this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2026
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
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- The entire showerthought must be in the title
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- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
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If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
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Sounds like a thing we talked about in a philosophy class I took.
You have a room, with nothing but a blank piece of paper in it. There is one thing in the room.
You fold the paper. There is now a crease in the paper. It is still in the room.
How many things are in the room?
A "crease" (like the corner of a table) is a distinct thing, yet it is part of the paper. There is no increase in mass in the room. Yet the crease remains.
Information and entropy changed, if you melt ice figures to refrozen the water again you go the other way around, but you have introduced/extracted things during the process, so I stop seeing the philosophical wonder.
To begin with "how many things are in the room?" an in-depth list should include all the energy in all their forms, including matter and organisation, and when you perform processes that change this you logically vary the full list of things in the room.
The truth is there are already many things in the room. Walls, air, paper. Gravitational influence. The arrangement is rife with mass. Between the Planck lengths are quantum fluctuations. A crease introduces a new arrangement of some of this, and the energy required to do so increases entropy. In other words, this philosophy exercise seems completely useless other than putting ignorance on full display.
Nah, it's supposed to get you to think about what a thing is. You've listed random other examples of things but haven't really gotten closer to differentiating what makes a thing vs it not being a thing.
Thats what philosophy does. It's a crowbar we shove into the cracks in our models of how the world works to prove for weakness.
In the example above all you did was describe the paper better. It doesn't matter if it's blue or creased or whatever, the question is about the physicality (or lack thereof) of information. We're still not sure what happens to the information that passes through a black hole. Philosophy is a blind person's cane, helping to feel out unfamiliar territory.
As in, that territory can never be fully known?
Ideas are nouns.
This philophical quandary, I posit, is solved in the mere definition of what a thing is.
A thing is a noun.
A noun is a person, place, object, or idea.
A crease in this paradigm is an idea. It is this a thing. There are 2 things in the room.
There's more, though. There's air presumably. There's walls? What are they made of? Are they painted? How about the floor? A stale fart? Confusion over the number of things in the room?
Still, all nouns.
Can the crease exist without the paper?
Then in my opinion, it isn’t a separate thing.
Creased is just a different way for the paper to be for a little while.
I am not aware of this setup, and so I'm musing and winging it, but I think what they're saying is that if you point at the paper and say "is this a sheet of paper" they'd say yes. And then you point to the crease and say "is this a crease" and they'd say yes, so it has identity, separate from the paper (as in creases and papers are not synonymous), but given that it's not counted when listing things in the room, it's also not a thing.
But I think for me it's not that tricky, because it's a feature of the paper. Like if there was a coat in the room with buttons, and you asked me what was in the room I wouldn't say a coat and three buttons, I'd say just a coat. And the coat has three buttons, but those are properties of the coat, not the room. And buttons are something that can stand-alone!
But if I had a sheet of paper with a button placed in the middle of it, but not attached, I wonder would most people say it was a sheet of paper and a button, or a sheet of paper with a button?
What if you fold it into a paper plane or boat? In that case would you go from two things to one?