The privilege of boredom: How philosophy can happen in isolation | Hacker News Reader

The privilege of boredom: How philosophy can happen in isolation

the-tls.co.uk

123 pointsapollinaire33 comments

We know, now as ever, that boredom is far from the worst that people will experience during this pandemic. Descartes reminds us that boredom can also be a privilege. For boredom allows the mind to wander, to rest on an idea longer than it would otherwise have, to start off on a road which leads to habits of attention.

The other day I mentioned to a friend that many people we both know say they are struggling with isolation and lack of something exciting happening and we both concluded that they are the same people that, it seemed to us, never reserve time for their own thoughts and probably are finding this whole boredom privilege quite painful because they are finally forced to pay attention to the person inside their minds, and that can be frightening I suppose. To some people that can easily become the worst experience during this pandemic.

It is not so much frightening to be inside own mind. These people thrive on things happening and lack of sensory input and lack of feelings and lack or anything you could think about and lack of place to spend energy makes them suffer.

I don't know why people project fear on others lately all the time or project deep scary depths. Sometimes it is simply that quick change makes you suffer.

I think it really depends on the state of your life. Anyone with some major underlying issues that they've been ignoring is bound to have trouble being alone with their own thoughts. The same might apply to those with smaller problems that they find hard to deal with.

However, people who tend to reflect on themselves and the life they lead, will find it easier to adjust. Also, I'd presume stuff like personality types matters too. It's more difficult for someone who's used to being around people and sharing everything with them to switch to isolation.

I think the reason for it is grounded in theories of causation in human emotions/behaviors: there are a number of behaviors which are deemed to behave like 'symptoms' in that they are effectively determined by a smaller set of underlying emotions, e.g. fear.

Part of the idea, from what I can tell, is that the emotion (e.g. fear) in many cases doesn't appear at the surface level because it is "unacceptable" to a person, so their mind/brain assists in disguising it. But—the symptoms it causes are still there, hence this process of associating (visible) symptom sets to (non-visible) root causes, so that a non-superficial way of dealing with the problem might be recommended.

Or maybe it is simply shaming and dominance thing. Fear is used to emasculate and shoe the supposedly afraid person as lesser.

Like with masks - those opposed them like to frame wearing them as fear "I will not be afraid". It is never responsibility, caution nor fashion nor "who cares why not". It must be fear, because it shames.

>Sometimes it is simply that quick change makes you suffer.

Falling out of your comfortable routine can cause some immediate suffering. Continuing to suffer months later is a different matter.

Isolation and loneliness and lack of sensory input is harder the longer it goes.

You need years of preparation of social network able to help you cope, not like two months.

Or you could talk to your neighbors, call your family, and spend time on a hobby. People aren't in solitary confinement here.

"They are finally forced to pay attention to the person inside their minds ... and that can be frightening I suppose."

Or they start comparing their own internal values to those they see in the world and are truly disgusted by what they see.

Secondly, society and the economy are the systems demanding people never take a break. How many job descriptions require being able to "multi-task" or being "self-driven"?

I find it a bit sickening to see people reflecting these deep societal issues back on these individuals, as if it were their fault.

I find that having children has made me think deeper on a lot of things, for the simple fact that children ask very difficult questions without having a lot of other context to reference to when explaining. When you can’t use anything besides what your kid has already learned to explain something, you really have to think deeply.

I remember how long it took for my two year old to really grasp the meaning of “tomorrow”. Is it tomorrow yet? When does tomorrow happen? You said something was going to happen tomorrow, and now that thing is happening, so it must be tomorrow now... but then why are you saying something else is going to happen tomorrow? I thought it was tomorrow now!

When it is summer (like now) and the sun sets here around 10 pm, my son can put his head on the pillow for 5 mins, get up, see there is light outside (by leaving his room, as his rooms is dark) and exclaim: "It is now morning!". He is not always convinced that we are not lying to him when saying that is still evening / night.

Maybe it gets easier to explain when they have a better understanding of time? Understanding time has past and how much of it seems to be difficult for kids to grasp / understand ? (I have no clue, just observing my own small world).

I guess the same could be said for adults though, our concept of time often depends on whether or not we want to do what we are doing - time flies and so on. Sorry for the tangent!

Whenever running or exercise comes up in conversation, someone will invariably ask what music I listen to. They're often shocked when I reply that I don't carry anything on me other than a dumb stopwatch and my keys. Running is the only respite I have from being wired in, a sort of pre-shower shower time for me to face myself and my ideas. I've been trying to make it a habit to immediately jot down any ideas right after.

Somebody once called me a psycho after learning I don't listen to music/radio when driving. It's simply my preference, but I guess some people feel very strongly about it.

I've seen this topic, the gap between philosophy and life, being discussed a lot in Buddhism. The Vietnamese Buddist monks usually talk about "Đạo và Đời" meaning "Religion and Life." The monks explain why they don't get married and laypeople can. If we generalize the concept, it can become "Philosophy and Life."

The answer is practice. It's like math. In order to understand a concept, we need to practice. In the information age, we often assume that we understand some concepts by just reading Wikipedia pages. We all strive to be polymaths. We want to discover the next great philosophy. But we end up being confused. Practice is the key to understanding. Frequent mediation, having quiet time, isolation are forms of practice.

