Autistic Philosophy

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I wonder does any one else out there have any similiur views on things to me. I think my style of interpreting the world could have some parts that are more autistic than most in my philosphys. My mind isn't really on task at the moment but I think thats a good thing to keep this first post short.

An example of a view.
Every living person is a world of there own. There eyes look and interprete the world around them and no one else sees quite the same as they do. No one else shares there world. No matter how close to any one they get. We are all still in our own seperate worlds. We are in our own worlds with a limited ammount of processing power to try and look at the world around us. Animals have more limited processing power than humans.

With out life there is no universe. Even if it technically exist. Who is there to say there is one. Who is there to realise its wonder. No one.


When I die these walls wont exist to me. When I die this world won't exist to me. When I die you won't exist to me. When I die a world dies too.

I am interested to see any of the views about things that almost completely forget about the human side of things. And if they do include the human side of things to be at a completely differen't angle to what you would ever hear a NT say.


Ok i have muddled this post. Im really not on task. Hopefully its not complete gibberish but it probably is.

I agree that we all live in our own worlds. I think that the way we interperate the world is different for each of us based on our understanding and experiances.

I'm not so sure about the second part. I lean more to the philosophy that there is an all seeing being that still exists to that the world exists. However, this is one area of my personal philosophy I have not fully developed.

Y

Some of this sounds like solipism. I think your point about everyone having their own reality is a common one philosophers (and many psychologists) make, though. I somewhat disagree. I tend to see the external society as a largely cohesive whole with minor deviation constituting individualization. I am far away from this social unity, though. I would be much like an electron outside the high probability area of its orbital around the nucleus of an atom.

Yes, I agree with you. Sometimes I think I am the only thing that actually exists in this world and everything else are just inventions of my mind, and out there would be other people (maybe)who have their own universe and logics... very a la matrix, just that we are not fed by robots or something like that...

I think about this every day.

When I was a little girl I went crying to my mum because I was tired of being stuck in the patterns of the world.

Day/night days/months ect.

I live in my own world, and your post made me think that this is true for everyone.

The world as a whole does continue and if one individual dies it doesn't usually affect the world.
But here is where the NT part comes into effect. They bring order to this with the lack of understanding of some things but with there obsessions with Social Connections they manage to keep sociaity functing as a hole.

I was not saying that people have completely differen't views and worlds to each other because they are running from the same set of senses that send information to there brain that processes it. Aspergers process this information differen'tly. This allows us to process information that NTs block out.

So we can see information and process information that is invisable to a NT because there brain knows to block it out. The way my logic functions allows me to slowly build my own picture of the world around me to try and understand it better. Some things that I learn to understand better do not help with interacting with the world.

I also wonder how I always think I know alot about the planet and differen't things that exist on it. And then I think back to what is happening now. I am just some sort of evolved monkey looking through two eyes trying to build a internal picture of what is real. Just processing a couple of things at a time trying to fit them to gether and alot them into my bigger picture of things. Mean while I am doing other things just to keep alive in my own daily reality.

I think it is good to see so many replys to this thread. Does any one have a completely differen't angle to come at the Autistic Pholosphy with.

It sounds similar to my philosophy of life (the one about perception, not the "I-hate-the world-and-want-to-explode-it" one.) I have spent a lot of time since fairly early in my childhood thinking about those sort of things.

It hasn't been mentioned here. Sorry to confuse you.

I was wondering. Exactly what makes your philosophy an autistic philosophy? How is it different to what other philosophers have theorized in the past? Look at the etiology of autistic. In truth, it is not a more autistic view of reality than any other philosophy: all philosophies are autistic. They are the worldview of a single person, transformed into words so that others may debate how close this person's worldview is to viewing reality, pure and unadulterated.
Now, let us debate the validity of your philosophical musings. It is commonly agreed that everyone views the world uniquely, have their own interpretations, and naturally, view their perception of the world as reality. But nonetheless, it is not reality, it does not constitute 'a world'. It is the world/reality viewed through the lens of ourselves. Our view of reality is skewed, blotched with imprints and dust which gathers upon the lens, over our lifetime, beginning at birth. Does the world/reality cease to exist if the lens and the viewer is removed? If a tree falls in a forest with noone to hear it, does it still cause a sound? The sound is still generated, and at the least, the tree will still have fallen. All of which, brings us to my favorite subject, quantum mechanics. Ever hear of the Schroedinger's Cat theory? We can't know something exists in a set state, unless that existential state is validated. Until then, it exists in all possible states. Its existence itself is not in question, only the state of its existence.
Society works, because society is in the main populated by people who view the world through the same lens. In particular, a specific part of the lens needs to be shared by that majority for the society to work. Common needs, common goals, common sense of morality, common justice etc. The ability to socialize is the least reason why society works. Lack of socializing does not hinder me from fulfilling or providing a useful role to society. That's another reason why society works. The happiness of the individual can be sacrificed, for the good of society. Society doesn't require us to socialize, it requires us to contribute to society in other ways.
The death of a single individual fails to affect the world and society, not because of their 'obsessions with social connections', but because of the lack of social connections. The average individual doesn't have more than a handful of social connections, that get close enough to know the individual to regret the loss of that individual. There is no flow-on effect from people who are close enough, to people who know those people. Why was the world affected when Pope John Paul died? Or when Ghandi died? Because of the mass of social connections those individuals have. Millions of people who felt they knew those two men, felt connected with them, and felt a loss when they died.

