writefln and ASCII

Steve Horne stephenwantshornenospam100 at aol.com
Sun Sep 17 12:42:47 PDT 2006


Did you know that Tortoise Subversion includes a tool for tracking
cycles of depression?

Do the log for your main repository. Click 'Show All', then
"Statistics" and select "Commits by Week". Take a look at the nice
graph of how your energy levels have been cycling.

Admittedly its only likely to work for people with Aspergers, and even
then it depends on some obvious conditions.

I seem to be a rock bottom. My last peek was 5 weeks ago, at more that
twice the number of commits per week. Bigger commits, too. And looking
back, I was coping better with other stuff - actually managing to
visit family occasionally and stuff.

It's the same roughly-three-month cycle that I first graphed using my
sick day records, about 4 years ago, before I lost my job. So much for
getting better.

Oh well. Anyway, I thought I'd better try to not disappear...



On Thu, 14 Sep 2006 10:36:47 -0700, "John Reimer"
<terminal.node at gmail.com> wrote:

>Just have a very few that  
>are devoted to you

One would be nice. But then again, maybe not - right now I couldn't
cope with it.

>> One neuroscience study says people with Aspergers experience the
>> maximum levels of stress that the brain is physically capable of
>> experiencing an an everyday basis. Spending every day in a world war 1
>> trench might be *almost* as bad as having Aspergers. And yet Aspergers
>> is called mild, because it exlcudes some symptoms from classic autism,
>> as if total blindness was just mild deaf-and-blindness.
>
>
>I have very little faith in "neuroscience" having the faintest idea of  
>what makes the human brain "tick".  From Freud to now, it's been an  
>amazingly arcane amount of guesswork that often amounts to almost useless  
>monikers for "things they don't understand"

Freud wasn't a neuroscientist. Or rather, he was (to the extent that
you could be at the time) but rejected neuroscience and, although he
always claimed to be a science, in truth he rejected scientific
principles almost completely.

Reality is that Freud did in fact make a major breakthrough in
psychology. He realised that many mentally ill adults had been abused,
physically and/or sexually, as children. We now know that he was
absolutely right. But society then could not accept it. Freud was put
under so much stress by the scandal that he had a psychotic break. And
then he came up with socially acceptable theories that directly or
indirectly blamed the victim, making out that they were just childish
and irrational.

Those theories, by the way, were mostly his own interpretations of
things that were 'revealed to him' during his periods with
schizophrenia. Like many things that are 'revealed' during psychotic
breaks, they sound kind of profound. And like many schizophrenics,
Freud was often very charismatic. And of course, what he said, most
likely as a result of the social judgements he had been put through
when he'd come up with accurate theories, were socially acceptable in
that they blaimed the victims.

Can anyone say 'religious cult'! I mean, for a long time he even had
disciples (Jung, Adler, ...). And some of those broke from Freud
because of revelations that came to them during periods of severe
mental illness, which contradicted Freuds.

Given that the study of psychology started this way, and given the
respect that is still given to these cult leaders, it is unsurprising
that psychology still has BIG problems.

A major one is paranoia about eugenics. Any hint of genetic
determinism is considered immoral. Pure social determinism is seen as
freedom. Total stupidity. Failure to separate the crime from the
excuse.

Determinism is determinism. Pure and simple. Doesn't matter if it is
social or genetic. Doesn't even matter if there are 'cyclic causes',
which at least one prominent popular scientist of the moment considers
an unpredicatable break from determinism (clearly he's never done any
math - huge classes of systems with 'cyclic causes' are easily
solvable, and even those that aren't are deterministic - nothing says
that a chaotic system isn't determined, it is only unpredictable. If
it were possible to measure an initial state perfectly precisely, it
would be predictable to exactly the extent that quantum mechanics
allows.

And even the quantum mechanics getout doesn't mean freedom. It means
being determined by random, chance effects. Even if your actions are
not predetermined, they are still determined.

