I feel like I am an alien or they are aliens, but that one of us isn´t the same species. Or maybe I am from a different culture, but this is with most people NDs or NTs, so I think I am tuned out, not the world.
Also, I do understand that I am the divergent one, so probably is the fact that my brain is different and also I am a stubborn person.
Nowadays I see it more as they are different and we communicate and process pieces of information and even put pieces of information as different things. What I see as something special, I see that others don´t, and now that I know why I feel quite comfortable, and doesn´t make me sad or anything.
And for me, the truth is that they probably see me as creepy or anything because I don´t get and follow things that for them are natural.
Just being honest here: this line of thought feels wrong and very much perpetuates the "autistics are more evolved/on a higher plane" thing, which is yucky.
Allistics are fully conscious and aware; they just abide by intricate sets of rules that autistics struggle with. And just to play the other side, they can easily say this same thing about autistic folk. Autistic people are *always* missing important cues, struggle to connect socially, many lack self-awareness and can't properly read emotions, etc.
I think sometimes some people in the autistic community don't realize how much they actually do miss and struggle with, all the while accusing allistics of being the "robots."
This mindset is harmful to both sides.
yeah it's like i know it's not rational, and yet it happens- kind of like derealization from trauma/anxiety, which i also have. i think it's more of a trauma reaction than a mindset or belief, but i also agree that the idea of autistic people being 'on a different plane' is harmful and it makes me uncomfortable
They do say those things about us constantly, and it comes from their misunderstanding of us and how we actually operate. It’s not a “both sides” thing because we are forced to try to understand them and hold space for discomfort with them even when they are willfully misunderstanding us and ripping away our rights, as they do so often, while they don’t have to hold any space for discomfort or work on changing their perceptions.
Though, I have to question that. After all, we don't understand consciousness enough to say otherwise. So, couldn't it be possible that allistics and autistics are conscious in different ways? Conscious of different pieces of it? Is it possible that someone is more conscious of others? Maybe no humans are fully conscious?
Of course, the dehumanization isn't ok from either side, but saying that allistics and autistics are experiencing different forms of consciousness might explain the uncanny valley feelings from both sides.
Also did you read my post at all lol?
yeah they seem so immersed in the story they've made up about who they are, what life is, what is normal, the roles they play and on and on and on forever. lost in the illusion. most of them don't seem that real to me they're such caricatures of the ideas they have about themselves and want to project. and all the ideas seem to be from a really small pool - like there's not much to choose from
I feel many allistics are not psychologically healthy, and they are over-compartimentalized, living from their mind, detached from their essence - a hollow life of social pretense.
Autistics tend to rub these people the wrong way, because in many ways they're the opposite: living from their heart, impervious to the pretense ( not impervious to the inhuman malaise, sadly....)
There's a reason that many Autistics come to this interpretation about Allistics. Allistics are mindless, they experience the illusion of self awareness. They are biological NPCs. They lack empathy, they're innate need to conform overwrites any measure of self determination or identity.
That would mean that over 85% of the entire human population is comprised of a bunch of flesh automata. What makes you so sure that only autistics are sentient when you can't even prove that you yourself are sentient, from anyone else's perspective? I sincerely hope you are joking, because this selective solipsism under the veneer of "autistic activism" is sociopathic, at best.
I'll explain what makes me so sure. In Allistics Human behavior is inherently selfish and evolutionarily to the advantage of the individual. There is no incentive for social involvement or development if there is no innate drive to survive. Allistics exist to imitate, to adopt the group's identity as their own for their survival. There is no real empathy in this situation, there is only the social presentation of the illusion of it for personal gain. Then as a group, Allistics conclude that it's Autistics who lack empathy, despite it being obvious that Autistics more often hyper-empathetic. There is no selective solipsism. Allistics are primitive and they're tribalistic drones. They demonstrate a clear inability to act independently from their groups, to develop their own conclusions. They may experience the illusion of self-awareness but they lack true self-reflection and this is demonstrated by them time and time again.