My philosophy in relation to viewing reality is quite simple; its the opposite of Plato's Allegory of the Cave. We see the world, not as it is, but as we are. The lens of ourselves, colors and distorts and prevents us from seeing reality as it truly is. And beliefs, are the greatest of the mind's eyelids. While it would be best to remove the lens entirely, it is nigh on impossible to achieve. The best one can manage, is to polish the lens, and free it from as many imperfections as possible.

Hence, more words I give you: Plexure and Asarya

While I admire the standard of writing/specialized knowledge etc in general, I tend to go along with MindOfOrederedChaos in that my perception of the world is not and never will be NT. Negotiated reality works when people approach it in the same way, but (depending on level of autism) we don't always approach it in the same way. The usual examples of where you look when you enter a room and so on do point to, but don't guarantee, a different perception of reality. Some of the rules people follow are not programmed into me, and vice versa.
I have problems with things like trust and faith (liberated from the latter) and so find that political dogma, religion and even the writings of philosophers leave me cold in general. Perception always fascinated me in a childish way when I was young. I couldn't understand why in dim light things appeared (what I now call) pixellated, made up of lots of tiny dots. Why some things were felt but others weren't (I was shown that you don't always feel pins in your back). I then became the wierd kid that asked funny questions. It alter dawned on me that either everyone else wondered about the same things or that I was wierd (I settled for the latter), because they didn't ask the questions.
I'm happy that I have no strong need to fit in, no wish to belong, because the wish to fit in seems to warp people. Whether you look at the history or the work done on cultic studies ( http://www.apologeticsindex.org/c00.html )fitting in seems to be pretty perverse at times.
Put another way, if I agree that I have a different neurology, surely its not unreasonable to wish for a philosophy that accomodates that.

I was not trying to make the entire thread focus on the one opion I put forward but try and find out how other people on the autistic spectrum view the world. That is what I meant by autistic pholosophy. Less NTs are interested in pholosophy than aspergers because of the difference of how we view the world. This entering exmple of worlds was just to try and get things moving.

You say that all pholosophy is autistic then how does this post become not autistic if that is the case?

I was more trying to get accross what my opion of the world is rather than trying to say it was autistic as such. I was just meaning that as being Autistic we are more likely to view this world as this naturally because this is just one of the ways I view the world. I was also wondering what other people who are aspergers have to say about how they view things. Not nessicarrily the world but just some of there thoughts and ideas that are not fact based but interpretation based.

To do with weither a tree branch brakes does it still make a sound. Of course it still makes a sound, but does it effect us in any way shape or form. To say people are world is just my word for identifying life.

Explaining how sociatiy works by saying that people all view through the same lens is not quite right I think. I think it is more that people think that they think through the same lens that helps things. In reality pholosophy I think is just an attempt to best understand the world around us in a genralised way because we can never hope to understand reality any where near a complete picture because every thing interconnected and things have almost infinate differen't possibitys and states. Like for say I eat a apple. I can't hope to under stand the apple entirely unless im willing to study for years and years and even then I probably wond fully understand it. I will not understand how the atoms are interacting with each other how the molcules are bonding with each other how all the differen't chemical reactings are interacting with each other and how they are effected by time. And how the molicules bond to gether to make the cells how the cells first formed how the apple grew on the tree. How apples first came into existance etc. I think I have gone on to much on this one but you get my point about how you can't know every thing about some thing and every thing we do to try and understand the world around us is only ever an interprtation based on the usally limited ammound of knowledge and processing power we have.

JB814, you seem to have missed the point. The "autistic philosophy" put forward by MindOfOrderedChaos, is already generally accepted by psychologists and philosophers.
There is nothing "autistic" about it, as separate from other people's philosophies. Noone is disputing that we all perceive reality in separate ways, as dependent on who we are. Who could possible determine which, NT or autistic, is closer to reality? Only someone who sees reality as it is, could make that determination. Alas, it is a paradoxical endeavour; for even someone who sees reality as it is, that reality is only true for him.

Autism is merely why we're different, but its no big deal. NOONE approaches everything the same way. I don't see why autism has to be made into THE reason regarding everything. Think of someone who was brought up catholic, someone who was brought up atheist, someone who was brought up agnostic. How different would their views on the world be, regardless whether they be NT or autistic? The catholic might see the divine hand, where the atheist will see mere chance. Or another example, two men look at a rose, one cries and one smiles. The man who cries had a garden of finest roses, and only this one remains. The man who smiles was once blind, and beholds the flower for the first time. Our lens through which we perceive the world, is an eyelid which imprints what we see. This lens, this eyelid, is composed of beliefs, traditions, experiences. Systems through which we view the world and interpret what we see.

Give the emphasis on why we're different a rest. Fact is, we're no different to the rest of the world, in that we are different. Autism is just a word people have given to a collection of differences, so that they can see the world in black and white, instead of a spectrum. The idea "autism" allows people to categorize people into groups, normal and autistic. Autism is not who we are, it doesn't define us, it doesn't represent us. We don't HAVE autism; autism is not a part of us, either. We are who we are, why isn't that enough? It is a meaningless word, which like all words, allows people to blind themselves to reality. How can any one word encompass the millions of individual people, individual hopes and dreams, abilities and inabilities? How blindly, do we allow and perpetuate this system, and accept this label of limitation? Words can be powerful, but because they delimit rather than show the interconnection of all things, it is a poor system for representing something as complex and myriad as humanity.

Danlo