And unpredicatability 

Oh - and 'social determinism' emphatically does not mean parents - at
least not normal parents. Much more is about peer relationships and
adopting unique roles in groups in early childhood. Children raised by
the same parents are actually noticably more different than randomly
chosen children, whether they are genetically related or not -
presumably because the family is one such group where there are
different roles to be adopted. For example, most children don't really
go for too much direct competition with their siblings where its
avoidable. Each picks something different to be best at, so all can be
winners. Each picks his/her own peer group. Etc etc.

For my money, if any of these are bad, it is social determinism. It
means being manipulated by other people who have their own agendas.
1984, anyone? Freedom simply means being able to make your own
choices. Whether those choices could have been forseen by some
superior being at the time of the big bang is really beside the point.

But the paranoia about genetic determinism and seeing this in
either/or terms this in psychology, particularly in the past, has led
to a number of atrocities. The discovery that parents with autism were
more likely to have children with autism was taken as proof that the
parents were at fault, for instance - the 'refridgerator parent'
theory. It was immoral to even consider the possibility that genetics
were involved.

Well, autism is about 90% hereditary. For the main part, it doesn't
matter who raises you. It only matters who your genetic parents are.

So all those parents who had their children taken away from them was a
clear abuse. An abuse motivated by total stupidity and paranoia about
eugenics.

Not a one-off either. The assumptions have profoundly affected the
core of psychology. You must pick between nature and nurture, and if
you pick nature it makes you a thought-criminal.

The thing is that, for all neurosciences failings, it IS a hard
science.

Oh, I agree that the drug industry has a lot to answer for. The idea
that you can say "this appears to help slightly more people than sugar
pills, therefore it is a miracle cure, and it doesn't matter that we
don't know what it is doing or how" and call it science is a big
problem. But this is not the totality of neuroscience.

In the last few decades, the genuine objective hard science of
neuroscience has done a great deal. The neural circuits that are key
in understanding things like anxiety and depression have been traced
and understood, at least on a level which is sufficient to disprove a
lot of the psychology rubbish.

It shouldn't have been necessary, really. There is already strong
evidence that anxiety and depression and physical illnesses. I mean,
did you know that alzheimers and clinical depression are clearly
linked? And I am talking about depression that preceeds the alzheimers
by 50 or 60 years!

Anxiety and depression are all about the stress response. It is proven
fact in much the same way that Newtons theory of gravity is proven
fact - sure, we may get a more sophisticated understanding in the
future, so relativity equivalent or whatever, but the basic concept is
proven and sound.

You don't hear much about it because it is socially unacceptable. Even
the neuroscientists who have written about this stuff tend to include
statements along the lines of 'despite the evidence I still believe
that these are caused by social determinism and irrational childish
beliefs' much as many atheist scientists have been forced to include
'there is still plenty of room for god' clauses in their writing.

Did you know that most people with anxiety disorders don't know what
they are supposed to be anxious about? They aren't aware themselves of
what exactly triggers their anxiety. They don't know themselves what
they are supposed to be so scared about.

Psychologists have many profound-sounding explanations. The core comes
down to two things, though - fear of fear itself, and subconscious
fear.

Both are garbage. OK, if your stress response keeps triggering and you
don't know why, it is bound to cause some frustration and some
embarrassment. But that isn't the original cause of the anxiety - it
is a by-product of a pre-existing problem.

As for subconscious fear, try unconscious conditioned responses. The
connections between the amygdala (stress response triggering) and the
pre-frontal cortex are mostly one way. The amygdala controls the
pre-frontal cortex. The unconscious autonomic response controls the
higher mind.

It makes perfect sense if you think about it. When there is something
in the environment that is potentially dangerous, you may not
consciously notice it, but your unconscious mind sees much more - and
doesn't need perfect recognition before triggering a red alert. That
forces your conscious mind and body into a mode that is appropriate
for dealing with dangerous situations. You focus on identifying risks
and solving them. If you identify the apparent risks and see that they
aren't real, that triggers the 'all-clear' back to the amygdala.