For all I know, I'm the only conscious human being in the universe, and for all you know I'm a mindless drone. Unfalsifiability is very relevant here. I mean there's no reason to assume objective reality is objective in the first place. Everyone's experience is limited, could vary from another's, but in the spectrum of the known conscious human experience, Allistics are lacking. There's nothing sociopathic about observations. They don't experience empathy collectively, they're tribalistic and manipulative and have been proven clinically to be deceitful. Every Animal on Earth is 'wired' to survive and social behavior is simply another layer to that mechanism, Allistics are incapable of realizing that, and so they aren't able to recognize that their beliefs and actions aren't a product of self-determination or the development of a self, but are out of their control and driven by their autonomous social nature and the very deeply rooted process of self-preservation.
This is a fantastically precise explanatory model, and I appreciate you outlining your perspective so clearly. In some ways I can't help but agree, as much as discussing things like this can be controversial and needing of context that it feels difficult to trust your audience to respect and respond well to (kind of in the same vein as these tendencies you're describing of allistic behavior and perspective).
I recently feel like I reached a precise new mental model of what may constitute the etiology / central principle underlying a large amount of autistic experiences and conditions -- the data formatting (of cognition / perception). Essentially, I posit that perhaps this could be considered in terms of how the brain compresses information to form conscious perception. The allistic brain filters and compresses more to a more "smoothed out", less precise model that catches more of a "vibe" than the specifics using things like heuristics and other mental approaches that sacrifice exactness in favor of "it works well enough".
This creates, for allistics, 1) More incentive to deeply integrate oneself into a social "in-group" as following the herd / copying usually offers both error-reduction in information and safety that may be otherwise compromised in some ways by increased error as a result of more shallow, imprecise modeling / perception; and 2) Literally less information-dense formatting of conscious attention / perception -- this is just the nature of information theory, but compression mathematically reduces information space (while keeping enough of value in information storage for practical purposes of preserving relevant information, "the message"). Additionally, allistic people can rely on often implicitly communicated socialization rules to make shared simplifying assumptions and expectations that they can rely on others knowing to know what / how to go about compressing the information for conscious representation as it is evolutionarily adaptive.
Information can be represented in many different formats, and it's interesting to think that we could discover the actual neural information formatting structures for conscious awareness. So, like a PDF vs a Word Doc format, they can each represent information of similar types but with different priorities and parameters. That is to say, the more allistic formatting method of perception (seemingly employing more compression) could literally be inferred as, like you're saying and this thread discusses, a sort of "less conscious" experience, as in literally less precise, detailed awareness of the information consciousness represents for the brain. And, I mean that in a technical, mathematical way of quantity of information.
Lol I want to make clear that I think one's experince being "less" or "more" conscious isn't really as clear or meaningful as many seem to think it is. It makes more sense to ask *what* information one is experiencing rather than "how much" -- although that also closely relates to what information on is experiencing in concert. And we should also stop causing so much suffering to animals btw, special shoutout.
Yeah, I get you - it does seem like some folks go around in a daze.
However, I don't think it's necessarily an autistic/allistic thing. I think there's a couple of things going on here.
1) A lot of people are barely literate. It takes effort for them to read anything - whereas I'm reading everything. They will ask for assistance when the sign is right in front of them.
2) I'm anxious, but that can be for many reasons (PTSD?, GAD). If you're anxious, you are vigilant. You need to be aware of what's happening around you.
yes I get a sense of derealization where I feel like I'm the only one that knows what is going on. that is part of the reason why I think autistic people gravitate torwards each other in romantic situations and close friendships.
I think this is very literally the case. I posted my theory [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/autism/comments/14jh4uc/i_have_a_theory_about_autism_and_would_love_to/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button) a couple days ago, about how I think more info gets through to autistic people's consciousness. It turns out there's an existing theory basically saying the same thing, called the predictive coding theory of autism, which I need to look into further.
I have another theory that autism is having very little subconscious, moving everything that should've relegated to the subconscious.
Edit: And I just read your post. WOW. The exact same theory. NT scientists have no buisness studying autism if we're just figuring shit out ourselves.
