God's Debris

[Cosmo]

A friend sent me a link to this story. It's written by Scott Adams, whom some of you may know as the author behind the famous "Dilbert" comic strip. It's around 130 double-spaced, very large-font pages long - it should only take about an hour or so to go through.

While Adams states that the views portrayed within are not his own, it's still an interesting read. Indeed, in the introduction, Adams calls it a "132-page thought experiment wrapped in a fictional story".

A number of thoughts came to my mind as I was reading it - everything from "that would make an interesting sci-fi movie!" to "what the hell does that mean?" to "Adams my boy, you can write a damn good comic strip but you (or your character, I guess) couldn't be more wrong about this." My reasons for posting it in this forum are twofold:

* I may not have agreed with every part of it, but I did enjoy it. I think that some other people might as well.
* Some of the more nitty-gritty sections - the part about evolution, the stuff towards the end about relativity - I thought were misrepresented, misquoted or generally misshapen in the text. I'm a longtime lurker on these forums, and I know that it would take a more educated and critical mind than my own to really pick apart his story - and it deserves a good picking-apart! - and I also know that there are minds here capable of such critiquing.

The story is a free PDF download from here. Give it a try, it's an interesting read.

 

[Cosmo]

Yuck - double thread post. Go post in the other one!

A little help from the moderators please?

 

[Beerina]

Too late! This thread already had one response.

I bought this book based on some wide-eyed reviews, and that it was from the cynical Dilbert guy, and I highly respect master cynics. He's #3 in my eyes right after Mark Twain and Ambrose Bierce.

Before we get into spoilers, I note he does put out a disclaimer at the beginning not to treat each answer as if it's gospel, but rather to use them as examples as if settled by some mysterious stranger who knew all the answers to difficult questions.

Which is a good thing, because some of these sub-answers are pretty silly.




************ mild spoiler ************




For example, the man askes the stranger, "Ok, what about psychics? How does that work?" And the stranger replies that psychic powers don't exist, but that some people are just super, super-intelligent in being able to predict where things are going, so it just appears psychic.

While that sounds like a description of cold reading (gagging on the super-intelligent part, of course) the implication I got was that he was assuming that real, psychic-like abilities existed, but that it was caused by high intelligence, unbeknownst to the "psychics" themselves. In other words, Scott Adams violated Randi's rule that, before you waste time trying to explain something, first prove a phenomenon exists. He seems to presume that there's some mysterious abilities that exist that go well beyond what cold reading could produce.

 

[Kopji]

I mostly enjoyed the story.

A question that arises is - is the idea of God helpful or does it actually get in the way of a more clear understanding? We bring to the story enormous myth and emotional content. Why not simply let it go?

The curious bee metaphor is a weak point of the story. It might be more accurate if the bees constructed the stained glass edifice they were peering into, and not merely observers of it.

The story does not really address the idea of sacrifice. What is the tipping point where what we sacrifice to maintain our 'delusions' becomes greater than the cost of letting them go?

And in the final reel we see that the Avatar has released his delusions and sees things as they are. Understanding something as it really is, and not only as it appears seems an axiom - 'a real good'.