Even this doesn't need to be conscious - there is plenty of habit and
procedural learning in the prefrontal cortex, so that all-clear can be
sent unconsciously in a fraction of a second, before the stress
response has even really got going, for familiar things. This is how
come people can become habituated to instinctive fears like heights.
The amygdala still tries to scream, but the prefrontal cortex shuts it
up so quickly that the scream never gets out. 'Extinction' of a phobia
doesn't really happen in the naive behaviourist sense, at least not to
any measurable degree, but the effect is created by procedural
learning and the all-clear.

The thing is, that connection back from the prefrontal cortex to the
amygdala is exceptionally fragile. It consists of a small number of
long distance connections. Evolution apparently feels that this is
acceptable - that it is better to be safe than sorry anyway. If that
link is weak or missing, it is harder or impossible to shut down the
stress response. Plus, because the amygdala doesn't get the all-clear,
it takes those stress triggers (and anything co-incidentally present
at the same time) as being genuinely plausable danger signs, and does
a bit more conditioning.

For acute anxiety, everything is working fine. Something bad happens.
You're amygdala remembers the signs that preceeded it, to help you
avoid a repetition. But with time those triggers are proven safe, so
your prefrontal cortex learns to habitually send the all-clear.

But when people with chronic anxiety problems don't know what is
triggering their anxiety, it is unsurprising. Things that they have
never been conscious of as being present when they were anxious have
been conditioned as additional anxiety triggers. This is why chronic
anxiety consistently generalises over time - a pattern that has long
been recognised, but rationalised as 'our patients are just being
difficult'.


If this is a rather simplistic and abbreviated explanation of my
understanding of the neuroscience of anxiety, you can be quite
confident that my knowledge of autism is a lot deeper.

Take the theory of 'central coherence'. This is actually something I
take comfort in, not because it is strong, but because - even though
it sounds kind of cool and profound, and even though it makes
everything the victims fault - even the psychologists have become
aware of its weakness.

Here's a nice quote...

"""
The central coherence account of autism is clearly still tentative and
suffers from a certain degree of over-extension. It is not clear where
the limits of this theory should be drawn - it is perhaps in danger of
trying to take on the whole problem of "meaning"!
"""

That's from Francesca Happe, someone who is a bit unpopular with
autistics since she once basically decided that her theory was more
important than reality, and basically said that what was written by
autistics could not be real and that publishers editors most have
completely misrepresented what autistic people said.

I know. But add on the psychologists who just assume that any autistic
is a selfish uncaring bastard by definition and you'll see one of the
basic problems with autism.

So even that style of psychologist can recognise that the central
coherence theory is flawed. And when you look at the theory in detail
- the belief that autistics cannot bring together disparate pieces of
information - you can see the flaw. It can mean what you want it to
mean, depending on which kinds of information you refer to. It is a
theory born out of intuitions and subjectivity. So no wonder you can
find some autistics who lack 'central coherence' for any particular
definition-of-the-day - and, of course, some who seem bizarrely
stronger by that definition than normal people.

But the thing is, switch levels, and suddenly there is a logic behind
central coherence theory.

Autism is a proven biological disorder. Not 100% heridary (only 90%)
but that is normal for a biological disorder that is not transmitted
by a single faulty gene. And there is no doubt that environment has a
role, just as stress levels affect the symptoms of alzheimers. It
doesn't change the basic facts.

So where is this "central coherence" brain module that gets broken in
autistics. Quite simply, it doesn't exist. "Central coherence" really
means "information processing" when you apply a sufficiently critical
mind to it (therefore the "meaning itself" quote, really). The whole
brain does information processing.

BUT the term "central coherence" does tend to imply the combining of
relatively distinct information. That is, it is suggestive of
relatively long (and relatively fragile) links between brain areas.
Exactly the kinds of neural links that are most likely to form
wrongly.

Now consider this...

