After finding a mysterious strip of paper that reads SOFT-DRINK STAND instead of an actual Soft-Drink Stand in one of Dick's most amazing scenes ever, Time Out of Joint's protagonist Ragle Gumm expresses an interest in studying philosophy, saying to his brother-in-law Vic, "I've read some [philosophy], in my time. I was thinking of Bishop Berkeley. The Idealist. For instance -"Those of you interested [as I am] in decoding the soft-drink stand scene in TOoJ will be interested to learn that, aside from having the California town of Berkeley (where PKD grew up) named after him, Bishop George Berkeley was a 18th century philosopher/metaphysic who developed a very complex notion of subjective reality, dubbed by him as 'immaterialism' and later termed by others subjective idealism, which contends, in part, that no object exists without someone perceiving it. In other words when a tree falls in the woods and no one's around to hear it, it doesn't make a sound [although that's a simplification since the tree falling in the woods riddle is basically a vocabulary problem that depends on the definition of the word 'sound'].
Since George Berkeley is long dead, and, conveniently now in the public domain, you can read his A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge here. It ain't easy or fun reading, but it is interesting. Once you've ingested it, check out Wikipedia's synopsis. This incredibly poorly focused pair of sentences from Berkeley's treatise seem relevant:
"4. It is indeed an opinion strangely prevailing amongst men, that houses, mountains, rivers, and in a word all sensible objects, have an existence, natural or real, distinct from their being perceived by the understanding. But, with how great an assurance and acquiescence soever this principle may be entertained in the world, yet whoever shall find in his heart to call it in question may, if I mistake not, perceive it to involve a manifest contradiction. For, what are the fore-mentioned objects but the things we perceive by sense? and what do we perceive besides our own ideas or sensations? and is it not plainly repugnant that any one of these, or any combination of them, should exist unperceived?"
Now, add the notion of reification to the above equation and you begin to see labels standing in for reality, because what we perceive is rarely the totality of what we sense, but instead, using language as a kind of shorthand, our minds rely on words to make objects comprehensible. Instead of seeing a silver, four-wheeled, loud, moving, object, we see a car. This is a necessary, albeit reductive, way of perceiving the world. If we become further removed from 'reality' because our nervous systems are overworked and stressed, or because of a mental illness like paranoia, we perceive even less sensory data, and, consequently, are quicker to see things as generalizations, as categories. The word or label is always a reduction of the object it describes, or, as I explain it to my students, "the menu is not the food."
I thought if I wrote this out, I might better understand my thinking on the subject. So much for that idea.
For an interesting summation of exactly how complicated (and influential) the soft-drink stand scene is I suggest you read Patrick Clark's essay The Secret of the Soft-Drink Stand Explained At Last (click here to download the .doc file). But, alas, Clark doesn't explain the Soft-Drink Stand.
Update: Philosophical debate continues in the comments section.
