Scott Adams offers practical heuristics for living in “God’s Debris.” You don’t have to accept his cosmology, which I interpreted as an updated conceptualization of De Chardin’s Noosphere, to extract a number of useful insights.
God’s Debris: Scott Adams Meditation on the Noosphere
I finally got around to reading “God’s Debris” by Scott Adams. In the beginning, the Big Bang, God explodes into a cloud of basic particles to create the Universe. All of us are made of these particles and we are engaged in an effort to reassemble God by the end of Time.
I interpreted this as Adam’s meditation on the Noosphere, Teilhard de Chardin’s 1947 vision: “We must enlarge our approach to encompass the formation, taking place before our eyes of a biological entity such as has never before existed on earth—the growth, outside and above the biosphere, of an added planetary layer, an envelope of thinking substance, to which, for the sake of convenience and symmetry, I have given the name of the Noosphere.”
Conversation
“Conversation is more than the sum of the words. It is also a way of signaling the importance of another person by showing your willingness to give that person your rarest resource: time. It is a way of conveying respect. Conversation reminds us that we are part of a greater whole, connected in some way that transcends duty or bloodline or commerce. Conversation can be many things, but it can never be useless.”
Scott Adams in “God’s Debris“
I found a lot of wisdom in this passage.
Some simple guidelines for living a good life
These suggestions are pulled from some paragraphs near the end of the book.
- Be humble
- Acknowledge your flaws
- Remain mindful of the role luck plays in any success.
- Picard’s Law
- Express gratitude.
- Give more than is expected.
- Speak optimistically.
- Remember names.
- Don’t confuse flexibility with weakness.
- Don’t judge people by their mistakes; rather, judge them by how they respond to their mistakes.
- Your physical appearance is for the benefit of others.
- Attend to your own basic needs first or you will not be useful to anyone else.
- When you do good things, good things come back to you, but not in a one-for-one manner. Individual actions are not directly rewarded. It is only on average that doing good improves the quality of life for you and the people around you.
I found all of this to be good advice.
SKMurphy Take
Overall the book was a quick read and had several passages of beautiful writing and some practical advice, the latter I have excerpted in this post. Overall I don’t know that I can recommend it as I think Adams gives in too much to a tendency to be a smart ass.
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Image Credit: The Noosphere or “The Thinking Layer”? – Art by Midjourney AI (h/t Ron Jones “Noosphere“)