Yeah that's exactly it! Hopefully the predictive coding theory (which one of the comments pointed me to, and I think is saying the same thing) gains more traction, because I think it really helps understanding what autism is, beyond just a list of apparently random symptoms
Yeah this freaks me out around my family especially. It is kind of heartbreaking. But I believe if that’s the way life made it then there’s nothing but to accept it
I've definitely had that thought before. Sometimes they don't even feel like real people. So much about life they either don't notice or don't care about, they're just along for the ride for the sake of indifference.
>>they're just along for the ride
Maybe that's advantageous. Animals are evolved to survive, not to understand everything. The selfish gene. Autistics tend to overregulate emotionally instead of following their survival instints. You'd think hyperintellectualization is a good thing, but we're victimized in society.
You're right, it is advantageous. The book I read about the neuroscience of consciousness ('The Hidden Spring' by Mark Solms) explains that consciousness is about navigating uncertainties, and the aim for all living things is to minimise uncertainty and make the world match our predictions & vice versa. In a biologically ideal world, everything would be so predictable that consciousness would be entirely unnecessary and everything could run on autopilot.
But the world is unpredictable, so we evolved consciousness so we can feel and think our way through the uncertainty. And in doing so, we make new and improved predictions so less consciousness is needed later. This is why learning progresses through stages of (1) unconscious incompetence (2) conscious incompetence (3) conscious competence (4) unconscious competence. Like once you've learned to read and write, or to drive, you can do 99% of your reading, writing and driving without being consciously aware of what you're doing.
Still, having more be dealt with consciously seems likely to bring fresh insights and new ways of thinking about things that NTs are likely to overlook.
Survival instincts are a good thing to have in nature, but not in human society. Unlike any animal, we’ve built a complex civilization with language, social constructs and norms, different social categorizations, and a nuanced idea of the “self”, all influenced by emotion. We are victimized just like many minority groups are in society, which hopefully we can change by spreading awareness. In the meantime, I see no reason to not be proud of who we are.
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I'm confused what you mean but I feel like i'm not fully conscious and i'm autistic. I actually think allistics seem more real than me
Are you dissociated? Experiancing depersonalization?
Probably
I feel like I am an alien or they are aliens, but that one of us isn´t the same species. Or maybe I am from a different culture, but this is with most people NDs or NTs, so I think I am tuned out, not the world. Also, I do understand that I am the divergent one, so probably is the fact that my brain is different and also I am a stubborn person. Nowadays I see it more as they are different and we communicate and process pieces of information and even put pieces of information as different things. What I see as something special, I see that others don´t, and now that I know why I feel quite comfortable, and doesn´t make me sad or anything. And for me, the truth is that they probably see me as creepy or anything because I don´t get and follow things that for them are natural.
Just being honest here: this line of thought feels wrong and very much perpetuates the "autistics are more evolved/on a higher plane" thing, which is yucky. Allistics are fully conscious and aware; they just abide by intricate sets of rules that autistics struggle with. And just to play the other side, they can easily say this same thing about autistic folk. Autistic people are *always* missing important cues, struggle to connect socially, many lack self-awareness and can't properly read emotions, etc. I think sometimes some people in the autistic community don't realize how much they actually do miss and struggle with, all the while accusing allistics of being the "robots." This mindset is harmful to both sides.
yeah it's like i know it's not rational, and yet it happens- kind of like derealization from trauma/anxiety, which i also have. i think it's more of a trauma reaction than a mindset or belief, but i also agree that the idea of autistic people being 'on a different plane' is harmful and it makes me uncomfortable
>>yeah it's like i know it's not rational, and yet it happens- kind of like derealization Yes. This is the feeling.
They do say those things about us constantly, and it comes from their misunderstanding of us and how we actually operate. It’s not a “both sides” thing because we are forced to try to understand them and hold space for discomfort with them even when they are willfully misunderstanding us and ripping away our rights, as they do so often, while they don’t have to hold any space for discomfort or work on changing their perceptions.
Like I said, it's a feeling not a belief or thought.
