Can autism cause main character syndrome?

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sohil142003
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08 Sep 2022, 4:20 pm

Where you feel like your the main character in the world and everyone else is an NPC. I feel disconnected from everyone else and like I’m the only one who truly exists. It’s a very weird feeling and hard to describe. I think it has to be an autism thing for sure, I don’t know what else could cause this



Doberdoofus
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08 Sep 2022, 8:08 pm

Sounds a bit like depersonalization and derealization which can be common in autism. I found this thread for you viewtopic.php?t=103611


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CockneyRebel
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08 Sep 2022, 10:15 pm

I also feel that I'm the main character in my world. I feel as though my world is a movie or a TV show.


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shortfatbalduglyman
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08 Sep 2022, 11:03 pm

While I do feel "disconnected" from everyone else, I don't feel like the "main character"

I don't feel like a protagonist or antagonist or anything like that

I just feel like something in the background

(On the other hand I would imagine that plenty of neurotypicals see themselves as the main character) but I am not telepathic so I can't read their minds. That's just what they act like, sometimes, in my viewpoint. Not a representative sample. Not a controlled experiment.



ToughDiamond
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09 Sep 2022, 8:31 am

Don't know. I've often thought I might be happier if I took more interest in other people's lives instead of being so self-absorbed and aloof. But it's easier said than done, in my case. Still, I don't see much effort being made by people in general to act as a co-operative community rather than being so competitive and selfish. Their brain wiring may be better equipped for social intelligence and imagination, but it's sometimes hard to see what use they make of it.



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09 Sep 2022, 10:50 am

Um. I AM the main character in MY world.


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lostonearth35
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09 Sep 2022, 10:58 am

When I was younger I would sometimes look in the mirror, usually after taking a shower. And then I'd wonder why I'm me. Why was I born as me and as someone else? And what was it like to be someone else? And then I'd feel really uneasy and creeped out. Maybe it was from making a lot of eye contact with my own reflection, but I don't know. But if I really am the main character in a story or whatever, then we're in a lot of trouble. Or going to be in more than we are now, anyway. 8O



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09 Sep 2022, 11:19 am

I have very similar thoughts to those desribed by OP! I might name such thinking as "solipsoidal (super)simulation hypothesis". These solipsism-like ideas are rather not unpleasant to my "mentality". My "mentality" hypothetizes so because it considers this world evil-filled, cruel... I have "something like certainty" that the Quran is revelation from God because of its inconceivable mathematical and linguistic "coincidences". And my "mentality" does not want hell to be real! I have very severe problems. I have very severe dilemmas.



dragonsanddemons
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09 Sep 2022, 10:18 pm

I feel more of the opposite, like everyone else is a main character or a side character and I’m an extra, present in this world but not a part of it.


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Siddiq_Sultan
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18 Sep 2022, 2:35 am

People are egotistical by nature. Since everyone literally sees the existence from inside of their body being literally in the center of existence, no wonder everyone thinks only of themselves as VIP or more like MVP(most valuable person). If we could've just easily precieved world from any perspective it would be very freeing, like looking at your city from high place or looking at the stars combined and multiplied by 1000.
As for your solipsism perspective, yeah, I feel that fear sometimes. Donald Hoffman has interesting talks about this whole subject. Sometimes I fear that this is a complicated hallucination of a world, weird dream. You know, because dreams appear real for some time no matter how weird they are, from inside the dream everything seems proper and reasonable. And people believed in the dumbest s**t before, so our limited perception might as well be something like that.
I think that this feeling appears because of lack of real connection and understanding of the world and people around you. Like I can't really see other person's mind, can't feel what they feel so it may as well be an illusion. Sometimes I even don't trust my own thoughts and feelings because if you are being honest with yourself you understand that you are more like an observer inside of complex biological robot and your thoughts aren't actually yours. They come and go and you stay behind and above everything. Saccades make the trust in your sensory perception very futile (see "Blindsight" by Peter Watts for extra creeps). Memory can't be relied upon too much too, because we make up ton of stuff on the go.
Even the rational mind itself sometimes feels like the parasyte upon a parasyte (personality/ego). Like my body just wants to live and function like any animal body, but here am I, forcing it to do various things, preventing it from being free, and on top of that there is a mind which appears to play it's own games ny its own rules (i.e. antropocentric, black and white, determenistic thinking, with scarse input info and tremendous speculative output of bogus models and expectations). I read Kant's critique for a while now and the main theme is "We can't trust our own perception of reality, reality appears to us in a certain way, but we can't really know what reality is, because our perceptions and mind act like a filter" and we can't percieve world in any other way. I don't let this realisation sink in too deep because I feel like it may be dangerous for the psyche. Like why do we even percieve the world visually in a certain way? Is it because of shape of our eyes? Or is it because of laws of light traveling? Can we like see in 4D? And isn't our vision is really a fake 3D, like 3D glasses of sorts? And if time is just an illusion, how would world appear to us? (Certainly not like all things merged together or mixed in some way becuase this concept is born out of our linear time perception itself).