Boredom is not a privilege except through material circumstances, it’s literally a form of suffering. That it is a microcosm for the suffering of the material world has literally thousands of years of discussion worth examining. Perhaps this time could also be spent contemplating the material circumstances that lead to the fucked-up nature of considering boredom to be a privilege.

Could you point me to some examples of such discussion? Very interested in checking them out.

I sometimes think, people in cities are constantly distracted by the entertaining parade of events forever passing. They have no time to think in silence and stillness.

Children may not be capable of the sustained informed rigour needed to "work on" philosophy, but they're certainly capable of the playful inquiry needed to "hack around" philosophy.

(I had a sports coach who used to ask the little kids questions like "what is freedom?" I asked him why he asked them questions that adults fail to answer, and he replied he was hoping that, in five or ten years if not now, they might come up with an answer he hasn't yet run across)

That's a great coach. Planting the seeds that will help those kids later in life to not be afraid of asking hard questions because they will remember their coach asking these questions. It helps to have role models like that because people are mimetic and they copy from everyone around them.

(from profile: "What if thoughts had Fourier transforms?")

Couldn't the "frequency-domain" conjugate of thoughts be Vannevar Bush's "Associative Trails"?

How so?

They're conjugate in the sense that thoughts will be part of many different trails, while trails are composed of many different thoughts. Focus too much on the specific thought, and one loses track of which specific trail; focus too much on the trail, and one loses track of which thought. (so a self-reinforcing coherent group of thoughts and trails would be a gaussian?)

Interesting perspective. I imagine trails as graphs and stepping through a graph is like looking at the components of a time-domain representation of a signal so in my mind associative trails are a time-domain representation of thinking. But you might be onto something. I've been thinking about how to incorporate search into something I'm working on and search can be considered a frequency representation because finding and ranking documents is about finding the frequency components relevant to the query. If associative trails can incorporate search then that might be a good enough frequency-domain representation.

In the context of knowledge engineering I think "frequency" representation has to be dynamic and search is a very simple form of dynamism. But I might be thinking about this the wrong way and your view might be more correct, i.e. static content = frequency domain, dynamic content = time domain.

Not sure I'd call it a privilege exactly, but frank boredom probably did help me learn computers as a child. There was no hardware around, nor anyone to learn from, so I simply read whatever sales literature and manuals I could get my hands on (which wasn't much). Sheer boredom led me to study them well, and it was good early learning.

That said, boredom can also be quite agonizing, and I wouldn't wish it on any but my enemies.

If people took daily showers in 17th century Europe this would have been a lot easier. Nothing like a good long shower for thinking.

People back then had miles to walk and no phones to stare at or tvs to watch. There was plenty of time to think.

It's easy to think of ideas that others have had (interpolate). Much harder to synthesize new ideas (extrapolate), or at least those of significance. Probably related to P NP problem.

Edit: yes, verifying would be P and synthesizing would be NP. And with this new intuition I suppose encryption will probably be safe!

P vs NP is more about verifying correctness of a solution compared to the hardness of finding a good one. I don’t think interpolation/extrapolation fits very well.

However, what fits better is understanding existing ideas and verifying they indeed solve a problem, compared to the hardness of finding a “best solution” to a given problem. This is still only a rough parallel. You are right that many (probably most) complexity theorists believe that hardness separation in this case is a fundamental principle reflective of real life.

Depends where you're walking how free your mind is to wander - if you're walking through woodlands, on rough tracks, in country with wild animals then you could have no cognitive overhead available for pondering.

I walk, pandemic aside, 45mins each way to work as it's on quiet pavements I can walk without thinking which is a different experience to walking in rough country when one needs to focus on the walking itself.

For me I come up with a couple of inventions/innovations every week (ideas are cheap as everyone says, which is rubbish for me as ideas are about my only differentiator) but unfortunately I don't have facilities or time (nor probably the skills) to develop them.

I disagree, hiking rough terrain is an excellent time for me to think, personally. I find the stimulation is additive.

Sort of like bouncing a leg or twirling a pen.

I was referring to the letter from Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia to Descartes saying she was too busy with courtly life to follow his instructions.

Then: rare bath, lots of combing done by servants

Now: common shower, ideal alone time.

If you were a noble/royal woman, I think it's fair to say you'd have more time to think now than then.

(And exercise, the other thing that's nicer for thinking behind doing nothing besides warm water, was also not really a thing for women then.)

> saying she was too busy with courtly life to follow his instructions

That's because his instructions were totally extreme even by today's standards. This says nothing about averages and ultimately as a noble she simply did not want to.

>And exercise, the other thing that's nicer for thinking behind doing nothing besides warm water, was also not really a thing for women then

Are you implying that women just sat around not thinking all the time? Because I am too, but for different reasons, and not just men.

The vast majority of people are not interested in thinking beyond the bare minimum. Otherwise we'd have more than a tiny fraction of the population purposefully self learning.

I'm claiming that early modern Europe, and courtly life in particular, did not give upper-class women a lot of alone time.

I am trying to find the book I once had a college class to cite, but I am having trouble finding it.

It can, but lots of interesting philosophy can need collaboration. Good philosophy of mind stuff should be informed by neuroscience.

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