Boredom, DFW and Temporal Dynamics

"Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain, because something that's dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from." - David Foster Wallace "The Pale King"

"Sein [des Menschen] Leben schwingt also, gleich einem Pendel, hin und her zwischen dem Schmerz und der Langeweile, welche in der Tat dessen letzte Bestandteile sind." - Arthur Schopenhauer

I have distracted myself. I think. Or have I?

I came along a post about boredom and The Pale King earlier and a little essay (link is in the comments) about how to go through full boredom to make it more interesting and a rewarding experience. Having been bored at the time and also tired I didn't pay much attention to it. Yes, my boredom hadn't ceased for the time being. Also I think it did not make much sense. But that may solely be linked to the fact that sense-making and clarity are qualities that don't go well with boredom. The point made in the post (if I'm not mistaken) is that voluntarily entering a state of boredom makes the whole thing much more interesting and even rewarding because what follows is a better level of attention. And, well, yes, better attention is on the way, all right, because some form of attention always follows boredom, since lack of attention is one of the things at the dead center of boredom. Hence (symplified): boredom = no attention --> attention = more attention than no attention. But the other thing is quite impossible, to enter a state of boredom voluntarily. There's a twist in it that does not work.

I feel a strong connection to the impossibility of a perpetuum mobile and an inventor I once corresponded with regarding his plans to build one exploiting oceanic maelstroms. There was a point in his theory where he was mixing warm and cold water-masses and thought they would add up and thus provide the extra amount of energy that not only kept his machine running on its own but could also turn the lights on somewhere. But of course the temperatures of a cold and a hot mass of anything do not add up, they even out. Creating a lukewarm mass of something and that is what we call entropy (simplified). And entropy is certain. The only way to heat a lukewarm mass up is to heat it up. From the outside, that is. The water can't heat itself up just by entering a mental state of voluntariness. There is no voluntariness and thus no free will in the water. And we could have lenghty arguments over if there is free will in human beings or any living (or dead, what's that all about anyway?) matter, for that matter.

Now consider boredom a lukewarm mass of indifference, an entropic state of the mind. There is no way to voluntarily enter such a state other than yearlong sensory deprivation. And that is also not possible because our body needs input from the outside (and gives output from the inside) and this serves as massive stimulation if the other senses are shut down for awhile. And even the momentarily giving in to boring activities with the purpose to come up with another level of attention requires a not insignificant amount of attention and thought-provocation that renders the former boring and tedious task indeed very interesting. So what was proposed in the post is not going through boredom to gain better levels of attention but to come up with ways and techniques to instantly turn boredom into something useful, thus interesting, beforehand. It is a prepared stimulus that is supposed to kick in every time your mental state goes boredom. It is a machinery set up to provide you with impulses (from the outside) to prevent boredom. And doing so is a very paranoid form of dealing with boredom and brings us back to the underlying pain in human beings and the quote from The Pale King: "which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from."

Let's imagine time as applying to the laws of thermodynamics, since a feeling of slowly passing time is also associated with the concept of boredom.

• First Law of Temporal Dynamics: there is a fixed amount of time. There is no way to produce more time than there is. No new time is added. No past time is lost. The present is the focusing of one's attention on a particular spot of time.
• Second Law of Temporal Dynamics: Time strives toward entropy.
• Third Law of Temporal Dynamics: Time with absolutely no content to focus on is it's dead center. This point of absolute zero can not be reached.

From these Laws of Temporal Dynamics we can further deduce (I never paid much attention in that Poe/Peirce seminar considering the differences between deduction/induction/abduction) some concepts:

• We can work with time. We can accelerate it or slow it down by putting it to use, filling it with various content and actions, structuring it.
• The quality of time's absolute zero is full entropy, an equilibrium of time. It is time that is completely unstructured by the mind.
• Boredom is the approximation of one's mind to time's dead center, approaching a mental state without impulses, without stimulation, without structure, without content.
• The underlying psychic pain that is associated with boredom is the experiencing of time's true nature, which is eternity.

So far for now. Any comments?