In Scott Adams(2013) book, the character Avatar and a delivery man engage in a back-and-forth dialogue following a problem solving philosophy known as Occam’s Razor. This e-book is a variation on the original story. In this story, the main character Avatar is visited by two people rather than one. The two people have very similar beliefs but very different backgrounds. One grew up on a farm and is a student of religion, while the other grew up in Brooklyn New York raised by a theoretical physicist and neuroscientist. He is a student of theoretical physics at Princeton University.
I have intentionally used many full quotes from the original Adams (2013) book to preserve the same dialogue flow as the original story. I cite all of the actual quotes throughout the e-book. In some cases, the Avatar quotes are modifications of the original text in order to maintain the flow of these new conversations. Similar to the Adams (2013) book, this is a thought experiment of my own. I asked myself the question; how would my two characters, much smarter than the original delivery-man character, respond to the same questions?
The questions asked and the answers provided will cause some of you a level of discomfort which may be cognitive dissonance. Similar to the two characters visiting Avatar in my version of this story, each of you have lived in different places, had unique experiences and different levels of confidence in what you currently know. If you have ever stood in a large city or University library and walked through the aisles of thousands of books, you may have thought that there was too much information to choose from. Or you many have stared at the tens of thousands of results from a single search on the internet and thought, how do I know what to read? You probably look at the top ten or twenty items. How can anyone possibly locate answers in all of that information? The key is to keep asking questions and continue to tell yourself that compared to the universe of information out there, I still know very little. Remember, you need questions in order to receive answers.
And a disclosure that the opinions and ideas presented in this story, may represent my own beliefs but they do not represent any official organization. In the Adams(2013) book, he refers to the book as a “thought experiment”. This book was also a thought experiment. I did not write an outline before writing this. I just started to write. As I went through the story, I tried to preserve the logical questioning asked in the original Adams(2013) book. I tried to think like Adams’ Avatar character when writing for him or the other two characters when writing their responses to Avatar’s questions.
REFERENCES
- Adams, Scott. God’s Debris a Thought Experiment. Andrews McMeel, 2013.