Aspies For Freedom

You think brain-damaged people don't have achievements??

Louise18, I'm brain-damaged, and I have a significantly lower IQ than I used to (whether as the result of brain damage or something else, I don't know, but it's below average, and my voluntary memory which was tested at the same time is way below average).

A group of people at MIT personally sought me out to assist them with their research.  They are asking me to do this as a colleague, not as a research subject.  They have asked me to do this because I understand things easily that they find very, very difficult to understand -- some of these are PhDs mind you.  I am helping them develop various forms of technology and design experiments, and they value my intellectual contributions and insist (despite the fact that I find these things easy) that they would be unable to make the same contributions I am making and that they don't understand easily things that I understand without having to think about it.  They have said that other autistic people they've worked with, including those who probably have far higher IQs than I do and no brain damage at all, have not made some of the same intellectual contributions I have.  They in fact sought me outbased on my ideas, not based on me being a random autistic person.  They value these contributions enough that they have paid my travel expenses to MIT and back, and were it not for (unrelated) health problems preventing full-time work they would've considered hiring me.  As it is I do the work on a voluntary basis when I can do it, I have an email account at MIT now and converse with them through skype.

I don't think this proves my worth as a person or anything.  But it does say something about your assumptions and your standards:  If MIT judges me to be contributing intellectually to the point where they'd pay me for it if they could, and I'm brain-damaged, what does that say about your assertion that brain-damaged people make no significant contributions (let alone intellectual ones)?  If anything that brain-damaged people can do, you all can do better, why didn't these people seek out someone without brain damage instead of me?

(While we're on the topic of intellectual contributions, I'd love to see all the people who think they're the only or highest form of contribution to society, try to get along without janitors, grocery store employees, all the people who make your clothing, assembly-line workers in factories, garbagemen, and stuff.  My only paid employment that lasted particularly long was basically manual labor and people who think that's not a contribution to society have generally never had to do without those who do it.  Also people who do that kind of work do have an intellectual life too, as do people with cognitive disabilities believe it or not.)

I'm not saying that people should be measured by this stuff.  But since you do measure people by this stuff, I wanted to point out some flaws in your assumptions.  And that woman I quoted earlier who has Down's syndrome is a college graduate, by the way.

That's a pretty bad definition of respect.  But you've missed my point.  I don't care if I have your respect or not personally.  But you said this of brain-damaged people:  "They don't have achievements worthy of respect. They don't contribute anything academically; they don't contribute anything financially. Their "achievements" are often things that others take for granted being able to do."  Do you still believe it?

And very few people contribute anything that could not be equally contributed by another.  In fact I'd say pretty much nobody is worthy of respect if you take that as your guidelines.

I don't think there's people who don't contribute anything, just people who don't contribute a narrow set of recognized things.  But at any rate a person's worth is not measured up by contributions to begin with, which I think was what you were getting at anyway.

I am also certain that other animals have consciousness, insight, and creativity.  Every time they come up with a new thing that "separates us from the animals," they find an animal who has it.

I prefer starting with reality.

I don't start with ideas, I start with things.  Then I look at the patterns of things and see how they fit together.  And that's where ideas come from.  Ideas are merely abstractions from reality.  Abstractions have no reality in themselves, and starting with them and banging them together is bound to lead you to more and further and more complex abstractions that, if taken as the main thing to pay attention to, obscure reality, rather than illuminate it.

Oh, and not knowing where you're going is the whole point.  

And is in fact the whole point of science, for that matter.  If you think you know where you're going, you end up inserting biases into your data.

You look at things and the patterns they form tell you where to go with things.  If you think you know where you're going to begin with, why bother looking?

I'm not a philosopher, so why expect me to act like one?

My childhood best friend is a PhD student in philosophy, though, and she seems to think my way of doing things has enough merit that she tends to bounce her ideas off me when doing projects.

(I hate the lack of edit button.)

She also told me that of all the people she has told some parts of her projects. I'm the only person they've made intuitive sense to.  And she's shown them to professional mathematicians and students of both math and philosophy.  My guess is it has to do with the fact that mathematicians and philosophers tend to engage themselves in endless games of abstraction bounced off of abstraction, and that they are therefore likely to find things plausible in the abstract that are completely implausible in the real world.  Starting with reality and moving to abstraction mainly to describe reality has its merits apparently.

Not "says this is okay," but finds it an actively useful source of information, sometimes more useful than people who study her particular field.

I get the sense that whatever I'm saying is actually too simple for you to wrap your head around, since it's certainly not nearly as complicated as you think you have to make things.

Those of us who can't hold complex coherent abstract idea-systems in our heads for very long don't have to propose all this stuff before we do it, we just do it.  If we were able to sit around proposing everything before we did it, we could probably do things your way.  I am sure we look very stupid to you, but if you are smarter, then you should be able to figure out what it is we are doing.

Why is it necessary to develop a coherent set of ideas?  The world is already coherent.  The most complex and rigorous and coherent and tested set of ideas will shatter against it in the end.  There are better things to do with the parts of the brain involved in abstraction than trying to build a pale and pseudo-shatterproof imitation of the world in your head.  (Those of us who aren't capable of holding large amounts of complex tied-together abstractions in our heads for long have mostly already figured this out by necessity, or we would not think, survive, have useful ethics, etc.)

And no, I'm not doing things purely on visceral reaction, nor am I particularly anti-intellectual.  This conversation may be frustrating, but I'm being as clear as I can.  There are gaping holes in any set of ideas.  There are no gaping holes in the world around us.  If we want ideas that will work in the real world, we have to be able to observe the real world closely.  It does not mean we don't change it.  We're part of it, anything we do can change it.  But unless you understand how you intersect with the real world, and how other parts of it intersect with each other, you're going to get even more frustrated than you are by talking to the people here at the moment, once you go about trying to change it.  A really nice aspect of the world is that it's all around you and you don't have to make it up for it to exist.  And any person who wants to successfully navigate the world of ideas or use it to any good purpose has to understand the holes between them and the edges around them.

And also it's good as part of that to understand how the idea-forming part of your mind relates structurally to the world around you, why it developed in the way it did, how that connects to other systems in the world, and so forth.  (That is related to a small part of the project my friend was working on.  A hint on how I operate is that asking me directly didn't cause me to remember it, but it being necessary to explain something at a particular point did.  I did not remember it when you asked and will doubtless forget it in the future.)

I tend to see philosophies more as tools if anything.  Because they're all wrong one way or another.