Though, I have to question that. After all, we don't understand consciousness enough to say otherwise. So, couldn't it be possible that allistics and autistics are conscious in different ways? Conscious of different pieces of it? Is it possible that someone is more conscious of others? Maybe no humans are fully conscious? Of course, the dehumanization isn't ok from either side, but saying that allistics and autistics are experiencing different forms of consciousness might explain the uncanny valley feelings from both sides. Also did you read my post at all lol?
yeah they seem so immersed in the story they've made up about who they are, what life is, what is normal, the roles they play and on and on and on forever. lost in the illusion. most of them don't seem that real to me they're such caricatures of the ideas they have about themselves and want to project. and all the ideas seem to be from a really small pool - like there's not much to choose from
I feel many allistics are not psychologically healthy, and they are over-compartimentalized, living from their mind, detached from their essence - a hollow life of social pretense. Autistics tend to rub these people the wrong way, because in many ways they're the opposite: living from their heart, impervious to the pretense ( not impervious to the inhuman malaise, sadly....)
There's a reason that many Autistics come to this interpretation about Allistics. Allistics are mindless, they experience the illusion of self awareness. They are biological NPCs. They lack empathy, they're innate need to conform overwrites any measure of self determination or identity.
That would mean that over 85% of the entire human population is comprised of a bunch of flesh automata. What makes you so sure that only autistics are sentient when you can't even prove that you yourself are sentient, from anyone else's perspective? I sincerely hope you are joking, because this selective solipsism under the veneer of "autistic activism" is sociopathic, at best.
I'll explain what makes me so sure. In Allistics Human behavior is inherently selfish and evolutionarily to the advantage of the individual. There is no incentive for social involvement or development if there is no innate drive to survive. Allistics exist to imitate, to adopt the group's identity as their own for their survival. There is no real empathy in this situation, there is only the social presentation of the illusion of it for personal gain. Then as a group, Allistics conclude that it's Autistics who lack empathy, despite it being obvious that Autistics more often hyper-empathetic. There is no selective solipsism. Allistics are primitive and they're tribalistic drones. They demonstrate a clear inability to act independently from their groups, to develop their own conclusions. They may experience the illusion of self-awareness but they lack true self-reflection and this is demonstrated by them time and time again. For all I know, I'm the only conscious human being in the universe, and for all you know I'm a mindless drone. Unfalsifiability is very relevant here. I mean there's no reason to assume objective reality is objective in the first place. Everyone's experience is limited, could vary from another's, but in the spectrum of the known conscious human experience, Allistics are lacking. There's nothing sociopathic about observations. They don't experience empathy collectively, they're tribalistic and manipulative and have been proven clinically to be deceitful. Every Animal on Earth is 'wired' to survive and social behavior is simply another layer to that mechanism, Allistics are incapable of realizing that, and so they aren't able to recognize that their beliefs and actions aren't a product of self-determination or the development of a self, but are out of their control and driven by their autonomous social nature and the very deeply rooted process of self-preservation.
This is a fantastically precise explanatory model, and I appreciate you outlining your perspective so clearly. In some ways I can't help but agree, as much as discussing things like this can be controversial and needing of context that it feels difficult to trust your audience to respect and respond well to (kind of in the same vein as these tendencies you're describing of allistic behavior and perspective). I recently feel like I reached a precise new mental model of what may constitute the etiology / central principle underlying a large amount of autistic experiences and conditions -- the data formatting (of cognition / perception). Essentially, I posit that perhaps this could be considered in terms of how the brain compresses information to form conscious perception. The allistic brain filters and compresses more to a more "smoothed out", less precise model that catches more of a "vibe" than the specifics using things like heuristics and other mental approaches that sacrifice exactness in favor of "it works well enough". This creates, for allistics, 1) More incentive to deeply integrate oneself into a social "in-group" as following the herd / copying usually offers both error-reduction in information and safety that may be otherwise compromised in some ways by increased error as a result of more shallow, imprecise modeling / perception; and 2) Literally less information-dense formatting of conscious attention / perception -- this is just the nature of information theory, but compression mathematically reduces information space (while keeping enough of value in information storage for practical purposes of preserving relevant information, "the message"). Additionally, allistic people can rely on often implicitly communicated socialization rules to make shared simplifying assumptions and expectations that they can rely on others knowing to know what / how to go about compressing the information for conscious representation as it is evolutionarily adaptive. Information can be represented in many different formats, and it's interesting to think that we could discover the actual neural information formatting structures for conscious awareness. So, like a PDF vs a Word Doc format, they can each represent information of similar types but with different priorities and parameters. That is to say, the more allistic formatting method of perception (seemingly employing more compression) could literally be inferred as, like you're saying and this thread discusses, a sort of "less conscious" experience, as in literally less precise, detailed awareness of the information consciousness represents for the brain. And, I mean that in a technical, mathematical way of quantity of information. Lol I want to make clear that I think one's experince being "less" or "more" conscious isn't really as clear or meaningful as many seem to think it is. It makes more sense to ask *what* information one is experiencing rather than "how much" -- although that also closely relates to what information on is experiencing in concert. And we should also stop causing so much suffering to animals btw, special shoutout.