If you have a genetically related family member with autism, yes, you
are more likely to have autism yourself. You're also more likely to be
mentally retarded, even if you don't have autism. You're also more
likely to have dyslexia or any one of a family of 'specific learning
disabilities'. You're more likely to have schizophrenia (another 90%+
hereditary disorder). And so the list goes on. Even certain kinds of
blindness are included (ever wondered about the speccy geek
stereotype?).

Similarly, if you have a family member with one of these other
disorders, your risk of getting any of them is increased. Your risk of
getting the same one is particularly high, but not by that much.

This is one of the reasons that I say Aspergers is mild classic autism
in the same sense that profound blindness is mild deaf-and-blindness.
Symptom-clusters have been inappropriately combined in classic autism.
There are symptoms related to verbal learning disability and/or mental
retardation that have been aritificially forced into one
classification. No wonder classic autism is a one-in-thousands
disorder rather than the one-in-a-hundred or so that each of the other
groups of symptoms represent.

What we have is varying flavours of the same underlying problem

Now consider this...

Children are not the average of their parents, not even within the
limits of genetic determinism. Basically, you get a random 50/50 pick
of chromosomes - for each chromosome you get a pair, one from mum one
from dad, chosen at random from the two copies of that chromosome that
your parents have. For example, since your father has one X and Y
chromosome, but your mother has two X chromosomes, your chance of
being born male is the 50% chance that you get your dads Y chromosome
rather than his X chromosome.

But most traits aren't determined by one chromosome. The DNA isn't
even a 'blueprint for the human body' as it is commonly described. It
is a specification for how cells react to certain environments. As an
indirect result of this, the body develops in a certain way and ends
up with what looks like a final design built to a blueprint but it is
not.

There are complex interactions between what different chromosomes
provide in all of this, the end result being that very few traits can
be traced back to single chromosomes. A range of genetic abnormalities
plus gender, really.

Now consider this...

Evolution doesn't have a plan. It cannot anticipate. If there is
sufficient survivial pressure, 'beneficial' mutations will be
maintained across generations and will be spread. If the survival
pressure is enough, you get multiple independent adaptations in a
large enough population, some of which may be compatable and some of
which may be incompatible.

No mutation is ever entirely beneficial, though, because of the
complex interactions between genes that create a particular trait.
It's a kind of entropy thing. When a new beneficial mutation starts
spreading through a population, further adaptations are needed to
mitigate the side-effects.

Most side-effects depend on interactions with other chromosomes that
many individuals in a sufficiently large population won't have, and
even on interactions between multi-chromosome sets that can be
extremely rare even when the individual chromosomes are all common in
any population because of combinatorial issues.

So basically, there are rapid adaptations for immediate survival
issues that affect everyone, but there is a very long lag time before
all the side-effects can be resolved for the whole population.

For humans, the evolution of larger brains has been extremely rapid
and extremely recent.

So, in simplistic terms, if you inherit mummies "grow this region
region bigger" chromosome variant, and daddies "grow that region
bigger" chromosome variant, it isn't that surprising if the overlap of
those regions has problems caused by the growth outpacing the
processes that direct the growth patterns of innate neural
connections.

As for the 90% heredity, as opposed to 100%, well, when you really
understand genetics and neural development you begin to see why. There
certainly is room for chance beyond the 'which chromosomes' selection.

As I said, the genes aren't a blueprint exactly.

Lossy fractal compression (or rather decompression) can be done using
a random process. The decompressed result always looks the same, but
is subtly different. Overcompress and the compression artifacts look
slightly different each time it is decompressed.

Well, with all the interacting processes involved in turning a genetic
code into a body, with the unplanned convergence-on-apparent-design
implicit in evolution, and with the unpredictability of details of the
environment that development occurs within, the bodies development is
much the same. If DNA is a blueprint, it is lossy compressed using
something analogous to lossy fractal compression.

And yes, I'm aware that there is such a thing as lossless fractal
compression and indeed deterministic lossy fractal compression. Just
focus on the kind that matters - the analogy is too useful to throw
away ;-)

The 90% makes sense, now, yes ;-)

Right, so how can social abilities be affected by biological problems
without implying general stupidity, as with autism. This can be a real
problem for some people. After all, who really believes that they
inherited their social skills and conversational ability genetically?

