by Gwen Lee
Now, all of Greek philosophy had been an attempt to figure out what the basic substance of the universe was. Was it made of fire, air, water, whatever, you know. Kitty litter, whatever. There is some substance that was, you know, old shoes, you know, just anything. Leftover tires, for instance, you know. There was some basic substance. And he said, “I know what it is. It’s mathematical ratio.” Well, so he was right, he was correct. All modern science is quantitative. It all takes it for granted that there is no qualitative basis, there is a quantitative basis. So this has enormous significance for science, but not immediately—it took a long time. You see, because this is just one theory amongst a number of theories. But he then equated music and mathematics. And he went on then to say that the basis of the universe was mathematics and music together, because music and mathematics are two versions of the same thing. So he taught—that was where the term “music of the spheres” comes from. He then said that moving bodies emit music, but we don’t hear it because we hear it from birth and we’re not conscious that we’re hearing it. But we are hearing a constant music.
And, by the way, there have been some tests lately, there’s a recording called “An Eighty-Foot Wire” or “Music by a Long Thin Wire”—I thought this was a joke recording. It’s an eighty-foot wire, they strung an eighty-foot wire out and they played a single tone through it and then they recorded it, but the eighty-foot wire did a single oscillation. The oscillation never varies. The oscillation [is] absolutely steady, the pulsations fed through the wire. And they recorded four LP sides. During those four LP sides, that wire creates the most incredibly beautiful sounds you’ve ever heard. And it doubled back, the sound[s] would come back and overlay each other, and there will be intervals of exquisite beauty. This is just an eighty-foot wire. We, we want—
LEE: Was it a particular metal, or—
DICK: No. Copper. Yeah. With one tone fed in, that’s all. Once that tone is fed in, in no way is that tone modulated in terms of amplitude, in terms of frequency, in terms of pulsation. No changes are made, the wire does it all and it creates music of incredible beauty. Just incredible.
So OK now, he said this is going on all the time. Here’s what I did: I says, OK. Music and mathematics. What would be a—if you wanted to create a triad, what would be the third constituent of a structural basis of the universe? It’s 2,300 years ago [2,500 + years] that he did this. What would be the third constituent in the sequence: music, mathematics, what would be the third? Now what follows logically— nobody’s been able to figure it out, nor even do I know that anybody’s even tried to figure it out. Well, I came up with what I believe is the next sequence, and the next unit in the sequence—
LEE: OK, now, what would that be? You’re going to tell me, aren’t you?
DICK: Well, yes and no, because unfortunately (laughs) I burned out as a result of envisioning it because I envisioned it in my mind, like I see my characters you know, when I’m writing I actually see them. I saw this in my mind, in my mind’s eye, you know how you do, I saw this, and it consisted of a musical score in which the notes were arranged entirely mathematically. Which is OK so far, I mean there’s nothing that hasn’t been already done, but the third factor was color. Now, all color is of a particular frequency. They’re measured in what’s called millimicrons. The Fraunhofer lines, from B to F, or something like that. So every given color is at a particular number of millimicrons and can be calibrated right down to the millimicrons. So within the spectrum, the visual spectrum, like, in red, there’s a whole range of millimicrons, there’s many many reds. Just many, many, many. I don’t even have an idea of how many there are. But, you see, this is an exact mathematical ratio, as there is in sound. Music is a vibration at a particular frequency. Color is a vibration of a particular visual frequency.
LEE: I don’t really see color—
DICK: Well, color is my choice, you see. So I conceived of an object existing along three axes—color, mathematics, and music simultaneously. That was the last I ever did, on that book—
LEE: I didn’t want to sound stupid, but that was what was going through my mind, was color.
DICK: Well, see, it’s logical because it does have, you know, a frequency and for instance what you could do is you could transmit information in terms of color. And you would, what you would have to have is a transmitter, you see, which would encode the information at exact visual frequencies, like frequencies of light. And then at the other end, simply it would extract the same way, it would be a duplicate, just like a telephone works.
LEE: How do you, how do you see these things together?
DICK: Well, when you—yeah, I did and it was really—
LEE: They tried it up at, uh—
DICK: The Laseriums—
LEE: OK, well, a laser. It was nice but it wasn’t quite the same thing.
DICK: No, this would actually be the idea that I had, was that conceptual information could be transmitted simultaneously as color, music, and mathematics. And this would permit abstractions in the impossible to us now. So what I did was, I dreamed up—I said OK now, if the abstractions, the conceptual abstractions permitted by the triune or trinitary structural basis is beyond our powers now, I will have to start with the annotation and work back to the concept. So I envisioned an actual sequence of color, musical stave, staff, you know, and annotation. And then I tried to extract the concept back out of it. And of course it was impossible, because by my very definition this is not thinkable to us. ’Cause you don’t have the three constituents, we only have the two. And I just couldn’t go on anymore. I had now thought, I had literally thought of a concept which I could not think of.
LEE: So, OK, this is the book you wrote.
