And to make the same assumptions regarding autistic thinking as for neurotypical thinking is to ignore the nature of autism.

It seems so funny/strange that the people with all these extra processing layers and all this procedural gingerbread are seeing their own thinking as sensible and straightforward.

Visually, what kinds of compensation - change of viewpoint, focal length, depth of field, and so on - would have to be done to give this impression? And what would other behavior look like after having that transform applied to it? It wouldn’t make sense - the equations would be unsolvable. (This switch to a mathematical metaphor then led me to wonder if there could be “social imaginary numbers”, but I didn’t pursue that line of thought. Ironic, though, that the hallmark of imaginary numbers [the square root of -1 ] is represented by a small i...)

With autism being defined and assessed based on physical behavior, one wishes the above quote could be engraved into the desk of every autism researcher, clinician, and caregiver. Isn’t it possible that our “incomprehensible” behavior might make sense if it was understood why it takes place? Unless this prospect might lead to neurotypicals having to examine their own behavior... this could be as uncomfortable as having one’s belief system challenged. “Behavioral fundamentalism”, which could be said to insist on behavioral/communicative orthodoxy and considerable generalization concerning what “everybody knows” and “everybody does”, seems to stand in curious contrast to religious fundamentalism. The former insists upon intricate figurative and sometimes-contradictory structure for its orthodoxy, while the latter places literal interpretation at a premium. So we literal autistic folks are the “behavioral heretics”, while those who embrace doctrinal figurativity are the religious heretics. Curious.

Last revised: June 22, 2007
(c)2007 Dave Spicer
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