I have an interest in finding a minimal property of Autism. Here’s my best guess:

Autism is aversion to mimicry to retain ownership of the ego.

Ego is formed by loading the “intent” of the world around you – people, animals, etc. The ego then inverts memories to convince the subject that he originated his own desires (see Girard’s Mimetic Theory). These inverted nodes lead to all kinds of hangups and have to be reverted to their proper order – “No Johnny, he had it first,” “No, Joe, she’s his wife.” Each intent load creates a new internal motor representation (IMR) layer in the IMR stack, and Autistics really hate it when mutual assessment gets involved in this. At the bottom of the Autistic IMR stack is IMR0 which seeks out repeatable and predictable intents that allow the solidification of ego. So IMR layers are taken in from non- or less-reciprocal entities: TV personalities, cartoons, robots, cars, etc. Autistic egos are at once fragile yet rock-solid, but inverted nodes destroy the thing really easily and send Autistics in a downward spiraling “repeat mode” (covering ears, repeating things, etc.).

(In the future I’ll write more on Intent Load Theory which details all this stuff.)

Simon Baron-Cohen has claimed Autistics don’t have central coherence, Tomasello that they don’t have Theory of Mind (ToM). But it’s their terminology that is faulty: Autistics are averse to human ToM but have solid ToM when there’s no mutual assessment, as with Temple Grandin’s ToM with animals. Non-Autistics have horizontal coherence which specializes in cause-effect, give-take, A->B->C. Autistics have vertical coherence, which loads lots of different As, Bs, and Cs into memory for years, ignores simple cause-effect relations for now, processes into a hypothesis on the broader data set: A(n)->B(n)->C(n). When Autistics are in the middle of this, it looks like mental retardation where your man is organizing crayons all day, until one day he publishes a theory on nuclear fission.

(As someone on the spectrum, it definitely feels like mental retardation for years until something clicks. Suddenly you have a workable hypothesis, and then that’s all you can think about. For me, that’s ROBA. An important tool then is how to domain-switch and use those years of experience in domains outside of your hypothesis. For me, this is why I’m also interested in Autism, Bible research, linguistics, anthropology, etc.)

Mainstream psychology is convinced that it can’t be this simple, so it lists symptoms and behaviors, which has done nothing but confuse the issue. They’re opposed to simplicity, but this is why they’ve failed at Violence, and now they’ve failed at Autism.

If I had to take a stab at the other end of the spectrum, it would be the Manic-Schizoid preference for mimicry, locating value and meaning by loading the intents of a group. Manic-Schizoids appear comfortable with terms and content shifting around, but they require other people to keep reorienting these definitions. Or they will find something immovable and rigidly adhere to it, like a holy book, and try to push it in all kinds of directions to make it give, or if it’s unyielding they will push people away from their version of it.

The spectrum is not flat. If I had to take a stab at that, it’d be knife-shaped (no pun intended), with the center virtually non-existent, introvert and extrovert closely straddling the center, and a quick falloff on either side. Introvert->Aspergery->Autistic, and Extrovert->Manic->Schizoid.

The world is significantly more “carpentered” today than it was yesterday, and that’s true throughout history. There are more right angles, more circles that spin around. Whatever humans make looks nothing like creation. There’s nothing really random. Things fit perfectly. These things find their natural home in the Autistic IMR0: they’re predictable and, once observed, can be expected to be the same tomorrow, or at least their transformations are very predictable. Watch an Autistic stare at cars or spinning things and you’re watching their IMR0 humming along perfectly, thinking about who-knows-what from there. It’s calming. However, the Autistic IMR0 is averse to mutual assessment, which is the opposite of all that stuff. Like the beach. I hate the beach with a passion.

The thermodynamics of ROBA dictate that recursion can remain in the symbolic state of language where it can generate heat. We Autistics must be retaining language in this symbolic state for inordinate periods of time, often without participating much in the language enterprise ourselves. We just gather a ton of data and make hypotheses.

Manic-Schizoids do this too, but in their own way: recursion is cycled through many different individuals who mutually assess and continue parsing terms in exciting new ways. Things don’t stay the same for long. Autistics hate this.

Occasionally a Hitler pushes recursion out of this symbolic state of language into the active state of violence, where he can destroy those symbols, or eradicate a massive portion of a population. This is a total loss. I don’t think Hitler actually wanted to de-carpenter the world, since his architecture and design was very angular. The Swastika is a wheel, a very recursive symbol, one that might appeal to an Autistic personality. He was, however, jealous of the Jewish capacity for retaining recursion in the symbolic state for long periods of time. (Dude, Hebrew is the oldest alphabet in the world. What did you expect?) The Talmud is a 64-book recursive formulation of the first 5 chapters of Genesis. That’s a massive expansion of heat in the symbolic state of recursion done by only a handful of people. The Talmud has this dual-value: it’s a law book, and it’s evidence that the symbolic state can really expand indefinitely without spilling into the active state of violence. That’s arguably the Yahwist claim to truth: the Word can expand indefinitely. The Talmud arguably does this from both Manic-Schizoid and Autistic angles: mutual assessment is constant, arguments are everywhere, but terms are lingered upon, and the fact that it’s codified is arguably Autistic itself.

Hitler’s destruction of Jews was the opposite statement: “Recursion must now go back to its natural state of violence.” He believed that violence could then be restructured into a new universal religion resembling his edenic, Aryan history. I only mention this in a post about Autism to note that sometimes carpentry is destroyed by other “carpenters” who still have really bad design ideas. Not all carpentry is creative nor good.

By contrast, the IMR0 of Manic-Schizoids requires mutual assessment for ego formation. When alone, the ego has nothing to mutually assess against.

