The autistic brain and seeing the truth.

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The way I see it is, nothing is absolutely certain, but we can't think productively unless we start with assumptions, and the trick is to acknowledge that they are assumptions, or "working hypotheses" as scientists call them. Fortunately there are many assumptions that we seem able to assign a high degree of certainty to, because (for example) they explain and predict our observations very reliably, and these we consider to be as near as dammit to reality, until such time as evidence to the contrary appears. It's not entirely satisfactory but I don't see what else we can do if we want to function. So I think that Bee is substantially correct about expert opinion. There's always the possibility that they could be wrong, but it's often fairly safe to take them as being right.

A religionist once tried to explain the concept of faith to me by saying I had faith that the bus would arrive, which was why I waited for it every day to get to school. But I knew that the bus might not arrive, just that it usually did and that my best move was to work on the assumption that it would. To this day, I see faith as telling yourself you know something that you don't 100% know, to the extent that you feel quite convinced that it's absolutely true. I've never been able to do that as a conscious act of will, which rather excludes me from religion, though I've sometimes caught myself believing things by accident simply because it hasn't occurred to me that I could turn out to be wrong.

I once told an author that he had helped to promote a stock fraud. He assured me that so many other people could not be wrong. I knew that their brochure violated both Gr. 11 physics and the history of engineering, and just waited for the eventual exposure. There are dozens of similar examples. I am less affected by the herd, and more certain about the laws of nature.

When I was a child, I used to believe that I was the only person who did not understand what was going on.  I mean, I would see, hear, or otherwise experience something, only for "everyone" to tell me it never happened.  It wasn't until I got older that I realized that I really was experiencing the truth; but "everyone" else always seemed to have some reason to want me to forget about it or go along with their "official" narrative -- it was they who wanted me to either shut up or lie for their benefit.

That's when I also realized that their are two "truths": The popular "truth" (i.e., cover-ups and conspiracy theories), and the Truth about what really happened (e.g., what I saw, heard, and experienced).

"So that really WAS Paul and Julio down by the schoolyard..."

Perhaps there is kernel of truth to be found in the words of Oliver Sacks.

This is an excerpt from an article about the Doctor.(https://www.salon.com/2015/08/31/oliver ... uman_mind/)

"Sacks, who died yesterday at the age of 82, was renowned not only as a brilliant scholar of the human brain and nervous system, but also as a doctor of extraordinary compassion. Instead of simply viewing the mentally and neurologically ill as sick people in need of a cure, Sacks recognized that their unique perspective on reality often helped them arrive at valuable insights that eluded the “normals.”

This is a quote from a book by Oliver Sacks that the author cited in the above article:
"Although the patients struggled to comprehend the verbal content of the president’s oratory, “natural speech," as Sacks explained, "does not consist of words alone. It consists of utterance – an uttering-forth of one’s whole meaning with one’s whole being – the understanding of which involves infinitely more than mere word-recognition.” Because the aphasia patients weren’t distracted by the rhetoric and theatricality of Reagan’s address, the subtle nonverbal information that eluded most of his listeners was particularly pronounced among the aphasiacs. "Thus the feeling I sometimes have," Sacks wrote, "that one cannot lie to an aphasiac. He cannot grasp your words, and so cannot be deceived by them; but what he grasps he grasps with infallible precision, namely the expression that goes with the words, that total, spontaneous, involuntary expressiveness which can never be simulated or faked, as words alone can, all too easily."

I can relate to seeing the truth, in a way that my social circle might not. Seeing things as they are I often realise that I dont see specifically the whole picture, especially when I compare notes per se with another person on the Autism spectrum, likewise I see aspects that they may not be aware of.
This part of truth is subjective I guess.

What is this reference?

A 1973 song by Paul Simon “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard”

I think I might feel the same way as you fnord, IF my experiences with mental illness didn't leave me questioning my sanity, and the validity of my perceptions.

If the powers that be repeat often enough a lie, to their media centric population , People start to repeat that lie , believing it to be a truth . Whether it is a load of ——— or. Not .
When in fact , the facts are the facts and usually in science facts are the rule . But in society, the most often repeated lies are taken as facts . Especially when inserted into society by people supposably holding authoritarian positions.

Aspies have unique abilities to integrate more information into any given equation, until you present overt facts that may have been left out of the equation . And then you may possibly be able to change a Aspies opinion.
Am speaking from what some consider a HFA ,s. Point of veiw . The Initial starting post in this thread was extremely poignant. I feel .

I can relate to this 100%. It almost seems unfair because in society it is always assumed that the majority must be right, so if you see something that nobody else does and have a different opinion, you just get labeled as “crazy” according to the herd. This can also reinforce other people’s opinion of something being “wrong” with you if you are an Aspie.

Yes it's interesting that ASDers appear so often to see through the hype and to be the ones who point out (often to no avail) that the emperor has no clothes.

It also seems that we're not the only people in the world who aren't so much taken in by the lies that the mainstream appear to largely believe. As has already been suggested, aphasiacs also appear to be hard to deceive. What I'm wondering is, what other groups of people are like us in this respect, and what is it that makes people that way? I suspect certain types of education can do it, obviously media and propaganda studies, and perhaps science where the student is encouraged not to believe anything without hard experimental evidence. Also some kinds of travelling, where the person is exposed to different cultures that have different assumptions about the way things are, so that the traveller tends to notice there may be more to reality than the version of it held by the people in the traveller's home town. Probably access to a variety of information sources makes a difference - it's been said that restricted sources of information gives people restricted opinions. It might be interesting to conduct a survey of the hard-to-dupe sector of the population, looking at how they came to be that way, and to compare their experiences with the easy-to-dupe sector. I'd also like to know how many people fall into each group. I tend to think that most people are pretty gullible, but it would be interesting to see.

^^^^^^. Your childhood musta been Contageous ^^^^^^^^^

"Contageous"??????

I am not sure what the word is that you are looking for is, but you cant mean "contagious", because "contagious" is the adjective for diseases that you can catch (like Covid 19).

Maybe you mean "contentious"? (full of tension, or argument).

It sounds like there was a lot of gaslighting going on in your childhood.

I think I do this too, somehow I can often tell if something is false or untrue. Maybe it is due to processing things slowly and thinking deeply as has been said.

Seeing inconvenient truths can be Difficult sometimes .