This might be a weird question but need NT input

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No man or woman is a stand alone/self contained island. AS people need encouragement and love and look for these reinforcements. Look at the dating forums. Look at the unsurety or insecurities therein.

I just don't buy the completeness theory.

If aspies were completely self contained why would this forum exist?

Thank you. That is the truest thing I've read on this thread so far. Obvs I haven't quite got to the end yet.

From what has been posted elsewhere I would say that it is the speed of processing certain information rather than a different process altogether. For example the dreaded empathy question - I've seen posts from people with ASDs who say they feel similar things to NTs but, crucially, not in the situation at the time, but several hours later at home.

Similarly, I gather it is not that people with ASDs don't have feelings, they merely appear not be able to "access" them as quickly as NTs in conversation. And I don't mean all of them, just as a tendency.

As the quote says some of us NTs are way more similar to Aspies than we are to the sort of stereotypical super outgoing alpha NT that has nothing to do with my (NT) life.

I digress. I don't thinks its as much slower as different, so it appears slower as information is proccessed differently, and maybe in a different order.

I was talking about completion of thought patterns. In other words, the ability to think for one's self vs. needing to be told what to think in order to complete a thought pattern. This has nothing to do with the need for encouragement or love. Completion of thought patterns is a separate issue. You are making wild misinterpretations of my statements.

You're NT so you would think that. It's wrong. Any autistic can try oxytocin and get a glimpse into NT 'thinking', which is more like pre-conscious knowing + post-hoc rationalisation. It's a totally different process to autistic thinking.

First, I don't see any need to place scare quotes around the word normal. Very little is black and white in the real world, so hence the need for words like normal, which denote an average in this case.

What makes aspies abnormal is primarily our lack of ability to deal with others (though there are certainly other criteria). On one extreme you have people like us, and at the other extreme are the utterly charming people, such as Bill Clinton (regardless of what we might think of his politics). Most people fall somewhere in the middle. Hence the need for averaging.

I must admit I was confused about people too until I got into the cattle business. Cattle are rugged individualists compared with normal people. Normal people can be divided into two groups: Those with high status and those with low status. Those with high status tend to want to stand out to differentiate themselves from the group. Those with low status would rather die than stand out; they seek to conform to group norms (there's that word again) at all costs.

What separates aspies is that we tend to stand out but rarely have high social status. Aspies can be trendsetters, but it tends to be in a discipline rather than socially. One of the advantages of being an aspie is that we ask if something is true or false rather than if it's cool or nerdy--at least if we allow ourselves to.

OK. Let's try this: What thought pattern(s) are there that exist in an 'incompleteness "NT" mannered state,' hinged upon "needing to be told what to think," (or the implication is the inability to think independently), to make into a 'whole?'

I'm assuming NT here in this instance is all non-autistics, including the High IQ'd "NTs."

I get the impression the use of the word "needing" implies emotional or emotive to fulfill a desire to be told what to think in this context.

Ergo without the "need" one completes the thought process (or pattern) independently as in autistic.

Another words the subjective nature of our experience ( NT's in this instance) is incomplete without a reinforcement or second individual present, to objectify it - to make it real.

Is this the angle?

I really don't care for these back and forth type of discussions. I've said what I wanted to say.

It wouldn't.

Wow, a thread I wrote in resurrected after 3 YEARS?! I've grown and recovered from the removal of a tennis-ball-sized brain tumour in that time_

Anyhow, Dianthus, I suspect you've been misinterpreted.

If you look, for example, at poetry, obviously written by NT introverts for the most part, it's full of social metaphors for physical events and similar. In that sense, as long as the NT poet is only barely conscious (to begin with) of the purely physical nature of what he or she is describing - rather than beginning with the physical and building up the metaphor from there - the NT's thought process needs 'completion' in terms of social dynamics. In fact, it begins with social dynamics and only rationalises this to confirm its content, as has already been said.

The problem with seeing no connection between autistic and normal thought patterns - apart from the intuitive impossibility of two completely unrelated forms of consciousness arising independently and even co-existing within the same universe (isn't the physical universe all of a piece?) let alone the same species - is that the autistic pattern is always an option for NTs. They may try to access it as scientists, and although subconscious force of habit may make this unintentionaly inconsistent, it's always possible (in theory) simply to begin at the level of physically demonstrable facts and keep going. The reason why NT's needn't normally do this is that their brains process sensory information to the point where *social interactions reach conscious awareness as factual data*; not only has evolution ensured its accuracy, but it can still be checked using autistic/intellectual processes. It isn't that they're more emotional; it's just that the information is processed automatically - something autistic mihds/brains rarely seem to do - to create intuitive and (in the context) often emotional insights into what's going on in the surrounding world, in order to aid survival.

Western (and Buddhist) psychology claims that human beings have to prove to themselves the existence of the other in order to prove (to themselves) their own existence; if this is impossible for some autistics, they may be left with no perceived other to defend their own sense of existence against, hence the lack of concern with status. Hence the term autism and its connotations of solipsism.

