Day off tomorrow!
Oct. 14th, 2003 04:15 pmOof! I'm bored. Today is full of difficult people and tedious meetings. On the bright side, the sky (above the hideous concrete university buildings) is quite attractive. Kind of grey and gold marbling.
Never really noticed the sky until about a year ago, when I decided to start looking up rather than down.
Never really noticed the sky until about a year ago, when I decided to start looking up rather than down.
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Date: 2003-10-14 10:22 am (UTC)I hate looking up. Ever used a magnifying glass to start fires as a kid (maybe to burn ants or melt plastic toys)? Picture wearing two of them on your eyes and looking up at the sun... No, I only look up on gray overcast days. You can see more when your eyeballs don't feel like they are boiling!
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Date: 2003-10-15 08:48 am (UTC)yes, but boredom is one of the great causes of change. When things become dull and uneventful people desire change. When things stagnate and go bad, people desire change. You list your favorite sky as something which doesn't happen... Maybe that's because you are bored with the real sky and desire it to change?
were their subject areas and ways of thinking driven by boredom...or by the hunger of interest?
I'd say combination of both. Obviously they didn't have anything more interesting to do but sit around and think. I'd say they were bored with life, and so turned inward. However I definitely can't say that with certainty since I can't exactly go back in time and ask them (well not yet... maybe at the end of the month... depends on the experiment: Can drinking mass quantities of alcohol and dressing up like a loon transport you back in time? Stay tuned for the results).
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Date: 2003-10-15 12:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-10-15 12:45 pm (UTC)Thanks, its a work in progress. I'm trying to logically prove that Boredom is the driving force behind any and all action (starting of course with God creating the universe out of boredom).
However, I encapsulate what the universe does to change in my point, and that is independent of perspective
This however is incorrect. Change cannot be observed or acknowledged without perspective. By definition change involves time (though it may take an infintesimal amount). As shown by the Theory of Relativity, Time can flow different for anyone, and therefore anything involving time has perspective.
Boredom to me is a reaction based on a personal choice not to like or enjoy doing something
You say this like there's always a choice to like or enjoy doing something, then quickly state that no one can stand SPAM. If not liking SPAM is not a choice, there must be other things in which one has no choice about liking. If you do not like something and circumstances force you to do it, boredom usually results. It can be a personaly choice (a lifestyle for people like me), but boredom cannot be a reaction to a choice, if one does not have the choice.
a ringed planet of frozen ammonia in the Andromeda galaxy is overmined by sentient cockroaches and thus cracks apart
Now since I've argued that you can make an assumption about change without taking into account perspective, lets take a look at these cockroaches. You've declared the cockroaches to be sentient, and by the term "overmined" we can assume a reasonable intelligence. No doubt the cockroaches would realize the more they dig the more the planet seems to shake and more tunnels collapse. This would be enough to convince most creatures to stop, so why did they keep digging until the entire planet cracked apart? Probably because on a frozen planet full of cockroaches there's not much else to do... and they got BORED!
Now this is one of the strangest arguments I've ever been a part of. Not quite the strangest yet (don't ask, I chose to forget).
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Date: 2003-10-16 09:25 am (UTC)However, I encapsulate what the universe does to change in my point, and that is largely independent of perspective because most of the said changes...aren't ever going to affect one on the conscious level.
You're right in that change does require perspective to be observed, but we can't observe every change. I'm willing to bet we don't see even a quark-sized piece of the pie of all changes that occur between any two time points (I don't deny change requires time to occur, for it absolutely must.). Hence, for me, for any perspective to exist on a change, the change must be observable to begin with.
Boredom to me is a reaction based on a personal choice not to like or enjoy doing something
You say this like there's always a choice to like or enjoy doing something, then quickly state that no one can stand SPAM.
