If I were to make a short list of the most important human qualities—

—and yes, this is a fool's errand, because human nature is immensely complicated, and we don't even notice all the tiny tweaks that fine-tune our moral categories, and who knows how our attractors would change shape if we eliminated a single human emotion—

—but even so, if I had to point to just a few things and say, "If you lose just one of these things, you lose most of the expected value of the Future; but conversely if an alien species independently evolved just these few things, we might even want to be friends"—

—then the top three items on the list would be sympathy, boredom and consciousness.

Boredom is a subtle-splendored thing. You wouldn't want to get bored with breathing, for example—even though it's the same motions over and over and over and over again for minutes and hours and years and decades.

Now I know some of you out there are thinking, "Actually, I'm quite bored with breathing and I wish I didn't have to," but then you wouldn't want to get bored with switching transistors.

According to the human value of boredom, some things are allowed to be highly repetitive without being boring—like obeying the same laws of physics every day.

Conversely, other repetitions are supposed to be boring, like playing the same level of Super Mario Brothers over and over and over again until the end of time. And let us note that if the pixels in the game level have a slightly different color each time, that is not sufficient to prevent it from being "the same damn thing, over and over and over again".

Once you take a closer look, it turns out that boredom is quite interesting.

One of the key elements of boredom was suggested in "Complex Novelty": If your activity isn't teaching you insights you didn't already know, then it is non-novel, therefore old, therefore boring.

But this doesn't quite cover the distinction. Is breathing teaching you anything? Probably not at this moment, but you wouldn't want to stop breathing. Maybe you'd want to stop noticing your breathing, which you'll do as soon as I stop drawing your attention to it.

I'd suggest that the repetitive activities which are allowed to not be boring fall into two categories:

Things so extremely low-level, or with such a small volume of possibilities, that you couldn't avoid repeating them even if you tried; bu

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Zaphod

Zaphod

Zaphod

Zaphod