Seems like an autistic person could “self-tune” to this process, but that it is not inherent because the thought process could be so rigidly bounded or so unbounded... paths might coincide for some intervals, but the very idea of contributing to a collaborative thought process seems artificial. Such behavior could perhaps be deliberately chosen, but it sure doesn’t seem like it’s the ‘default’.

Consider evolution, and a bunch of attempts at alterations, some of which make no sense even to try. But that is what goes “outside the box”, and unless autistic folks are to be thought of as “channeling chaos” or something, maybe our unusual thinking is an attribute which is currently undergoing “beta testing”.

There is also the prospect that nonsegmented/noniterative thought could affect other thought by resonance or some other “influence through proximity” phenomenon. The way to protect one’s own thinking against such “contamination”, of course, is to keep the “illegal thinker” out of sight and out of mind - or simply to fix them.

This seems related to the “orbit” discussion in an earlier item. What exactly is a hyperbola “connected to”? Or, in my own case, are novel-appearing correlations between widely differing subjects a “thinking further”?

Visual metaphor: a sandbox (containing figurative materials), wherein early thinkers fuse the sand into plastic, later ones fuse the plastic into Legos, still-later ones build objects with the Legos, and so on. But the whole notion of such a progression is just one possibility - and the simplest case at that. What about new-old hybrids, or novel means of “processing the materials”? And what march of progress was Bart Simpson participating in when he microwaved his plastic “army men”?

Last revised: June 23, 2007
(c)2007 Dave Spicer
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