Is the definition of the construents of autism incomplete?

Post Reply New Topic

No. Animals are conscious. Sometimes their consciousness is very different from human consciousness but it's the height of human arrogance to use our own brand of consciousness as a measuring stick to determine the consciousness or lack thereof of other animals. Each animal has a consciousness uniquely evolved for their particular circumstances. Humans no less than others. Who are we to impose our circumstances on the other animals? If we were measured against feline consciousness it is we who would be said to be unconscious.

Your idea also overlooks the fact that many autistic people have intense connections with other animals. Temple Grandin and cows. Dawn Prince-Hughes and gorillas. And stories abound of autistic people who were helped into human communication and relationships by our communication and relationships with other animals. In my case it's cats. Cats have a real depth to their communication and consciousness that is subtle to most humans but intense once you see it. (Sort of like Magic Eye stereograms, which look like nonsense and suddenly the depth pops out and everything becomes obvious.) There are layers on top of layers. It's not like most humans think but awe-inspiring and beautiful once you can perceive it and have broken the species barrier.

They can sit around fairly radiating their selfness, awareness, feelings, perceptions, and directedness (hard to describe, like the direction of their awareness and intent). They will respond positively when humans do our own feeble equivalents. I assume it's about subtle body language and perhaps smell. (That's the other thing humans do: We judge other animals through our own senses when the animals have totally different sensory strengths as well as occasionally additional senses like the directional sense of birds. Who are we to judge cats through our primarily visual and auditory channels when they are profoundly smell-based creatures? I have seen experiments done on cats that don't even take into account the fact that they're literally unable to visually see the experimental apparatus. I have a friend who modified that one at home so the cats could see it and they all passed with flying colors.)

Additionally, by most of the highly biased theories of consciousness that humans of your bent try to use on other species, I have spent (and still continue often to spend) much of my life unconscious. The kind of thought I use most of the time is so foreign to regular idea-based thought that many people (including many people like me who have gained a partial or full ability at idea-thought) describe themselves at those times as not thinking at all. In my natural mode of operating (not usually the one I use language from, although I can echo language as a string of sensory information without traditional meaning attached), I have awareness but it's not reflected back on itself and at times is very quiet indeed. At the higher levels of ability, sensory information flows in me, out of me, and through me without attaching meaning, category (no "table" or "chair", just texture, kinesthetics, sound, smell, and light), idea, or contemplation. At other times, the sensory information is out of my conscious awareness and all I have left is a peculiar senseless, idealess, timeless awareness without memory of anything different (though memory is obviously recording or I wouldn't be telling you about it). Beyond that, I can "disappear", and I am unable to even come close to explaining what happens then.

Most people who talk about consciousness would not call any of those states conscious. Many actually then use that idea to propose horrific "ethics" with regard to people like I am at those times. But I say that I am conscious at those times because I have any awareness at all, even if it's not lofty enough to qualify to someone hyper-rational like you as conscious: Even when I have enough rationality to participate in discussions like this I retain much of the flavor of my normal "home/native" state of mind and barely hang onto the foreign idea-thought that makes this possible. I hope I will never become as hyper-rational as many of the people here, or I would lose something important to me.

So count me out from your theory. I am highly reliant on instinct and direct sensory awareness without the "rational" questioning and evaluation of such things. (To me, my idea-mind serves my instinctive/sensory mind. Not the other way around. Questioning my instincts has only ever brought me grief.) I have an intense connection to cats that I would never give up for the world. I'm not even technically a "person with AS" (although there are plenty of those who resemble me more than they resemble your ideas). I have no desire to evolve away from other animals even if that were what evolution is about. Which it's not. And I probably don't usually fit into your ideas about consciousness, let alone "more conscious". Always remember not all autistic people resemble you and not all of us want to. (Not that it's bad to be like you. But I wasn't built to be like you. You were built to be like you. But you're no more the pinnacle of evolution than I am. Humanity is built to have all kinds of minds, and yours and mine are only a small percentage of the species for a reason. It would not be better if everyone "evolved" to be like either of us. If we were needed in more than small doses there'd be more of us.)