I don't believe autistics do things for their own sake any more than anyone else, unless they pursue a spiritual practice so as to dis-identify with the limitations of self-interest. If we (autistics) do good, we may not be concerned with gaining a 'high social status', but may well have an eye to ensuring that society allows us to survive; if it's a particular kind of good, it may simply reflect the old story of so-called "aspie special interests" - Adrift in an infinite ocean of possibilities, we find it easier to latch on arbitrarily (the degree of randomness corresponding with the level of existential panic involved) to whatever distracts us in our inattentive moments, rather than identify with the ocean. Given the closed-off nature of an autistics' intuition, these inclinations (based on different balances of taste and chance) are likely to lean towards intellectualised 'facts' rather than the reality they represent, hence the term 'interest', rather than, say, 'passion'.

I couldn't put it better - or as well - myself. With insufficient physical capacity to cross-reference information between brain regions/functions, how can 'social understanding' be reached?

I hope I've demonstrated that 'NT thinking' is roughly the same as 'autistic thinking' - 'and then some'. I did think oxytocin was just about affection etc. - If it does what you say it does, why isn't it 'the cure'; moreover, how come you're not already high on the stuff?

Dunnyveg, a good pair of similies for us might be cool ~ natural / nerdy ~ unnatural (or unable to outlive the current Human Plague atleast!) From this, natural ~ eternal ~ true / unnatural ~ ephemeral ~ false - ?! However, I don't see that John Gray (British philosopher and 'pupil' of A.C. Grayling) is justified in denying the wider survival value of seeking truth (as well as lies and self-deceptions) - Note how, in high finance for example, human alpha males disseminate clever lies (which they often know are lies) that have since been widely believed, first because powerful self-confident individuals told them, and then because the majority of people believed them. As I hope I've explained, this has little to do with autism *directly*; many more-severely-autistic people lack the intellect to do without this kind of authoritative knowledge (even though they may lack the intuition that would lead them to it), and so rely more on close family etc..

Actually, all I can say is this: nobody knows, and know one CAN know, as it is impossible to change from autistic to NT or NT to autistic and you cannot truly understand yourself until you understand others.

Spam-I-Am, I hope I've indirectly addressed most of the points that you made in your thread-reviving post, and definitely don't want to make any more consecutive posts, but I do want to go into more detail on a couple of them.

'The push for knowledge' is all very well for someone who doesn't have knowledge to begin with, but if you have that intuitive foreknowledge of the social world that gives you all the facts you need, survival becomes more likely, and feelings can come into play, having already brought unconscious observations into semiconscious awareness. 'Feeling the winds and looking where the converation is going' is 'thinking before you speak' in this sense.

Also, when you mention games of hierarchy, you fail to offer an alternative that would make life as colourful for our NT siblings who have intuitively 'figured out' how the world works by around age 7, and so have no further need to struggle towards understanding. Have you heard of "Maslow's Hierarchy of NEEDS"? - Life has to be about more than mere personal survival, otherwise what basis would there be of allocating scarce resources when the community's survival is suddenly threatened? In any case, how could we have evolved if the strong had not ensured themselves greater reproductive success than the weak through hierarchy? You could never have been born if it weren't for what you call 'stupid games', which by the way, aspies often CANNOT play. {The Fox and Grapes thing gets very 'old', as some Americans say, for thinkers.} Bullying is one such social game, but what people refuse to notice is that true bullies pick on people whose lives are obviously WORSE than their own, as a more straightforward way of confirming their own basic goodness in the 'Noble Ethics' sense.

NTs, unless they're Bankers (an instrument devised by Nature to cull 99.9% of humanity I imagine), tend to be with you about the importance of contributing to society. The examples you pick, though, summarise those contributions that can be made WITHOUT social game-playing; it's for that reason, it seems, that those professions are full of aspies - It would be silly to attempt to enter a profession such as Sales without social game-playing!! Also - on a darker note - the 'aspie-infiltrated' occupations tend to increase the number of humans surviving to old age at a time when the earth has become dangerously overpopulated.

Also, everyone will say they can do something if doing it earns them money, and lastly, I hope you wouldn't express joy or even indifference if someone you merely disliked (rather than hated) died. When we talk about death, little irritations become irrelevant to the fact that a whole person has ceased to exist.

Last edited by undefineable on 22 Dec 2011, 10:24 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Not sure what you're referring to. In case I'm misunderstanding you, I'll say that I aim to understand what is superficially furthest from my origins (i.e. 'NTness' v. 'me' as you'd see it), as my 'aspie thirst for knowledge' tells me that this is the only way I can be even 90% certain of what NTs know; this is around the only degree of certainty anyone can have about answers that matter. If we successfully 'understand' in this way, we personally transcend the autistic/NT divide on that level - I'm not just saying it; look up the word 'understand' in the dictionary if you don't believe me

If you're claiming 'intellectual nihilism', i.e. that no-one can know OR understand anything, then why are you on this thread?