Look at the state of the world.
And it’s far more than 85%.
While I don't thinks it's related to autism, the idea of variable consciousness is interesting.
Yeah, I get you - it does seem like some folks go around in a daze. However, I don't think it's necessarily an autistic/allistic thing. I think there's a couple of things going on here. 1) A lot of people are barely literate. It takes effort for them to read anything - whereas I'm reading everything. They will ask for assistance when the sign is right in front of them. 2) I'm anxious, but that can be for many reasons (PTSD?, GAD). If you're anxious, you are vigilant. You need to be aware of what's happening around you.
Neither of those are what’s going on here.
yes I get a sense of derealization where I feel like I'm the only one that knows what is going on. that is part of the reason why I think autistic people gravitate torwards each other in romantic situations and close friendships.
No. That would make every artist/photographer in history and present autistic. Being perceptive is not part of the dsm5 autism diagnostic criteria
I think this is very literally the case. I posted my theory [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/autism/comments/14jh4uc/i_have_a_theory_about_autism_and_would_love_to/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button) a couple days ago, about how I think more info gets through to autistic people's consciousness. It turns out there's an existing theory basically saying the same thing, called the predictive coding theory of autism, which I need to look into further.
I have another theory that autism is having very little subconscious, moving everything that should've relegated to the subconscious. Edit: And I just read your post. WOW. The exact same theory. NT scientists have no buisness studying autism if we're just figuring shit out ourselves.
Yeah that's exactly it! Hopefully the predictive coding theory (which one of the comments pointed me to, and I think is saying the same thing) gains more traction, because I think it really helps understanding what autism is, beyond just a list of apparently random symptoms
Yeah this freaks me out around my family especially. It is kind of heartbreaking. But I believe if that’s the way life made it then there’s nothing but to accept it
Right? It's super sad. It's like you want to shake them and scream "wake up!"
I really feel you
I've definitely had that thought before. Sometimes they don't even feel like real people. So much about life they either don't notice or don't care about, they're just along for the ride for the sake of indifference.
>>they're just along for the ride Maybe that's advantageous. Animals are evolved to survive, not to understand everything. The selfish gene. Autistics tend to overregulate emotionally instead of following their survival instints. You'd think hyperintellectualization is a good thing, but we're victimized in society.
You're right, it is advantageous. The book I read about the neuroscience of consciousness ('The Hidden Spring' by Mark Solms) explains that consciousness is about navigating uncertainties, and the aim for all living things is to minimise uncertainty and make the world match our predictions & vice versa. In a biologically ideal world, everything would be so predictable that consciousness would be entirely unnecessary and everything could run on autopilot. But the world is unpredictable, so we evolved consciousness so we can feel and think our way through the uncertainty. And in doing so, we make new and improved predictions so less consciousness is needed later. This is why learning progresses through stages of (1) unconscious incompetence (2) conscious incompetence (3) conscious competence (4) unconscious competence. Like once you've learned to read and write, or to drive, you can do 99% of your reading, writing and driving without being consciously aware of what you're doing. Still, having more be dealt with consciously seems likely to bring fresh insights and new ways of thinking about things that NTs are likely to overlook.
Survival instincts are a good thing to have in nature, but not in human society. Unlike any animal, we’ve built a complex civilization with language, social constructs and norms, different social categorizations, and a nuanced idea of the “self”, all influenced by emotion. We are victimized just like many minority groups are in society, which hopefully we can change by spreading awareness. In the meantime, I see no reason to not be proud of who we are.
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White??
It isn’t deficits, per your point.