Scott Adams and Philosophy

by Daniel Yim

  The old man to whom the unnamed protagonist in God’s Debris delivers a package is a Socratic figure, and the method he uses throughout the story is the Socratic Method. Socrates was known in Athens as “the gadfly” for the tendency he had to flit about the city pestering people with questions. Most of Plato’s dialogues feature Socrates in this role. He finds some unwitting citizen who claims to know something and then proceeds to thoroughly demonstrate that they actually have no idea what they are talking about. Within mere pages of God’s Debris, the old man is off to the races, making deft use of the method of the most famous of the Greek philosophers. His approach isn’t slow and steady—The Avatar is like Socrates on speed.

  Near the conclusion of the book, The Avatar claims that there are five levels of awareness. The last is reserved for one and only one person—The Avatar himself. We’ll discuss these five levels a little more later. The thing to focus on for our purposes at this point is that the process of reaching the fifth level is a matter of unlearning—of realizing just how much you don’t know. So, in this sense, the Avatar is very Socratic.

  The Avatar pushes The Postman to challenge his preconceptions about a stunning range of topics. To do justice to any of these topics would require a whole tome on each, so the goal here is not to settle each philosophical question once and for all. Rather, the goal, in very Socratic fashion, is to get The Postman to see just how much he doesn’t know.

  Introducing Global Skepticism

  Though The Avatar is a Socratic figure, his approach also employs a dash or two of the methodology of a seventeenth-century French philosopher named René Descartes. Indeed, the story has the flavor of a book-length skeptical hypothesis exploring the possible gaps between what we seem to perceive and what reality is actually like.

  Skeptical hypotheses are perhaps the philosophical concepts with which Hollywood is the most enamored; they appear in movies like The Matrix, Inception, Vanilla Sky, and Total Recall. Descartes offers two skeptical hypotheses in his Meditations on First Philosophy. Can Descartes know that he is really sitting in his chair, in front of a roaring fire, contemplating the extent of his knowledge?

  Descartes considers the possibility that he may be dreaming an extremely realistic dream. If he were really in bed dreaming, everything would appear to him exactly the way it appears to him now, but all of the beliefs that he would form on the basis of those appearances would be false. He would, for example, falsely believe that he was sitting in front of the fire when he was actually snug in his bed.

  The second skeptical hypothesis that he considers is that an evil demon is deceiving him, causing him to believe, in error, all of the things that he believes. If that were the case, there would be very little, if anything that we would know for certain. I’ll spare you the details, but, by the end of the Meditations, Descartes thinks he’s found a solution to the problems for knowledge posed by his skeptical hypotheses. We’ll see if there’s a way out of the skeptical quagmire Adams has dumped us into.

  The skeptical hypothesis proposed by the Avatar is a little more complicated than those considered by Descartes. The main, titular, idea is that we are God’s Debris. In one section of the book, The Avatar and The Postman consider whether, in his omniscient, omnipotent state, anything could ever truly motivate God. God lacks nothing. It’s hard to think of anything he might want or anything he might take to be a challenge. The Avatar concludes that the only thing that could truly motivate God—the only thing that would truly constitute a challenge for a being of God’s type—is self-destruction. The Avatar proposes the idea that this self-destruction has already occurred and that we, and all of the rest of the material universe, are the dust created by the destruction of God.

  This proposal is radical, but it does not yet constitute the skeptical hypothesis that I’ve been promising. To get this, we need his next, radical, claim. The way we perceive the world is an illusion. In fact, the universe is comprised of two and only two things: dust and probability. The “dust” is constituted by “the smallest elements of matter, many levels below the smallest things scientists have identified.” On the topic of probability, as we’ll see, what The Avatar has to say about that is a little odd. The Postman offers the response that I think most of us would be inclined to offer. He points to the tremendous body of knowledge that human beings have managed to amass, particularly in recent years. The Avatar responds by saying:

  Every generation of humans believed it had all the answers it needed, except for a few mysteries they assumed would be solved at any moment. And they all believed their ancestors were simplistic and deluded. What are the odds that you are the first generation of humans who will understand reality?

  What about the fact that human beings have been able to achieve tremendous advances in science and technology? The fact that innovations actually work seems to lend some credibility to the idea that we actually know things—a lot more things than humans have known at earlier points in history. The Avatar responds by saying:

  Computers and rocket ships are examples of inventions, not of understanding. All that is needed to build machines is the knowledge that when one thing happens, another thing happens as a result. It’s an accumulation of simple patterns. A dog can learn patterns. There is no “why” in those examples. We don’t understand why electricity travels. We don’t know why light travels at a constant speed forever. All we can do is observe and record patterns.

