Some thoughts on "theory of mind"

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I'm becoming increasingly convinced that the common belief that people on the Autistic spectrum are deficient in TOM is incorrect. At least, we're no more lacking in that ability than NTs are. I assume that everyone starts off in life, believing by default, that other people are basically similar to themselves when it comes to things like: sensory experience, instinctive behaviours and responses, motivations and priorities, thought processes, and abilities. As children, we have many opportunities to put this to the test. A “normal” person will discover that the default belief is correct most of the time. Because of this, He develops a sense of belonging and trust. He learns to feel confident that he can make himself understood and get his needs met. But, that is not how it was for me. When I tried to operate on the assumption that I was like everybody else, I found out that I was wrong most of the time. I discovered that I could not understand or predict the responses of others based on my own internal reference points. Other people did not understand me either, but they were so confident in their default belief that they couldn’t accept my attempts to explain myself. That's the main reason I knew I was different and felt like an alien. So, it would be true to say that we lack a theory of NT mind, but equally true to say that NTs lack a theory of AS mind. If it were not so, wouldn't NTs be better at understanding us than vice versa? Also, aspies don't have much trouble relating to and understanding other aspies. If we really had a TOM deficiency, wouldn't we be just as clueless about each other? I'm interested in what other people here, think about this different way of framing the TOM issue.

From what I've seen, aspies do have trouble understanding each other.

Nobody understands something they have never experienced, I think that's probably impossible. You can be supportive without understanding and maybe that's really what you're talking about - any marginalised group is more likely to sympathise with outcasts than the majority is because they know what it's like to be outcasts themselves.

I don't think all adult aspies lack theory of mind though, I don't seem to. I just learnt it later than your average NT.

I can totally relate to what you are saying about projecting my own experiences into other people not working. But I guess we just progressed from this starting point in different directions. In your case, you just concluded that other people are unpredictable. But in my case, I continued harder and harder to convince myself that I "can" explain other people in terms of my own experiences and put them into this box -- which lead to more and more frustration.

However the place when I do something similar to what you described is when, after I face a failure with the above approach, I start asking questions in order to understand just why did I fail. To others those questions sound "logical", so they think I ask them because I have no concept of emotional reasoning. But I understand that concept perfectly fine, its just that my own emotional reasons are different from theirs. So if our emotions were to agree, I won't be asking any logical questions at all. But since they don't, then logic is the only possible thing that would bridge the two together. But people don't get it.

Interestingly enough, I didn't have those issues back when I was little: back then, just like you described, I just accepted the fact that others were totally different species from me and didn't even attempt to understand them. I remember, when I was around the 3-rd grade, I was lying in bed thinking "just how can all those kids be running around, as if driven by motor, without ever thinking about anything? Do they even have emotions or an ability to think? I am so lucky I am not one of them". And that was long before I ever heard of autism. I guess that attitude that I was lucky that I wasn't one of them is what kept me from trying to understand them. But then, when I became an adult, and felt a need to connect to people, that was when I "forgot" my earlier knowledge that others are totally different from me, started assuming we are alike, which lead to a lot of frustration.

So yeah its interesting that, as an adult, I find that concept of others not having the same emotions as me to be so puzzling, despite the fact that, as a kid, it was so natural. I guess its "difficult" to accept things that go contrary to my emotional needs to connect. So this shows that I am not all about pure logic, after all.

Every species experiences premature mortality in proportion to their birthrate. Humans tend to die in groups because we are a social species, but far less frequently than Anchovies. I say "adequate" because NT cohesion has not made us extinct yet. I certainly agree that NT illusions about each other are causing other extinctions already, and may easily return us to Stone-Age human populations.

I would divide TOM into Theory Of Irrational Mind and Theory Of Rational Mind (which is called Logic). We're both struggling with TOM, but we Aspies have troubles with TOIM, NTs have troubles with TORM. For them TOM is equivalent to TOIM (they think they have good TOM), because they are all irrational in the same way, so that they can at least understand each other without good TORM. When we must deal with irrationality we have problems, because we are irrational in a different ways. We can't understand each other fully, because we can rely only on TORM, and usually the TOIM part is missing. And we can't understand NTs (and vice versa) even more because they usually lack TORM and we lack TOIM, so there's no common ground.

^^ Most NTs make their decisions with their emotions, paper over their motivations with rationalizations, and call it rational thought.

I think many, if not most Aspies have a lot of ToM. We have to in order to survive. What i am finding is that the nts that I deal with have none. Part of the reason I have so many communication breakdowns with nts is not my lack of ToM but theirs. They just can't see or understand that they lack it because they are the majority. A lot of nts that I deal with blame me and say I don't have ToM not because I don't understand them because I don't agree with them. There are actually lots of times that I really do not understand them but there are also plenty of times that I do. But I am not just going to follow their vibe if I don't agree with them. But yeah, that ToM thing goes both ways. They are just as bad with it as they claim that we are.

I think I have TOM, but idk. I failed the Sally-Anne test (which is supposedly a test of TOM), but I notice myself using TOM in my everyday life sometimes.