DICK: This is the book I’m allegedly writing. It’s called The Owl in Daylight.
LEE: The Owl in Daylight?
DICK: Yeah, The Owl in Daylight. It’s a folk expression meaning a—I heard it on TV, a guy in the Ozarks said, “I’m the owl in daylight” and he meant that he was unable to understand. ’Cause the book is about the inability to understand. And I have now created a concept that I don’t even understand, my own concept. I can’t put it into words.
LEE: But you could always think up something. But it’s got to be logical. Since you’re dealing with mathematics, and, uh, sound and color.
DICK: Dealing with concepts, mainly, uh, I conceptualized myself out of business, what I did. I developed—well, for one thing, I tested out my ability to reason. My ability to reason was really affected—I had a terrible time, I did real bad in school in geometry. Which, you know, which measures your ability to reason deductively. You start with, you know, a theorem, and you need a premise and all that stuff and you work deductively to whatever conclusion. By the way, Angel Archer can do that. So, I had a long sequence in there when she reasons deductively, and I can’t do that.
LEE: Maybe you should transpose yourself into her.
DICK: I can wear a wig and a dress, and a pair of—and a beaded purse and earrings, and says, “Hi, I’m Angel Archer and I can think real clearly.” Uh—
LEE: Uh, mentally, let’s do it that way. We don’t have to do it physically. (laughs)
DICK: But I, I, uh—
LEE: Have someone play to part of her, to give you feedback, if that’s possible.
DICK: But I checked out my ability to reason, I remembered that in Greek philosophy there’s a fragment, the first extant fragment before Plato that amounts to anything. It’s part of a poem, by Parmenides. And that’s the only really large fragment that exists before Plato. And it’s a logical argument. And it’s a very difficult logical argument. It’s so difficult, in fact, that there’s supposed to be an error in it. But even today, 2,500 years later, they can’t do it, the authorities can’t agree what the error is.
LEE: It’s difficult, I bet, for—
DICK: No, this is Parmenides.
LEE: Oh, I’m sorry.
DICK: No, the first one before Plato is—
&nb
sp; LEE: He was the original.
DICK: Yeah, Parmenides.
LEE: He was the father of philosophy.
DICK: Well, no, the father of philosophy was Thales. That was the first philosopher, you know, was Thales. Parmenides came just before Plato. In fact, Parmenides was alive when Plato was alive. Parmenides was a very old man when Plato was educated. And there’s one dialogue called “Parmenides” by Plato.
LEE: It’s been years for me—
DICK: No, to me it was yesterday morning. So anyway here’s a Parmenides argument and it’s a real difficult argument. It’s so difficult that there is an error and they can’t agree on what this error is, even twenty—2,400 years later, they can’t agree, you know, they say he made an error but they can’t figure out what the error was. And this error got ahold of Plato. Plato spent most of his time trying to figure out what the error in Parmenides’ argument was. And, so I decided to read over the entire argument, and see if I could spot the error. Well, I was now reading an argument that had baffled some of the greatest minds of the history of Western civilization. Well, I have—it turned out that I had to learn some Greek. So I did that, I learned the Greek alphabet and I learned particular key words. Then I had to learn specialized Greek words that had been used by philosophers at the time of Parmenides to deal with this particular argument. So not only did I have to learn—
LEE: You have done quite a lot of work on this.
DICK: Yeah, well, I thought, “This is real weird,” I says, because I can’t quite understand what the purpose of what I’m doing is, you know, all this. Uh, and I thought, I’m now getting into concepts—I got into, I got onto one concept that Aristotle had said he could not make any sense out of it at all. He could not figure it out. Now, he was reading it in the original Greek, so he had no linguistic barrier. And I’m working this concept over, I’m looking it over, and I say, he’s right, this concept is self-contradictory. It is actually what they call an oxymoron. An oxymoron is something which contradicts itself. You don’t have to know anything but the statement to know that it is wrong, because it contradicts itself. So then I got into—OK, that’s an oxymoron, and this statement was an oxymoron. It was by a—
LEE: And you found what you feel is the contradiction in a certain phrase, or—
DICK: Yes, I found it was not in Parmenides, it was in an answer [to] Parmenides. I still can’t find the error in Parmenides, I’ve given up on that. I’m not sure there is an error, in fact, and that’s another thing—
You know, I wish to go on record: If this tape is preserved for antiquity I want to say that I have studied Parmenides’ argument and I can’t find the error in it. But I have studied the answers to Parmenides, and the answer that has been accepted for 2,300 years, and is the basis for all Western science, contains an error. And that error has now been discovered by twentieth century quantum mechanics. Uh, physicists. People like Heisenberg, Pauli, all those guys who are working on quantum mechanics. I discovered by chance, I discovered absolutely by chance. I was reading the answers to Parmenides, I happened to come across an obscure philosopher named Leucippus that I’ve never heard of. Nobody’s ever heard of Leucippus. Nothing is known about Leucippus but he and Democritus together wrote an article answering Parmenides. And there is an error in their answer. Their answer, however, their solution was picked up by all of Western civilization. Because it was such a profound argument. It was, however, erroneous. It was a beautiful argument but it was wrong. And Aristotle was the first one to notice it was wrong. He said, what Aristotle said, he said this makes no sense. He says, the technical term is “unintelligible.” This is unintelligible. So I studied the Greek words, I learned the Greek words, you know, five particular Greek words—
LEE: You did this on your own?