Here's the thing - social ability and social competition has been very
important to our species for (in human terms) a very long time. But in
evolutionary terms, our social nature has increased dramatically in
relatively recent times.

For instance, we know for a fact that our species nearly went extinct
not so long ago (around 100K years ago IIRC, though I've not double
checked). And we know for a fact that humans were highly social then,
and had been for millions of years. It seems reasonable to believe
that social behaviour was essential to survival - that only the groups
with the strongest social connections survived.

So the survival pressure is there, and there is sufficient time, so
which specific social abilities are genetic then? Well, as it happens,
that's a stupid question.

Evolution of instinct works by a process called the Baldwin Effect.
Each adaptation makes it easier to learn the 'instinct' earlier in
life, until it becomes innate. Even insects once had a primitive
learning ability to handle what is now instinctive.

But individual adaptations don't have to make sense. They just have to
provide a net benefit.

In artificial intelligence, there is an idea called a 'heuristic'.
This is basically a rule-of-thumb. An imperfect rule that you can use
to narrow a search, which in most cases helps you find a solution
faster. It is an idea that has spread - you can read all about
heuristics in social psychology, for instance.

But the focus is on heuristics that make sense. As I said, individual
adaptations don't have to make sense. It is only over the long term
that multiple adaptations eventually converge on sense.

What I am getting at is "intuition". Even when we thing we understand
why we made a decision, when we have a clear rationale, intuition -
knowing without how we know - underlies the process. Thousands or even
millions of possibilities have been rejected without any real thought.
Heuristics have guided a process that suggests the most likely options
to choose from, and it is these most obvious candidates that we apply
real reasoning too - or whether for genuine critical reasoning, or
whether to invent a justification.

You don't need to be born with a big bag of perfect pre-formed
instincts. Even the few you have don't need to make any kind of sense.
The point is that they have evolved to allow you make more reliable
judgements, and to allow you to learn even better.

Crucially, they provide filters - an innate rejection of the naive
stuff that you are meant to believe. Oh, you can believe it too, sure
enough - but somehow you can tell everyone that lying is bad and
believe it, yet still have the expertise to spot when a little grey
lie will safely benefit you.

Its a small piece of genetic determinism that not only fails to
contradict social determinism, it embraces it. A small innate core
that helps you learn the lessons you need to learn, and helps you to
resist the ones you don't.

Why don't good parents determine how their children turn out? Because
parents have always naturally had an interest in controlling their
children, and because the childrens interests have always diverged
from that. Therefore, children have some degree of innate ability to
resist that control.

So, what is autism?

It's a question with no single answer, and it's a question that has to
be considered on many different levels. But for me, the core of the
answer is above. What is missing doesn't really make sense to most
people because it relates to an innate mechanism - a set of heuristics
- that has only partly converged on sense. Also, relates to an area
that has a lot in common with icebergs - the biggest part of social
ability is intuition, but it is the rationalisation and critical
reasoning that is conscious and 'above the surface'.

We even have some strong clues as to why social inability forms a
symptom cluster. Localisation in the brain is, of course, a
no-brainer. But to me, the specifics are more interesting than the
basic idea.

Basically, there are two adjacent regions in the pre-frontal cortex.
One is well know as being involved in problem-solving intelligence.

Get a normal person and a person with Aspergers to solve problems with
a specifically social element in them, and the normal persons brain
will light up in the adjacent area - lets call it socially-specialised
problem-solving intelligence.

The person with Aspergers will consistently light up the standard
problem-solving intelligence region, not the social one.

You have to be careful with brain-scan studies, even fMRIs are a bit
of a blunt knife really, plus there is always the issue of what a
brain region is actually doing when it lights up.

But even so, if evolution is going to create a specialised social
intelligence - to build in a core of social heuristics - it makes
sense that it should specialise part of a pre-existing problem-solving
intelligence region to do so. No pre-planning there - just converging
on apparent sense (an adaptation provides the best benefit in
co-operation with other related adaptations, and when it can exploit
pre-existing resources).

