How Do Informational Objects Trigger Living Intelligence? Plasmate, Tertiary Memory, and Unthought in Philip K. Dick’s VALIS and Exegesis

This paper asks how informational objects can exhibit properties of living intelligence. Focusing on Philip K. Dick’s concept of plasmate in VALIS and the Exegesis, it rereads this mythologized “living information” through Bernard Stiegler’s theory of tertiary memory and N. Katherine Hayles’s concept of unthought. Rather than psychologizing or mystifying Dick’s late writings, the paper argues that plasmate anticipates contemporary concerns about informational agency in the age of AI. Stiegler explains plasmate’s temporal persistence as exteriorized technical memory that shapes thought across generations, while Hayles accounts for its nonconscious cognitive operations. At their intersection, plasmate appears as tertiary memory imagined as alive and unthought experienced as revelation—offering a speculative grammar for understanding distributed intelligence beyond the human.