DICK: I just sitting around, I got nothing else to do, I’m not reading Howard the Duck, you know, I’m not watching MASH, I’m studying the argument of Leucippus, Democritus, you know, Parmenides, and Plato.
LEE: Not just a little MASH once in a while?
DICK: Maybe just a little, and also something to drink, you know. Holy God, now I start thinking, if there’s oxymoronic assertions that contradict themselves, there are—
LEE: Oxymoronic, is this your word?
DICK: No, no. It’s not my word. At least, let’s hope there is such a word because I’ve been using it for some time. Well, “moron” means “stupid,” it’s the Greek word for “stupid,” it carried over into English. I said, there also must be self-authenticating statements. If there are self-contradictory statements, which by their own intrinsic nature contradict themselves and prove themselves false, there must then, it logically follows, be self-authenticating statements. Immediately I thought, what would a self-authenticating statement be? A totality when the predicate is presumed in the subject. The old use of the word “totality.” It asserts nothing. It’s like a sentence, “All horses are horses,” is what it boils down to, you see, the predicate is the same as the subject. OK, now, then there’s—that’s different from a synthetic statement, saying, like, “All horses are brown,” ’cause brown is not implied in the word “horse.” So I said, now I wonder if there’s a self-authenticating statement. And immediately I thought of a self-authenticating statement. And a self-authenticating statement is not predicated on anything and it’s not a totality. And this raises up St. Anselm’s argument for—his ontological argument for the proof of the existence of God, which has been discredited for centuries—allegedly discredited. I thought, “Wait a minute, wait a minute.” It is taken for granted by all the modern thinkers, including religious thinkers, that St. Anselm’s ontological argument for the existence of God is spurious, but according to my argument, my reasoning, it’s not spurious. It’s self-authenticating. At least in theory it’s self-authenticating; it can be self-authenticating; I have to go back and examine it, but there can be such a thing as a self-authenticating statement. And if there can be one there can be more than one. There is such a category as self-authenticating statements.
LEE: Because I am, God exists.
DICK: That’s Descartes, that’s Descartes, so all of a sudden I start thinking back—because this is how my mind works—of a problem that arose during World War II, in the transmission of a cipher out of German occupied Europe, into England by spies from the Allies, that were behind the lines in Germany. And they have little radio transmitters and they transmit, you know, information about German troop movements and stuff, you know, military information to England. And they had these big radio antennas that would pick it up. Now, every once in a while the Germans would overrun one of these transmitters in Holland—a lot of them were in Holland, France, and Belgium along the coast and Germans would overrun it. So they had to build into the cipher material something by which the cipher spy could identify himself for sure, so if he was overrun and anybody else used his transmitter—as the English— and they would know he was overrun, you see. In other words, if you kicked open the door and shot the spy, he had his codebook—his codebook would be lying there, the cipher book—and his codebook would be lying there, you couldn’t then pick up his codebook and transmit because he would have some way of always proving that he—to the English receiver, to the British Intelligence back in England. And this became a major problem because it did happen one time, a very serious overrun occurred in Holland where they overrun the cipher card. They picked up these codebooks, the Germans did, and they transmitted the most loonedout material to England for years. And the English never caught on.
So what the Germans wound up doing is whatever things they were short on—trucks, you know, whatever they needed, parts of some kind, ball bearings and that kind of stuff—they would transmit a request for these parts. They’d say we really—you know, the underground, the French, the maquis, they’re called now anti-German underground—needs ball bearings in this particular size, whereupon the RAF would fly over and parachute down ball bearings to them. (laughs) Germans were restocking their short
ages from England that way, by overrunning the cipher book. So this was a very serious problem, I thought. Now that’s interesting. Genuine information would then have to contain some self-authenticating factors, you see, because it works in cipher situations. So I tried to analyze what would be a self-authenticating factor in a cipher transmission. Well, the point of all this is that one day I got up and I was burned out—
LEE: Yeah.
DICK: One night I went to be thinking all these things. What I thought was cadence sequences where the cipher would have—like in scansion, in poetry, you know, where you have iambic pentameter “—dump— de—dump—dump, the rolling rocks, the shivering shocks”—OK, you can say, “cadences,” you see, and, uh, I was thinking what I would call cipher verification systems. So I go to bed that night and I’ve had about sixteen cipher verification systems in my mind that would, you know, validate the cipher transmitter as being correct. But I woke up the next morning and I couldn’t even fix coffee. I had shorted out somewhere during the night. Somewhere during the night my brain decided that it’d had enough of all this. So as a result the book has not yet been written. And I—