We are talking about the prefrontal cortex here, and only one aspect
of autism though. Amygdala problems seem to underly most nonverbal
communication issues. Actually, there are two amygdalas - one each
side, with one side dealing with facial expressions and the other side
dealing with tone of voice. These are among many other tasks,
including stress response stuff. The amygdala is a real centre for
emotional triggering if not emotional experience (prefrontal cortex).

No surprise that seeing peoples faces and hearing voices can trigger
an instant anxious reaction, eh!

Oh, and not bad for an autonomic part of the brain. If that degree of
social instinct makes you uncomfortable, consider the syndrome (sorry,
I forget the name) where a certain connection breaks and a normal
rational person suddenly starts insisting that everyone he/she knows
has been cloned/replaced by aliens etc. The thing lost is the
emotional recognition of close friends and family. Without it, basic
intelligence and common sense are out of the window - "sure, I can see
that he looks exactly like my father, but ITS NOT HIM".

When a brain injury can leave everything else intact, but leave
someone unable to accept that people are really his relatives because
of the loss of a normally unconscious feeling - when an intuition with
no logic or reason to it can override all intelligence and common
sense, with the most bizarre rationalisations being invented to cover
for it - the things I've been saying probably seem just a little more
likely. It's probably just a little easier to see that the conscious
part of social reasoning is just that little tip of the iceberg, the
rationalisation for thoughts supplied by unconscious processes that
don't necessarily have a reason or logic since they are based in part
on evolved heuristics.

Just to clear one thing up, though, intuition does not mean innate. In
order to learn, we need an innate ability to learn. Basic heuristics
and intuition underly that, but a much larger collection of heuristics
and intuitions result.

The point is that the innate part form the initial conditions. Without
them, the rest are much harder to acquire. Paricularly when it
involves resisting societies generally naive popular beliefs.

Why are autistics naive? Maybe because they believe what they are
told, rather than learning to repeat the belief without really taking
it in to the core. Perhaps because the lessons we are taught as
children are designed to compensate for innate resistance rather than
to be literally correct. Either way, without that innate resistance, a
naive lesson is learned.

Exclusion, victimisation etc of course only make things worse.

Now, a final thing to consider.

There is a common pattern in which autistic children experience
abnormally rapid brain growth in early childhood, at or before the
time when children start become more genuinely social and when
autistic symptoms can be noticed.

It is commonly rationalised as 'inflamation', but there is no real
justification for this. The people who don't bother looking for
genuine explanations just jump to simplistic conclusions. But there
genuinely appear to be more neurons growing.

This growth spurt does die down, and many autistic children eventually
end up with a more-or-less normal brain size by early teenage years,
but...

1.  By then (even by three years old) the damage is already done and
    permanent. The processes that wire the brain happen at particular
    developmental times. If the wiring process is disrupted at a
    particular point (e.g. it cannot keep up with rapid growth) then
    the damage can never be repaired. Sure, the neurons can find
    alternate uses, but whatever innate connection was intended will
    never form.

2.  In any case, you've missed the learning milestones too, either
    through the brain being unable to learn or through distorted
    childhood experiences.

    I wanted to kill myself at age nine. Not exactly normal childhood
    stuff.

3.  The loss of neurons can be explained as a product of the stress
    response. The stress response is an emergency response. It shuts
    down unnecessary parts of the brain and body, while pushing others
    well beyond their sustainable limits (sure, you might pull a
    muscle running too hard, but at least your not lunch for a lion
    kind of reasoning). When the stress response is active, neurons in
    many parts of the brain fire a lot faster - and under chronic
    stress, neurons fire themselves to death. Even quite young people
    with chronic anxiety and depression have brain sizes around 5%
    smaller than average as a result - often called 'atrophy' but
    actually resulting from excessive brain activity, not too little.

