If You Think This World Is Bad, You Should See Some of the Others

Philip K. Dick delivered his famous speech titled "If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others" on September 24, 1977, as the guest of honor at the Second International Festival of Science Fiction in Metz, France.

The presentation, which lasted around 40 minutes, was delivered in a monotone style and simultaneously translated into French for the audience, contributing to some confusion and a mixed reception—many attendees found it perplexing or incoherent, with Dick later admitting it wasn't entirely rational or provable.

Throughout the talk, Dick explored philosophical and metaphysical themes drawn from his science fiction writing, including parallel universes, the nature of time (introducing the concept of "orthogonal" or right-angle time perpendicular to linear time), Christian Gnosticism, alternate histories in his novels like The Man in the High Castle and Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, and his own visionary experiences in 1974 following dental surgery, which he interpreted as glimpses into other realities.

He framed reality as a kind of cosmic game or dialectic between a divine "Programmer-Reprogrammer" (a god-like entity immanent in the universe, drawing from influences like Spinoza, Alfred North Whitehead, and Sufi poetry) and a malevolent "dark counter-player," where variables are altered to create better outcomes, resulting in branching timelines or syntheses.

Toward the end of the speech (around the 30-32 minute mark in available recordings), Dick builds to his revelation about our existence in a simulated or programmed reality, tying it to sensations like déjà vu as evidence of these alterations.

He explains that when a "variable" in the program is changed—reprogrammed in what he calls our "past" but actually outside linear time—it creates an alternative world that branches off and becomes actualized, with most people unknowingly adapting their memories to the new version.

Here's the key excerpt where he directly informs the audience of this idea:"I submit that these impressions are valid and significant and I will even say this such an impression is a clue that it's in past time point a variable was changed reprogrammed does it work and that because of this an alternative world branched off became actualized instead of the prior one and that in fact in literal fact we are once more living this particular segment of linear time because we have a a breaching a tinkering a change has been made but not in our present had been made in our past evidently such an alteration would have a peculiar effect on those persons involved they would so to speak be moved back one square or several squares on the board game which constitutes our reality either the head samba That this conceivably this could happen any number of times affecting any number of people as alternative variables were reprogrammed we would have to live out each reprogramming along the subsequent linear time axis but to the programmer when we call God to him the results of the programming would be apparent once we are within time and he is not I wish to add live we are living in a computer programmed reality and the only clue we have to it is when some variable is changed and some alteration in our reality occurs."

He further elaborates that this could explain feelings of having lived past lives—not in a chronological past, but in alternate presents that are repeated or looped, like a clock dial sweeping the same path forever, with people dimly suspecting the repetition.

This conclusion aligns with the speech's title, implying that our current world is an "improved" version amid worse alternate ones (e.g., dystopian Nazi-ruled realities) that exist laterally but are kept out of focus through programming changes.

Note that the published essay version of the speech (which appeared later) expands on these ideas, but the delivered presentation included this simulation concept spontaneously, possibly drawing from audience Q&A or last-minute rewrites.

The speech has since become influential in discussions of simulation theory, predating modern proponents like Nick Bostrom by decades.