Have to agree about cats. I can communicate with them more easily than I can communicate with many people (even if I can communicate more complex ideas to people), and they're always communicating back. It was a shock to me when I first encountered people who thought animals didn't have a real consciousness just because they weren't able to verbally communicate in human language with humans (or didn't use mirrors the same way humans would), and that this by itself was sufficient to prove a lack of so many things such as an alleged lack of capacity for affection or self-awareness, or that they are necessarily motivated strictly by greed (because wanting to eat is greed) and anger. And I have had this argument with a veterinarian.

By that point I had found it very easy to befriend (not tame) numerous feral cats and get along with them to the point they'd follow me indoors, but would panic if they lost track of me. That is to say, they felt safe if I was there, but not otherwise. They'd scratch and bite anyone who wasn't me who tried to touch them.

I can tell the difference between "I want you to feed me now" and "I want to cuddle" and "I want to play", their pickiness about certain foods, that they're aware of their surroundings to the point of understanding cause an effect, and I have heard other people say this is not possible, that cats are not capable of these nuances. And this list is not exhaustive, it's simply what I can recall right now.

I mean when you catch your cat flipping the television on and off with the remote while watching the screen intently, it's difficult to understand how they're not supposed to be capable of such things, you know? Or when your cat has clearly figured out how doorknobs work and tries his best to open your bedroom door when he wants in, even though he can't manage the leverage to turn the knob. He knows what to do, his paws just won't let him do what he knows.

Or I know people who believe that cats are unable to figure out what's going on with a laser pointer and think the dot is a thing separate from everything else, but many cats I've seen will immediately look at the source of the laser dot when the dot vanishes.

And I mean this is all superficial and I can provide examples all day that won't capture everything I want to be able to say here. And I mean I have seen similar in other animals as well: Consciousness, self-awareness, and communication. Even if it is not sufficient for human standards and thus doesn't count to many.

I know I went too far by mentioning evolution because it sounds smug. Me too have an extraordinary good relationship to animals, but by consciousness I mean the ability to understand yourself and your own nature, besides understanding the nature of other creatures. This ability includes a complicated logic understanding, where you understand that you are thinking, what you are thinking about and why, where you understand the biologic borders that we are trapped within living here. The same way as you understand that we are trapped within the existing physical possibilities that reality consist of.

Understanding emotions for example. If you start to study yourself, you will notice that you cannot always be sure that you act out of free will, because it could be your unconsciousness who wants to fulfill a primitive wish to gain a certain feeling. In this reality we are restricted to be biological creatures with basic and unconscious needs. I have not come so far to determine whether we have free will, but it must be based on the awareness and own conscious choice of the feeling we want to gain by doing something. I am still doubting the constant awareness and control of this, but I think the degree between me and an animal is big, and also between me and an NT.

At this point I want to talk about "Theory of mind".
For understanding another human you basically have to trust your own instincts even though you cant describe it or picture it in details. I will try to explain, even though it is impossible.
I am affected by peoples intensity and kind of measure how their words match with their body language. I also measure the harmony of the body language, when a person doesn’t use words. A perfect match and harmony emits an energy that I instinctively can feel is true. This means that if the person is concentrating on expressing one thought and is not lying, faking or disturbed by something I can feel a harmony between all the persons methods in expressing him-/herself.
The harmony is only perfect if the persons emotions are attached to what he/she is talking about and how he/she is moving. A little too much or less affection at some point of the information tells a whole story.

