For the last eight years of his life, science fiction author Philip K. Dick worked on his "Exegesis"-- a mostly handwritten theological journal in which he sought to explain a series of visionary experiences he underwent in 1974. The ideas he explored and tested found their way into his final novels (including VALIS and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer), but the "Exegesis" was an experimental playground for trying out different ideas about the nature of reality. This panel brings together scholars of theology, literature, and cognitive science to explore the "Exegesis" in the context of Dick’s life and fiction, as well as the broader contexts of the literary and theological worlds with which he interacted.
Science fiction author Philip K. Dick spent the final 8 years of his life writing an “Exegesis,” a handwritten theological journal attempting to understand a series of visionary experiences he underwent in 1974. As with in fictional works like The Game-Players of Titan, Dick drew on images of games and play throughout his theological writing, viewing God’s creation of the universe as a playful act and religious responses to it as a form of play. Ultimately, the “Exegesis” itself is a form of theological play, an effort not to establish a definitive truth but rather to devise compelling and unusual hypotheses. This paper will explore Dick’s use of playful imagery in the “Exegesis” and its place in his developing self-conception.
Philip K. Dick’s February 1974 “pink beam” experience was triggered by a vision of a pink beam of light containing information from on high, triggered by his seeing an icthys necklace. This marked a decisive shift in his sense of self and reality. Following this event, Dick claimed access to hidden knowledge, described the world as a “Black Iron Prison,” and began composing the sprawling theological journal known as the Exegesis. Drawing on cognitive neuroscience accounts of decentering, I argue that these experiences can be understood as a redistribution of epistemic authority beyond the stable narrative self, producing both ontological destabilization and sustained attempts at reintegration.
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.