been contacted or had come apart.
Connections
Simulation Argument · The Simulation Hypothesis · Rizwan Virk · Experiencers · Whitley Strieber · Control System Hypothesis · Mandela Effect