Erik Davis
Born
in Redwood City (California), The United States
June 12, 1967
More books by Erik Davis…
“The funny thing about games and fictions is that they have a weird way of bleeding into reality. Whatever else it is, the world that humans experience is animated with narratives, rituals, and roles that organize psychological experience, social relations, and our imaginative grasp of the material cosmos. The world, then, is in many ways a webwork of fictions, or, better yet, of stories. The contemporary urge to “gamifyâ€� our social and technological interactions is, in this sense, simply an extension of the existing games of subculture, of folklore, even of belief. This is the secret truth of the history of religions: not that religions are “nothing moreâ€� than fictions, crafted out of sociobiological need or wielded by evil priests to control ignorant populations, but that human reality possesses an inherently fictional or fantastic dimension whose “game engineâ€� can â€� and will â€� be organized along variously visionary, banal, and sinister lines. Part of our obsession with counterfactual genres like sci-fi or fantasy is not that they offer escape from reality â€� most of these genres are glum or dystopian a lot of the time anyway â€� but because, in reflecting the “as ifâ€� character of the world, they are actually realer than they appear.”
― TechGnosis: Myth, Magic & Mysticism in the Age of Information
― TechGnosis: Myth, Magic & Mysticism in the Age of Information
“It would be nice to begin the journey with who we are. But "who we are" is a house of mirrors, a tangled knot, a great and terrible Oz that in the final analysis may consist of nothing more than, well, nothing. The self, I am afraid, may be more of an onion than a fruit, and "who we are" is the skin we shed.”
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“By refusing randomness and unpredictability, conspiracy theories and paranoid reality tunnels reify the hubris of systematic rationality as such. “Maybe all systems—that is, any theoretical, verbal, symbolic, semantic, etc., formulation that attempts to act as an all-encompassing, all-explaining hypothesis of what the universe is about—are manifestations of paranoia.â€� As an “antidoteâ€� to such paranoia, Dick called for an injection of surprise into life—a cultivation, as it were, of noise on the line. “We should be content with the mysterious, the meaningless, the contradictory, the hostile, and most of all the unexplainably warm and giving.”
― High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experiences in the Seventies
― High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experiences in the Seventies
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