Consciousness starts with awareness of own feelings and if you study your own mechanics, you know that feelings can be so strong, that you act out of affection. For example when you start defending yourself. Therefore the understanding of theory of mind has to start with yourself.
The awareness of our biological prison is not common, because people usually just understand each other instinctively and don’t have the urge to question how it works. Now if you start understanding this consciously, we are talking about “theory of mind”.
I understand when a persons unconscious instincts are the reason for their behavior and which instincts the person is controlled by -> “which” emotions are interfering with the way they express themselves.
I notice the degree of consciousness by peoples awareness of their feelings. It doesn’t matter to me if the person has the need to come across as an intelligent person or put him-/herself in some light while expressing him-/herself. I know it is our nature and everybody is more or less conscious about themselves (including myself), but it sometimes scares me, because I often notice which “buttons” I cannot push, because it could “destroy” somebodys reality.

The harmony can be perfect regardless of consciousness, because we can fake it. The best liar can fake unconsciousness and that he/she is concentrated on something else than “the issue” when speaking, until a degree of harmony that is impossible to determin if it could be fake. A perfect harmony either mirrors complete unconsciousness about him/herself or a perfectly planned manipulation of others.
Now tell me that a cat can trick you to believe he is a proud cat, when he in reality is ashamed.

You continue to measure cats' consciousness by the specialized traits of (normal) human consciousness. As I said before, measure most humans by the deep, multilayered complexity of feline consciousness and it is we who come out lacking. Each species has its own uniquely evolved form of consciousness and to put one above all the others (as well as to assume no other species has those traits just because they haven't communicated them to us on our terms) is arrogant. There are things within a cat's consciousness that you are incapable of too. I doubt you'd appreciate having your consciousness judged by them.

As for the rest of your discussion of human consciousness, again I say those are traits I do not normally possess and some of them I even now (at my most "standardly conscious") do not even understand. I still don't appreciate definitions of consciousness that exclude so much of humanity including (most of the time) mine. Part of my task as a person like I am most of the time who has been given the ability to communicate about it to others in their (not my) language is to defend people like me and others (whether capable of this kind of communication or not) against definitions of things like consciousness that don't include us.

Ok, if I say that I dont connect positive or negative, above or underneath, black or white to the fact that I am more conscious about my own nature than what I see is common, but I just discuss the fact that it is so, do you then understand my attempt to describe my situation, which separates me from what is normal? Comparing it to levels of consciousness only build up on the picture I have. In which ways another creature has different abilities than myself would be separate discussions about those particular abilities. Now what I am trying to do is to put into words, that I recognize and question my normal human instincts, so that my awareness of them become out of the normal. I am only saying that I feel a step apart from the biological instincts because of my awareness of them. This means that I also sometimes have to accept that I have primitive needs, and that I for example am aware that I am being proud of a stupid thing. The problem is to describe this, so I use comparisons. Now imagine that a cat with AS would be aware of itself in the same way?... I dont know if you get my point, and I dont know how to describe it without repeating myself, but I actually only try to explain what I think separates myself from being NT.

Kenjuudo:
The mountain example shows how communication works in my eyes. When we live in a similar world, many have internal concepts or mental images that match sufficiently enough to reach understanding.
What qualifies as understanding differs for everyone. Some keep gathering data/opinions/perspectives and are never sure enough, others are satisfied quickly. The last category will probably appear more confident during social interactions.

Is it then not the skill in communication but the desired quality that makes the difference?

anbuend:
Thank you so much for writing and explaining that special kind of communication so clearly.
I had this happen to me once and felt very happy. Also confused and then decided to forget about it, because it would just make me jealous of something I would not have.

Your description clears away the confusion as I know grasp what happened back then.
I could understand and tell so much, so effectively and so much more defined.

Like the difference between showing someone a picture of a cat or an actual cat.
Thanks again, I am somewhat speechless now

Regarding the definition of autism: as I am just discovering all this, I only know the basics. I got no clue where I fit in myself, so it is hard to form an opinion about the definition. I have so far never read about the different style of communication, and am relieved it is explained here.

I wonder if people that do not "speak" that way can somehow perceive it?