Meditation On First Philosophy Ubik

The perception we have of the reality may be false or true depending on the ideas we have in the mind. When reading Ubik, the characters appear to be hallucinating as the events occur in both the past and the future. Joe, the narrator, describes the situation following Runciter’s death where he communicates with the half-dead. However, towards the end of the novel, Runciter appears and Joe appears to have been half-dead all along. This paper seeks to relate the philosophical themes that the book raises with the thoughts of Plato, Descartes, and Berkeley.

In Plato’s, The Republic, he states that true knowledge can only be attained through philosophical reasoning rather than sensory perceptions. He analogizes this through the Allegory of the

In Meditation on First Philosophy, Descartes states that the realities he believed to be certain during his young years have been false. Which therefore causes him to embark on the journey to destroy all the opinions he had believed as the truth, and accept only those claims that are certain, firm, and permanent in the sciences. Deconstructing these pre-conceptions requires a process of methodological doubt where he withdraws from the senses; that “all that up to the present time [he has] accepted as most true and certain I have learned either from the senses or through the senses; but it has sometimes proved that these senses are deceptive” (Descartes, 1-7). Descartes believes that at any moment, he could be dreaming, or his sense deceived by God or an evil demon. He ascertains his own existence through a clear and distinct perception guaranteed by God. In Ubik, the characters seem to be dreaming and their perceptions of the reality construed. The people are having illusions in the half-life state as depicted by Joe who appears to have possibly never left the house. Descartes believes that we can know reality using our minds and reason. For instance, he acknowledges his existence by asserting, “the fact that I am here, seated by the fire, attired in a dressing gown, having a paper to write on” (Descartes, 1-7). A claim

According to Berkeley, the reality consists exclusively of minds and their ideas. Therefore, the human experiences are always of concrete particulars. For instance, he says,” when I contemplate the idea of “triangle”, the image that comes to mind is that of some determinant shape; having the abstract image of a three-sided figure that is neither equilateral nor isosceles nor scalene is simply impossible” (Principles: Introduction 10). General terms acquire meaning by a process of association with particular experiences, which are in turn associated with each other. Therefore, since everything is relative, the reality only exists in our minds thus there is no outer world there are only ideas. Objects exist because we perceive them; they exist in our ideas. In Ubik, each of the characters engages in their own idea of reality. For instance, the plot occurs in 1992, a futuristic time when telepaths exist, and then we have a reversal to 1939. Joe, the protagonist, seems to have an altered reality as he narrates the story about the activities at the privacy company. However, when Jory arrives and reveals that he had been consuming half-lifers to sustain himself, it alters the reality and makes Joe realize that maybe he was dead. The events in Ubik assert that there would be existence of different possibilities for what is real. For