    Ever wondered about the connection between mental disorders and
    brilliance? Well, the stress response underlies mania too. It is
    where than mental energy comes from. But that energy comes at a
    cost, in terms of depression and breakdown.

>Perhaps you've had a look at the altercations and disagreements that occur  
>between neurologists and psychologists concerning the workings of the  
>brain.  That can give a picture of how clueless these branches are about  
>what's "really going on in there".

I hope I'm making a point above.

When you have read the source code and unit-tested the program, it is
hard to accept that it is an arcane magic beyond the comprehension of
man.

Sure, there is plenty more to learn. Sure there a huge gaping holes in
current knowledge. Sure, there are areas where prejudice still rules
and where fear of the thought police is holding back progress. Sure,
at best it is at a stage analogous to Newtons theory of gravity, with
general relativity long in the future.

One thing we know for a fact, though, is that we can never know
everything. There is no circuit diagram for the brain, no matter how
closely you examine the genes. Lossy nondeterministic decompression.
And your particular combination of chromosomes has never existed
before - there never was an original form that was compressed. Not to
mention the many environmental, social and random influences that
cause the wiring of the brain to be modified.

But study of the brain and mind has progressed quite a bit in recent
decades.

In short, I'm not arguing from ignorance, honest. When I say I've
obsessed about these things for a long time, I don't mean I read a few
pop science books. I've thrown away more textbooks than some experts
ever owned, and when I go looking for recent knowledge I really do
make a big deal of it. I certainly don't mean reading New Scientist
(although I do that too, from time to time, mainly for the physics
stuff which is just so sci-fi and wierd).

When ideas from many fields all converge on the same basic conclusion,
even though some of those ideas are strongly denied, I can generally
figure out for myself which way the wind is blowing. And I can do a
reasonable job of assessing the denials, to see which ones have a real
basis and which are motivated more by prejudice. And even the latter I
tend to examine anyway - always best to know the weaknesses in an
argument, shy away from them and you shy away from things that might
give an even better understanding.

>Often, though, we seek to be accepted by individuals  
>that have the wrong motives or an abysmal character.

In autism, we cannot be accepted by the individuals with the right
motives - not really. Either we get it wrong, or we run up against the
mismatch between our broken abilities and the neurotypical instinct
and we appear to be the wrong type ourselves.

>I can see this can be hard.  But I think you highly overestimate how many  
>people are really coping.
<SNIP>
>There's always something else missing in  
>one individual that is present in another.  Often these things aren't  
>readily apparent, however.

There is, in fact, a numeric scale that attempts to quantify 'coping'.
It's called the GAF scale and is included in the DSM diagnostic
manuals. DSM has a heavy American cultural bias in its standards, of
course, but GAF seems pretty widely applicable to me.

Normal GAF scores are 60/70 and above. This includes people who are
having real problems, but who are generally doing OK-ish socially, and
at work/school. People who have at least one or two meaningful
relationships. Normal people. Not some magic superior being or
anything.

There has never been a time in my life that would justify a score
higher than 30-40. These are the BEST times. The highest justifiable
score for the last 5 years would be in the low 20s. The normal score
for the last 5 years would be around 15. I spent my entire childhood
in the one-to-ten range - that is...

"""
Persistent danger of severely hurting self or others (e.g., recurrent
violence) OR persistent inability to maintain minimal personal hygiene
OR serious suicidal act with clear expectation of death.
"""

Coping is a relative thing. There are degrees of coping. Everyone has
problems. I'm not stupid.

BUT I'm also fed up with people minimising the problems of people with
autistic spectrum disorders.

When I say I'm not coping, I REALLY mean it.

Sure, there are some things I've achieved that I'm proud of. Some
things that many neurotypicals wouldn't even try to do. But you have
to look at it in context. Just because I was once a successful
computer programmer doesn't mean I was ever successful in any other
sense of the word.

Sure, most of us can't explain why we have these problems. Sure, even
when we can, the explanation is long and complex and in no sense a
convenient and socially acceptable soundbyte.

