Hi Everyone. I'm Matt, I'm from the US, and I'm 29 years old. I'm currently working towards obtaining an official ASD diagnosis. I don't particularly care about receiving such a diagnosis in itself - I don't believe that those who would attempt to diagnose or treat autism have much of an idea of what autism actually is, so their opinions as to whether or not I belong to the set of autistic persons has little value in itself - however receiving such a diagnosis could mean gaining eligibility for accommodations and supports, which could bring graduate school into the realm of possibility for me. That would bring with it university library access, my lack of which I frequently find myself lamenting. It would also bring with it time for research, analysis, and writing - time which as of now is squandered by my employer in petty capitalistic pursuits.* Thus a diagnosis is important to me, in that context.
My thanks to everyone before me who's written an introductory post. I have a much easier time writing when I can extrapolate a template from multiple examples; reading a few of the prior Topics in this Forum helped me do this.
I definitely don't think in language, although I have developed (and continue to ? it?s an ongoing process) cognitive structures analogous to assemblers, compilers, interpreters and so on (each member of this sequence is a recursion of the previous member upon itself**, so the sequence is theoretically infinite***) which allow me to process language via thought. The inverse operation ? translating, decompiling, and disassembling thought so that it may be successfully encoded into language ? is for me much more difficult, but the examples I mentioned help me in crafting an algorithm to do that.
I suppose I?ve already provided some information about myself via the above, the notes I?ve placed below on what I?ve written above, as well as the notes-on-my-notes which you?ll find below the notes. (My apologies for the horrendous organization****.) If there's anything else you'd like to know, please ask.
I look forward to communicating with all of you!
* Which isn't to say that academic pursuits are free of pettiness; merely that such such pursuits might cohere more completely and satisfactorily with my traits, skills, values, etc.
** In the context of this analogy to computer languages, the originating element of this sequence S of recursive iterations of language (i.e. {k = 0}) is machine language; thus, machine language is analogous to what I will (for now) call the cognitive calculus. Note that ? just as machine language is distinct from, and exists some interval of abstractions ?above?*+* the instruction set of the CPU of a hypothetical computer running some machine code, or the physical-electrical processes occurring when an actual computer?s CPU references its instruction sets to process machine code ? so too does what I?m calling the cognitive calculus exist some interval of abstractions ?apart from? the neurobiological processes by which a particular iteration of the cognitive calculus is instantiated in a person?s brain.
*** Note however, that for each progression (n --> (n + 1)) among the elements of S, and (more pertinently) along the elements of C (the sequence of cognitive-structure analogues to the elements of S), the complexity required of the network*++* N into which the model of each element is embedded increases*+++*, as does that of the instruction set required to embed said model in N.
**** This horrendous organization comes from performing mental multi-dimensional analysis, encoding the results in internal-language (compare with machine language) via functional interpretation, translating that internal-language model of the analysis into one-dimensional language (written words), and embedding the result in a two-dimensional plane of discourse (e.g. a page, a blackboard/whiteboard, a screen). Parentheses, footnotes, endnotes, and hyperlinks are all methods of overcoming these limitations. I'm planning to set up a blog/wiki at some point in order to present my ideas in a more accessible fashion.
*+* The direction may be arbitrary and/or context-dependent; i.e. we can conceive of an embedding of S in a vector space V, but it might be more appropriate to embed S in a topological space T.
*++* ?Network? is here used in an abstract sense; a mathematical object which models many extant phenomena (i.e. such a network is a member of the set of all weighted graphs isomorphic to internally-consistent models of real phenomena). Examples of such phenomena might include: the network of transistors comprising a computer processor; the network of servers comprising a supercomputing cluster; the neural networks of the technicians who will design, build, maintain, administrate, and decommission that cluster.
*+++* I suspect (i.e. ?I make a low-confidence assumption?) that the rate of this complexity increase grows as the sequence progresses, that the rate of growth accelerates as the sequence progresses, that the rate of acceleration jerks positive as the sequence progresses, and so on ? the rule defining the pattern should be apparent if you?ve studied/understood/retained differential calculus.
09 Nov 2014, 8:19 pm