I say this because I have never been bored automatically. I either like doing something or I don't, and the reaction I give takes some amount of conscious processing (i.e., a choice). However, maybe there is something to be said for unconscious boredom causing change, which is a topic I will have to further mull over. For the conscious side, boredom occurs when I am forced to do something I dislike and there are no "serious" breaches of my personal ethics (such as killing a person). So, that's why I say the universe is driven by change and boredom is a choice of a reaction to that change. Issues that I feel severely violate my ethics provoke an interested reaction (an interest in preserving my values), not a bored one.
The SPAM thing was just to end my 'abusive' argument on a light note and demonstrate the major source of evil that it is. Some high school buddies and I have traded cans of SPAM around on our birthdays since 1993 as gag gifts, under the mutual agreement of never exposing the masses to new levels of nausea simply to satisfy curiosity whether or not SPAM has a half-shelf-life. Of course...we also happen to work for good in the name of evil, so any means to our ends are valid with enough threatening humor about SPAM! ;)
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Date: 2003-10-16 10:41 am (UTC)Happens to the best of us on numerous occassions. That's why its the readers responsibility to "read what we mean and not what we write" *grin*
Hence, for me, for any perspective to exist on a change, the change must be observable to begin with.
Would make sense when taking Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle into account (if I have the right principle). You cannot observe without changing, but without observation does it really change? If you observe a change did it only happen because you were observing it or would it have happened if it could not have been observed?
All change has a cause, the question is what is the cause. The base cause of anything CAN be drawn back to boredom (in a roundabout way, sort of a six degrees from Kevin Bacon kinda thing), but then what caused the boredom? It could have been a choice (and would be in the vast majority of instances).
I think through this discussion we've ended up showing that neither change nor boredom is the core principle of the universe, but CHOICE. CHOICE seems to be the root of everything from conception until death.
I say this because I have never been bored automatically
I never have either. I choose to be bored often because it gets me to do things I would otherwise never do. There are somethings that I disliked immediately and irrevokably, but I'm only bored with those when I want to be, otherwise I find a way to make it entertaining if unwanted.
The SPAM thing was just to end my 'abusive' argument on a light note and demonstrate the major source of evil that it is.
I figured it something like that. I used to have a 30 MB hardrive full of saved SPAM/chain letters/etc until it died.
Anyway, I hope you haven't been taking this too seriously since my arguments were supposed to have been taken in jest (but I did make a few good points in there somewhere). I just love the fact that I can argue/debate anything well!
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Date: 2003-10-16 01:03 pm (UTC)Monty Python fan?
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Date: 2003-10-17 07:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-10-17 01:29 pm (UTC)Ah - the "look! A three-headed monkey" technique :) What's all this about mohawking heretic redheads? Reprimands have been issued, there's an amnesty on henna, we'll have no trouble of that kind here...
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Date: 2003-10-16 12:39 pm (UTC)Thank-you. Add to the uncomfortable synchronicity of my life by feeding into my grand theory of life after death :P
Now this is one of the strangest arguments I've ever been a part of
Oyez! Oyez! Come all, come one, and join cybermule's acid-fuelled LJ-salon of the insane. Hmm... think I'll put that on the title of my friends page...
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Date: 2003-10-16 12:31 pm (UTC)Uh...yeah... keep us posted ;) I always dress like a loon - mass quantities of alcohol usually lead to rudeness, introversion and sleeping.
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Date: 2003-10-16 02:06 pm (UTC)I'm always rude, introverted, and sleepy... Alcohol makes me dress like a loon....
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Date: 2003-10-17 09:40 am (UTC)What a friend! Not that I need it *grin*
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Date: 2003-10-16 12:28 pm (UTC)I've been pondering this whole thread for a while, and I've come to the conclusion that I would probably agree with this. Except I'm not sure if that's just due to my own definition of boredom as a particularly stupefying and irrational lack of creativity, rather than an inspiration to new ideas. See, I'm not sure if I'm confusing boredom with depression :/
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Date: 2003-10-16 12:29 pm (UTC)