But it isn't my fault that the issues are complex. Personally, if I
wanted to judge someone, I would point at the people who are too lazy
to deal with that.

>Like I said, I strongly believe that you won't find the answers in  
>psychology.  These are full of information about behaviours and  
>experiences that can't be grasped, seen, felt, nor trully experimented  
>on.  So, these books are full of the most imaginative descriptions that  
>amount to desperate attempts to analyze how the brain functions. Since the  
>brain is so poorly understood, disagreements and unknowns abound in those  
>fields.

That is why I emphasized neuroscience. 

>Their study is as limited as their perspective that the brain is  
>merely a chemical/electrical entity (which granted is the limit of their  
>perspective).

Add on 'information processing' and that's mine too.

The supposed escape from predeterminism and the cool profoundness of
quantum physics don't, in themselves, mean that there is 'something
more than a chemical/electrical entity' - not in any sense that's
important, anyway. Physics is physics. Even physics that we don't
currently understand isn't ever going to provide some magic mystic
consciousness. Stuff like superposition may sound magical, but its
still just physics - and even if is somehow exploited in neurons in a
way we don't understand, it is still information processing no
different to building a quantum computer. Also, being determined by a
roll of the dice just now is no different to being predetermined by
dice that were rolled at the big bang - its still determinism.

So if there's anything to 'higher' consciousness and souls, its a
religion thing.

Remember how a broken neural connection can make a person reject their
closest friends and family, insisting that they must be alien clones
or whatever? Care to explain how a soul could play a role in that? Or
alternatively, care to explain how the soul has nothing to do with how
we feel about our nearest and dearest?

I hate to bring up the god of the gaps, but really spiritualism and
religion have already been proven to have little or no role in the
mind. The gaps keep getting smaller. This is not the place for god or
the soul.

This isn't religious hatred or anything, though. Like any true
self-sceptic, I may be a committed atheist, but I know the weaknesses
in my position.

Time is just a dimension. Just space done differently. Think on that.
"Where is God?" can be interpreted as "When is God?".

The best place to look for God is in the initial conditions. The best
place to look for intervention is in the precise detail of the initial
conditions. If God knows all, he can anticipate all, so he can fix it
right from the start.

Not enough? Well, quantum mechanics does leave room for God to skew
the odds here and there. If he created a universe that even he cannot
understand, then he can at least look around and do some debugging.
All he needs to do is to be able to overcome chaos theory, basically,
and if he IS god then...

But the point is that the universe is clearly working to a system that
we can observe, quantify, and understand - at least to a point. There
was a time when we couldn't observe, quantify, and understand what is
going on in the brain and how it related to our 'minds'. This is
changing. But if there is a soul, it is in a different time - not just
a different place. And if there is a god, he created a universe with
and observable, quantifyable and understandable set of rules - rules
which apply inside the brain just like anywhere else.

If you think a mechanical brain is inconsistent with having a soul,
your placing arbitrary limits on the soul.

That's the argument that I can't beat, and I doubt anyone can. It's
only an argument for possibility, though - not for probability. And it
still seems like wishful thinking. And it's still the god of the gaps,
truth told. But a very hard gap to fill in.

So why not play the odds? If there's even an outside chance, take the
enhanced inner peace benefits and the worst that can happen is that
the big payout in the afterlife turns out to be a myth?

Come on - manipulate God! I don't think so.

As for the inner peace thing, thats for genuine belief. It'd never
work. I'm too much the universal sceptic, more critical of my own
beliefs than anyone elses. Sure, I've fooled myself in the past, but
never for very long.

Besides, people who get that seem to be benefitting from the same
emotional connection thing that happen for real-life emotional bonds.
"God always accepts me for who I am", kind of thing. First off, I'm
not so sure I have the needed neurons. Second, if there is a God, he
hates me.

No, I either believe or don't, and the simple fact is that I don't.




This is taking forever - I'm going to have to cut it off here.

-- 
Remove 'wants' and 'nospam' from e-mail.



More information about the Digitalmars-d-learn mailing list