There are only a few episodes in human history when the world was less carpentered than the day before. So Autism is winning. It’s easier and easier for Autistics to live in this world because the “intents” of all the carpentered elements of the world are easy to parse for us. This world “speaks” to Autistics and the meaning is easy to discern: packaging tells us the intents of the manufacturers, buildings tell us the intents of architects, and driver-less cars tell us the intents of programmers. The more predictable and automated, the better, and the more easily we can continue carpentering. You know the world is dominated by Autistics now because we get to complain about extroverts repressing us, and they’re expected to just listen, get out of the way, etc.

Again, Autistics are winning, and by a landslide. I’m on the winning side, but this is a warning to my side.

I believe Schizoids are becoming more marginalized since they “listen” to the carpentered world very differently than Autistics do. The carpentered world does not mutually assess, but since the Manic-Schizoid ego requires mutual assessment, parsing the intents of the carpentered world becomes confusing. Various sensory details will “sound” or “look” like demons, ghosts, etc., as these quickly fill the void. So the entire intent load of the carpentered world might be making Schizoids go crazy and shout at the sky, and we sort of just let them out on the streets. That’s very, very bad.

Also very bad: we treat possession as if it’s a personal mental disorder, when it’s likely a failure of mutual assessment. We treat exorcism as though it’s abuse, when it can be better explained as a reinstatement of mutual assessment. Not that we’ve done these things properly in the past, but these concepts need to be parsed anew so we can better resolve this problem.

Our Manic-Schizoid brothers and sisters are suffering, and Autistics need to stop waging a war against them.

What war?

I’m reading Ayn Rand’s Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, and most of it is a tirade against what seems like the Manic-Schizoid communication style. She picks a lot on Kant, who appears to have had more of a Manic-Schizoid personality. I was trying to figure out what exactly Rand’s problem was, so I made a thought experiment based on something from own experience.

A very liberal (and it seemed manic/schizoid) urban planner once talked held a talk about 1) the need to “involve the community” in a building decision, 2) that “the community” needs to come together to help this go through, and 3) that there’s “a community” which needs to be watched in the meantime. Here we have 3 different definitions of “community”: 1) lower class, potentially violent, locals, 2) like-minded planners, and 3) political enemies that can be wiped out with the legal system. All 3 “community” words were spelled and pronounced the same way, but they involved different gestures, joint attention, eye movement, etc. Rand and the Objectivists appear to hate this kind of talk and believe that it lacks context. But the speaker definitely included context, but the context was wrapped up in body language and other things that Autistics are bad at reading. Rand isn’t waging a war against irrationality; she’s waging war on the Manic-Schizoid language.

Rand’s concern is fair: once Manic-Schizoids can develop a language that stumps Autistics like Rand and her ilk, they will use it to regain some ground in carpentered society. Much of the opposition to Objectivism is probably from this camp. This language allows Manic-Schizoids to return to large-scale intent loading within human networks where words revolve through definitions, things aren’t written in stone, and lots of different entities can flow through society bringing in various “wisdoms.” Much of Manic-Schizoid language is a hallmark of matrilineal systems and their emphasis on art (not writing), pantheons (not monotheism), and intermarrying tribes (not huge armies that take cities). One could argue that patrilineal descent systems, with the stockpiling of inheritance and creation of fortified cities, kickstarted the Autistic Revolution. Maybe it began with some one-off Bronze Age cultures and some small-scale patrilineal groups within larger matrilineal mesh networks, but these might have been too ahead of their time. (Graham Hancock would love this idea: random patrilineal societies that quickly advanced but couldn’t fend off the broader matrilineal networks that were incompatible.) Once the Iron Age hit, the world was carpentered in no time.

(I don’t believe the opposition to Objectivism was some kind of Communist conspiracy: certainly much of Communism is Autistic, especially the Soviet kind with its obsession over rationality, math, and science. In its bureaucratic form Communism is even more Autistic than Manic-Schizoid, since it builds recursively on mass media and production and naturally uses carpentry to keep things as efficient as possible.)

However, Autistics do this same thing with language, only we do it through carpentry and automation: we carpenter the world, remove the need for mutual assessment, and work alone or remotely. Part of the idea for my Vio-linguistics is bridging the gaps between these two language styles. They appear to be at extreme odds and are not only communicating less but are beginning to be openly hostile.

The world should not be asked to bend to Autistics, because Autistics bend the world as it is. And it grows more Autistic every day. Sometimes we will have an extroverted superior who wants to do big company hangouts, or a teacher who wants students to sit in groups at tables instead of in desks. This is not a political issue; this is their attempt to push the pendulum ever so slightly back away from the extreme where it currently is. The idea that there’s a war against introverts is ridiculous, and a counter-insurgency against extroverts is totally misguided. The war has been won. Our energy is now better spent helping our brothers and sisters who are wandering aimlessly in the streets.

Here’s a grander concern: Is this the beginning of speciation between Autistics and Schizoids? This is simply in keeping with the self-domestication part of my ROBA Hypothesis: the transfer of recursion into language (I presume) promotes self-domestication, lending to greater language usage. We Autistics might generate our own self-domestication as we carpenter the world. Better eyesight might be one such result (I’ve been staring at a computer screen for 30 years nonstop with literally no loss in clarity). However, the Autistic “language” of carpentry is bordering on unintelligable for Schizoids, much as their 3 words for “community” border on unintelligible to Autistics. So it makes sense that Manic-Schizoids would try to develop their own non-Autistic languages, and these might have different self-domesticating effects. The two sides share words, but our definitions do not align, and these might be diverging into 2 different languages, which cannot build recursively upon one another.

And yet, the two personality types attract one another. Will their offspring eventually become sterile? Is this one cause of increasing global infertility?