  What’s more, the Avatar claims that the theories we use to describe the world are incorrect. For example, he claims that the force that we call gravity really doesn’t exist, or, rather, something altogether different is happening. He says:

  The universe looks a lot like a probability graph. The heaviest concentrations of dots are the galaxies and planets, where the force of gravity seems the strongest. But gravity is not a tugging force. Gravity is the result of probability . . . Reality has a pulse, a rhythm, for lack of better words. God’s debris disappears on one beat and reappears on the next in a new position based on probability. If a bit of God-dust disappears near a large mass, say a planet, then probability will cause it to pop back into existence nearer to the planet on the next beat. Probability is highest when you are near massive objects. Or to put it in another way, mass is the physical expression of probability.

  This proposal—that cause and effect don’t really function in the way that we think that they do—would mean that human beings are dramatically wrong about everything. Skepticism about cause and effect must lead, if we’re rational, to a general skepticism about science, since science can’t get off the ground without the thesis that some events truly do cause other events.

  This skeptical hypothesis plays a role in in The Avatar’s Socratic interrogation of The Postman. If what The Postman is claiming is possible, then his reliance on the received truths of science is unjustified. He must begin his process of unlearning.

  Considering Causation

  The suggestion that the Avatar seems to be making is that we are always missing a “why”—some causal feature or factor that fundamentally explains the constant conjunction between two events. He postulates, by way of skeptical hypothesis, the thesis that we never directly observe this “why” because it doesn’t actually exist. One event follows another event on the basis of probability alone.

  It seems, though, that the “why” Adams is looking for is actually causation itself. We experience the world in one state, other factors are introduced, and then we observe the world in a second state. We never actually experience the event that is causation.

  It may well be that this isn’t really much of a problem at all. Perhaps, rather than balking at the idea that causation ever happens on the basis of the fact that we never experience it, we just need a fleshed-out account of what causation is. Once we have that, the fact that we don’t experience causation may turn out to be no problem at all—certainly not a problem that should generate skepticism on a global scale. There are many theories of causation on offer
; perhaps The Postman would do well to consider those first.

  What’s the Chance that God Is Made of Probability?

  Perhaps the most striking feature of the cosmology Adams has described here is the unique way or ways in which he repeatedly uses the word “probability.” In the passage about gravity, recall that Adams says that, “probability will cause” a piece of God dust “to pop back into existence nearer to the planet on the next beat.”

  It is odd to speak of probability as “causing” anything. It’s a category mistake. Consider a standard case of probability—an example that Adams himself makes use of for a different purpose in the book—an ordinary coin flip. Whenever a person flips a coin, so long as the coin is a standard coin, we can describe the probability of each outcome—it has a fifty percent chance of landing heads up and a fifty percent chance of landing tails up. Adams often speaks of probability as if it is an entity with causal powers. But when we describe the way the coin will land, we’re simply describing the chances that the future (with respect to the coin) will turn out either of two particular ways. Probability itself is not an entity or an event. At best, probability is a feature of an event.

  This is not the only occasion in which he speaks of probability in a non-standard way. When describing God, Adams has The Postman paraphrase The Avatar’s revelation in the following way, “So you’re saying that God—an all powerful being with a consciousness that extends to all things across time—consists of nothing but dust and probability?”

  Again, Adams is treating the notion of probability here as if it has some special status on its own—as if it is itself an entity that can serve as one of the building blocks of God. We have another category mistake on our hands. Consider the case of a human person. We can describe the things a person consists of in a number of ways. We can say, for example, that Joe consists of muscles, organs, skin, and bone. We can say that he consists of various combinations of atoms, electrons, and protons. What we cannot say, for example, is that Joe consists of tallness. We can’t say this, even if Joe is, in fact, tall. To do so would be a category mistake. Tallness is not something Joe is made of. Instead, it is a way of describing Joe, a way that turns out to be highly context-dependent. Joe may be tall relative to others who work at his office, but not tall relative to members of a professional basketball team or to a skyscraper.

  Probability and tallness have something in common. Both can be used to describe things—events or states of affairs in the case of probability and objects or entities in the case of tallness. Neither tallness nor probability can be things that an entity “consists” in. We might say, in defense of The Avatar’s view here, that God is a being unlike any other that we know. Perhaps God, as a non-physical, supernatural thing, could be made out of probability.

  How is it that an all-good, all-powerful, all-knowing God who is an eternal, non-physical being can be fractured into two parts he didn’t contain originally? If he were non-physical to begin with, how could he rupture into physical parts in the form of the dust of which the entire universe is comprised? How could an eternal God ever have been made of probability to begin with? Why would probability be part of the flotsam and jetsam of God’s destruction?

  The notion that God is non-physical or that God is omnipotent can’t do anything to make it more likely that God could “consist of probability.” A category mistake is a category mistake and, like the laws of logic, even an omnipotent God can’t change that. Even an omnipotent God can’t be made of “hate for Mondays” or “late for work.” Those simply aren’t the kinds of things beings can be made of. The same is true of probability.

  Level Four or Level Five?

