What is a relationship?

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Bravo!

Yea but the good thing about it is (even tho an aspie I can see it) is that the men may get p**** - but the women get money & head.

As I see it, we are icebergs. We may collide and touch each other and voyage a little road together. But we will never melt in one thing, as some conception of love would like to be, and as we secretly would like to do. Each iceberg is ruled by an internal system of laws. There may be some agreement at the level of the tips, and, when we succeed in such agreements, we should not throw them away because they are incomplete. To us who are maimed in our souls, they appear even more incomplete, being thirsty for real affection or even more for love (oh love, love what a confusion!), we pretend much more than other people can give. We walk all our life on sidewalks close to other people that may be (may be, we are not sure) have the same secret desire, may be, perhaps they never knew about it, they were reared in an incubator, or perhaps they had never been endowed by nature of the organs of love or they were sold when they were children to some Asiatic brothel. Oh that happens here too, sold to a school of marketing, that promises a longer life and affluence but is no better than a brothel in the quality of the relationships it cultivates. …

According to massive modularity (Steven Pinker, “How the Mind Works”) we are not biologically endowed with a mind which is a general workshop or laboratory run by a centre (an Homunculus) which can allot resources at pleasure for the needs of behaviour, but there is a cooperative network of different organs (or modules) assigned to different behavioural tasks. To make some example, face recognition, language learning and usage, musical memory, imagination, courting etc. If you look at little 5-6 years girls in every part of the world, China or Amazonia you see that they have already developed common courting expressions, in the same way that little kittens, when they play, they know the necessary behavioural sequences of predating, communicating anger, threatening cospecifics etc. I think (and I think that Uta Frith would agree) that the problem with us autists, is that our modules (or organs) for fluent social interaction are missing or defective in the same way that some one is born without colour recognition (Daltonism). We talk of mind blindedness for this reason. There is something analogous in your PC which functions with separate software programs. This is why I dare to talk of “organs of love”. Love, affection and attachment are not plastic material which can be moulded the way you like, as needs arise, they rather possess some structure and rigidity.

Pardon me for my oscillating between existential pessimism and professorial didacticism. That’s how I understood these things and I am not capable to express myself in different ways. As at the end of a would be lesson, any question or refutation?

Well, for me, I think I'd ask for a dictionary. Not meaning to be rude, your knowledge of words is amazing, it really is, but as a side effect a few of the ones you just used, such as didacticism and homunculs, I can't even begin to imagine what they mean. Ah well, at least I wasn't all like: '0h gsoh wat da hex0rs did u jzt say?'. That would the the epitamy of being rude. Is that the right word? Epitamy? Doesn't that mean 'the utmost' or something like that?

Failing that, no questions at all. Interesting theory, none the less!

paolo has swallowed a dictionary.

Thanks for being rude, I deserve it. I will try to translate some technical terms tha are known only to people who have read about cognitivism. What cognitivism is? It's the now prevailing trend in psychology, against behaviorism (now totally disqualifed) and psychonalysis, even more disqualified. As for the homunculus it is the idea that behind this jungle of conflicting programs, modules, softwares, istincts which run our minds and tend to have a life of their own, there is someone (homunculus=little man) who is in charge, a chief, a director of the orchestra (the self, the ego, a unitary soul). Lorenz used to talk about the "great parliament of istincts" to indicate the plurality of drives that govern our behaviour. I try with an example: a cat is offered some food by someone she fears. She will not come to get it, but will not flee away and will circle around the offerer in what is called a compromise behaviour. Here you can see in a plastic way the manifestation of a conflict.
As for the relevance of all this for our problems, I may say that our life is the result of a confict between the need of companionship and the fear of succumbing or being hurt in our attempt to create a bond, because we are lacking the knowhow (module, software, behavioral language) necessary to create a bond.
I am not sure I have been a little clearer. I will try again perhaps.
By the way, Baron Cohen is a cognitivist and exponent of modularity.

"I have been a teacher (very bad teacher)". (I am quoting myself).

Last edited by paolo on 02 Oct 2006, 3:00 pm, edited 2 times in total.

An NT relationship kind of seems like a more sophisticated form of prostitution (money for sex, albeit in a more peripheral, discreeter way). I've been saying this for years but nobody listens.

Thanks for the explanation paolo, it helped me get the earlier post. We're still friends, though!

haha no one listens.. Of course not!

Paolo, I enjoy the way you write, its very interesting to read!

As for NT's relationships, my friends just proved that one.. they broke up, one ran to the nearest girl for insecurity reasons, the other wanted to obtain a 'boy friend' to make him jealous or even or something, I dont know (insecurity regardless).. I told her that wouldnt solve anything (maybe it does for NT's, what do I know?).. They are back together now.. They are the pinnacle of confusion for me..

While it is refreshing to see someone correctly utilizing an advanced vocabulary you have to keep in mind your audience.. we're all pretty smart or we wouldnt be here but still its considered rude to use obscure terminology simply for its own sake.

One of the rules of effective writing is the "least common complexity" rule. Meaning you use the simplest words you can and still be able to communicate your ideas.

Having a large vocabulary is worthless if it is doing more to hinder than aid your attempts at communication

I agree that I have to keep in mind the audience. I make such use of a complex vocabulary that I even think in those terms, as, in a way I think more in english, than in my own language, reading materials mostly written in english. What I would like to make clear is that I dont'use words "for their own sake". Anyway this "feedback", gently expressed, helps me. After all I have been a teacher, alas, by I am also autistic and I admit I have problems in communicating. The scold should be gentle, not for the sake of etiquette or "good manners", but because I am very vulnereable, like everybody else here.

Yeah Im really not one to talk.. I always have to write what Im thinking then go back and dumb it down word by word then proofread it again to make sure it still makes sense, then read back over it one more time if I made any changes before I post.

I tend to do the same thing when speaking hence why I tend to talk slowly and back up a lot in a conversation.. drives people nuts but its what I have to do or I wont be understood.. it sucks to know just the right word for the concept your trying to express but it always seems to be too obscure for anyone to know what your talking about.

I will try to express myself in a popular fashion.
Discovery of the unconscious. It's normally attributed to Freud, but many sharp minds knew about it before. For Freud unconscious = more o less to sex drive. Later Freud talks of a dualism between a life(or sex) drive and a death drive. In humans (he never takes into account that we have some kinship with animals) there is some wish to dissolve and go back to inorganic. All this has been wild speculation and is a mistake. It would not be wortwhile to discuss about this if it were not for the huge influence that freudianism has had on modern culture and for the grip it holds on the organization of pshychiatry even now in some countries (France). I have tried to discuss with a friend psychiatrist about Asperger. He is still convinced that AS has something to do with the fridge-mother theory. Mothers unable to give their children sufficient abundance of love, also phisically expressed with fondling, cuddling etc. are the main causes of AS. Mothers are very important, no doubt, but two things must be taken into account. 1. Frigid and unloving mothers were probably in turn AS. 2. in any case you must consider some form of interaction between genetic causes, and those causes attributable to mistreating and unloving mothers. If a child is genetically fragile he needs more love. I see that in many of the posts in these forums there is much recrimination about unloving mothers and parents. Isn't this a legacy of a psychanalitic influences in popular theory?
I will leave it at that for now. Tired and probably again professorial and unsuccessfully didactic.

Nah that was much easier to read and your right.. Freud was a quack who seems to have had more mental issues than his patients.

I don't really care about what causes AS, it's just there, and it is what it is. In fact, in a way I don't really want to know what causes AS. It's almost like proving a popular myth: It was better when it was a story and not much was known about it.