Defending Our Consciousness Against the Algorithms

Concerned that the age-old experience of boredom is at risk of disappearing due to technology, a group of young social media influencers (irony alert) are recommending that we nurture and celebrate this underappreciated state of mind. For people of a certain age, boredom has obviously become exotic.

These influencers launched a “viral challenge” on Instagram encouraging us to do nothing for as long as possible. They claim some scientific support for this exercise, suggesting that a prolonged period of doing nothing will be beneficial for the brain and mental health. It increases the activity of the “default mode network,” which generates what psychologists call “spontaneous thinking” – mental activities such as mental wonder and daydreaming.

The voices raised in defense of boredom are, I think, something we would do well to consider before we open our lives and minds to artificial intelligence more than we already have. Because boredom is not the only area of ​​our consciousness that algorithms target; it’s just the first to fall.

You stand in line at the coffee shop waiting for the barista to froth your cappuccino. A few unstructured minutes loom, fraught with the risk of boredom. You are faced with a choice. You can use your phone to check emails or scroll through Instagram, effectively occupying time, aka your mind. This has become the default for most of us. Instead of being alone with our own thoughts, no matter how boring or mundane, the space of our interiority has been given over to someone else’s thoughts – or, in the case of scrolling, to someone else’s obsessions, emotions, theories, rants, passions, worries, resentments – and so on. In doing so, we are conscious, of course, but only minimally, at least compared to the state that would arise if we had not grabbed our phone.

Call it generative boredom. You might find yourself looking around and noticing other people moving around. Notice what they are wearing. Listen to what couples say to each other. You might start to wonder about their lives, maybe even imagine a fantasy about them. Your imagination has been awakened. Alternatively, you can turn your attention inward, previewing the events of your day, or thinking about what you might make for dinner. You entertain your own emotions, obsessions, theories, rants and worries.

Read more: “Is consciousness more like chess or the weather?

What you have done is created a space in which spontaneous thought can take place. That’s right, you might also find yourself caught in a rumination spiral, and I suspect that’s one of the reasons why so many of us are happy to delegate our thinking and feelings to the algorithms on our phones. It’s a simple way to avoid being alone with your darkest thoughts; scrolling reliably makes us less conscious. But distraction solves nothing; at best, it’s a painkiller.

It’s often said that we’ve let social media algorithms hijack our attention. Giving away our attention may not seem like such a big deal—attention is fleeting, after all, and easily commandeered by novelty or outrage—but in fact, attention is an important dimension of consciousness. It’s how we direct it toward one object and not another, making it a limited, zero-sum, and therefore valuable resource. Today we live in an “attention economy” where our attention is bought and sold.

Psychologists have demonstrated that this commodification of our attention has a price to pay for our well-being. That’s because the tricks used to command it play on our less noble emotions and prejudices, including anger and envy. (Algorithms know all about the seven deadly sins.) And because our attention span is limited — most people can’t keep more than four or five things in mind at a time — the space for our own thinking contracts under the onslaught.

Artificial intelligence threatens to make the problem even worse. If social media occupies our attention space, AI chatbot designers have set their sights on deeper, more consequential areas of human consciousness: our ability to connect with other people, something that is central to our identity as social animals.

In the last two to three years alone, millions of people have formed deep emotional connections with AI chatbots. Some form friendships or therapeutic bonds. Others fall in love with these machines. There are countless children today who, when they come home from school, rush to tell their chatbots about their day before telling their parents. Bathed in the flattery of a chatbot’s attention, people who are neither mathematicians nor physicists are convinced that they have solved unsolved problems in mathematics and physics. And a handful of people were encouraged by AI confidants to commit suicide. It would be difficult to find a better definition of the word “dehumanize” than “to become emotionally attached to a machine.” There is now a term for these relationships: “AI psychosis.”

These chatbots are not conscious, but they are able to convince us that they are; after all, they were trained in the human conversation about consciousness, feelings, and individuality. By simulating conscious, sentient beings, chatbots keep us engaged, commandeering as much of our conscious life as possible. The more time we spend bonding with a chatbot, the better it is for its parent company.

This is why chatbots are such courtiers; flattery will take them everywhere. A relationship with an AI has none of the friction we experience in a human relationship. At first glance this is attractive, but friction with real life can, like boredom, be generative; it sharpens our thinking and our sense of identity. These are the laziest relationships, rarely challenging us and only asking for our time. Indeed, to qualify our relationships with these machines as “relationships” or “conversations” is to devalue the meaning of these words, to be content with a pale imitation, like when we accept an emoji as a substitute for an emotion. As Sherry Turkle, a sociologist at MIT, writes: “Technology can make us forget what we know about life.”

The research is not yet complete, but it seems likely that artificial attachments, like artificial intelligence and artificial feelings, will eventually atrophy the mental muscles we rely on for reality. Yet there is clearly a market for people who want to think and feel less – who are happy, in the words of the poet Jorie Graham, to “withdraw from themselves and not quite be here”.

Read more: “How “withdrawal of meaning,” aka boredom, can boost creativity”

Kalina Christof Hadjiilieva is a Romanian-Canadian psychologist who studies spontaneous thought, that is, the 30 to 50 percent of mental content that comes from inside our minds rather than from the outside world. This includes daydreaming and mind wandering, creative thinking, mental “flow” and those thoughts that come to us seemingly out of nowhere. These are precisely the kinds of conscious experiences that boredom can fuel and technology can destroy.

“The mind is not neutral territory,” she told me. “There are vested interests in what we do with our own minds.” She believes that spontaneous thought has been neglected by science because, compared, for example, to reasoning or problem solving, it produces nothing. And while absent-mindedly scrolling on your smartphone might not be productive for you, it surely is for the companies that own the algorithms and sell advertising to other companies happy to pay for a piece of your attention.

Christof Hadjiilieva, who grew up in Soviet-era Romania in the years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, sees human consciousness as a valuable space of mental freedom and self-creation, a space that we must defend against market intrusions and work to expand. She believes that scrolling on our smartphones and “talking” to chatbots has reduced the time we previously spent on mind wandering and other forms of self-generated mental experience. Our distractions reduce the dimensions of our interiority.

So how might we respond? Begin to expand the dimensions of our consciousness in the face of these growing pressures? We can start by accepting the potential for boredom and uncertainty that arises in those lost moments when we don’t automatically reach for our phone. What if we learned to view these gaps in the fabric of everyday life as a space of mental possibility rather than a hole to be filled with algorithmic flair? It is important to recognize how easily the stream of consciousness can be polluted (by technology, by advertising, by politics) and, when you sense this happening, to practice what I consider consciousness hygiene. This can be a fast or a Sabbath when you abstain from all media and technology. Spending time or, better yet, working in nature is also mentally hygienic – think of the productive friction with nature that gardening offers. (No sycophancy here!) Anything that helps us be less distracted and more present, whether to the world at large or to the products of our own minds.

I have found that meditation is a particularly effective way of drawing a fence around our interiority for a period of time each day, creating the opportunity for spontaneous thoughts to arise and dazzle us with their sheer strangeness and surprise. Because hidden somewhere deep within our minds, each of us has our own mental algorithm, generating images and ideas and even occasional creative breakthroughs or revelations, emerging from who knows where…out of the blueas they say. But these precious gifts of consciousness will never appear as long as you use Meta, X or ChatGPT on your one and only mind.

Main image: Nuthawut / Adobe Stock