  The Avatar claims that there are five basic levels of human awareness, and most people only reach three, four if they’re lucky. The first level is self-awareness—the basic sense of awareness that you exist. At the second level of awareness, people understand that other people exist. In the third level of awareness, people realize that they may be wrong about some things, but are able to maintain their system of beliefs even in light of that recognition. The fourth level of awareness is what Adams calls “skepticism,” though it’s not clear exactly why he settled on that name. He describes the fourth level in the following way:

  The fourth level is skepticism. You believe the scientific method is the best measure of what is true, and you believe you have a good working grasp of truth, thanks to science, your logic, and your senses. You are arrogant when it comes to dealing with people in levels two and three.

  I have much to say about his description of the fourth level of consciousness, but, just so we’ll have all of the working parts on the table before we discuss these concerns, we’ll look at Adams’s conception of the level of awareness of The Avatar himself—level five. Adams says, “The fifth level of awareness is the Avatar. The Avatar understands that the mind is an illusion generator, not a window to reality. The Avatar recognizes science as a belief system, albeit a useful one. An Avatar is aware of God’s power as expressed in probability and the inevitable recombination of God consciousness.”

  So here’s my verdict on this in a nutshell: the rank ordering of these levels of awareness is not defensible, and much of what Adams has to say here is inconsistent with some of the other claims he makes in the book.

  Adams seems to exhibit a tremendous amount of disdain for people in awareness level four. He leaves no room at all in his system of categories for people who believe in science but do not have disdain for people at earlier stages of the process. He seems to think all stage fours are bound to be arrogant jerks. But, after all, he offers these stages of development as advances. So really, what he has to say about the arrogance of people in level four really depends on what he means by arrogance. Is it simply that they are aware that they are at a higher stage of development? If so, by his own lights, they are correct about that—that’s why they’re in the fourth level rather than the third level. If what he means by arrogance here is that people in the fourth level are actually rude to people at the second and third levels, to be sure, there’s no need for that, but there’s also no reason to believe that is how everyone in level four will behave.

  As I mentioned earlier, it is a little strange that he calls people at level four “skeptics.” After all, the feature that brings people in that category together is not skepticism, but a belief that logic and the scientific method constitute best epistemic practices—practices that are the most likely to produce true beliefs. If they are skeptical at all about anything, they are skeptical of methods that are less reliable, or perhaps entirely unreliable. So, for example, some people might think that prayer is an effective way to cure someone’s cancer. Someone at level four might indeed be skeptical of that claim. This isn’t because they are skeptics in general, it’s because they believe that some methods are more reliable than others at generating true beliefs.

  Here’s the rub. When describing the fifth level of awareness, it sure sounds as if he has The Avatar rejecting the existence of objective truth. Recall that he says, “The Avatar understands that the mind is an illusion generator, not a window to reality.” So at best, if there is such a thing as truth, the human mind isn’t the kind of thing that can get at it.

  Right out of the gate, I’ll point out that the claim he is making here is self-defeating. In fact, his whole Socratic endeavor up to this point has been an attempt to point The Postman in the direction of truth. All along, he has been asserting that certain facts about metaphysics, epistemology, and even claims about interpersonal relationships are true. As I understand it, we’re supposed to take his claim that the “mind is an illusion generator” to be a true claim. The paradox here is fairly clear. If the mind is a mere illusion generator, than that very mind can’t reliably lead us to the conclusion that the mind is an illusion generator. What’s more, if there are no objective moral truths, then the claim that “the mind is an illusion generator” can’t be true.

  There is a further serious incons
istency between two other things that Adams has to say. In the introduction to the book, Adams says, “The central character in God’s Debris knows everything. Literally everything.” What this means is that the Avatar knows every positive fact. Let’s assume, since the Avatar explicitly states that he is mortal, that he has a mind. Indeed, Adams claims that both intelligence and awareness belong to the mind, but awareness is a matter of “recognizing your delusions for what they are.”

  But, the problem is, if the Avatar is truly omniscient he doesn’t have any delusions. He doesn’t believe anything false. What’s more, once you introduce an omnipotent entity, you can’t also claim that truth is relative. Not if you really want the notion of omniscience to mean anything. If there are no objective truths, everything is omniscient. Rocks are omniscient. Tacos are omniscient. If all that’s needed for something to be omniscient is that you know every true fact, and it turns out that there are no true facts because there are no such things as objective truths, then omniscience turns out to be a pretty easy standard to meet.

  This part of the story should motivate further thought and conversation. The suggestion seems to be that belief in science is just one belief system among many. It’s not clear based on this work alone whether this is Adams’s own view. In the introduction, he goes out of his way to make it very explicit that the views expressed in the book are not necessarily representative of his own philosophical worldview. So, I’ll pin this on The Avatar. I think the view that he is endorsing—the philosophical underpinning of the fifth level of awareness—is tremendously dangerous.