Comment by exmadscientist | Hacker News Reader

Comment by exmadscientist | Hacker News Reader

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I think the actual hallmark is one layer deeper: the brain's "input filter" is different and doesn't assign "important" versus "not important" distinctions in the same way as a "neurotypical" brain might. (In fact, the brain just might not be very good at input filtering, period.)

This shows up in a lot of ways: sensory (can't just filter out the tag on the back of your shirt), interests (can't recognize that you're spending just a liiiitle too much time on that model train), food (don't categorize trying new foods as interesting, so you don't), etc. But human socialization is incredibly complex, and while many of us can do decently well at learning it, imagine trying to get a grip on social cues without being able to tell what's relevant and what's not. Sounds pretty bad, doesn't it?

It also is a working theory that well matches my experience with the autistic people in my life. "Deficits in cognitive empathy/ inability understand intuitively what other people are thinking", aka "theory of mind", is a really good description of how things are often difficult, and I think "different stimulus input filter" is a pretty good hypothesis for how it might arise.

As an autistic person, what you say is correct to my experience. I have all sorts of sensory processing issues that all basically are variations on "I can't ignore signals".

Well, autism is sensory integration problem, that's the core thing.

It's the other way round - let's say you have a thousand inputs, and those contain 1 bit/s in a way that you can't pick one or a few inputs that allow you to correctly decode that one bit of information.

Or let's say you have a million inputs, or pixels, and you need to determine if there is a cat in the picture. Selective attention won't work for that either. You can't pick six pixels that allow you to reliably answer this question.

You need dimensionality reduction, that will reduce the data into a manageable amount of abstract features, from which you can pick what features matter to you.

Neurotypical people lack (or only have remnants of) this second filter.

>lack (or only have remnants of)

I'd say have been successfully precluded from developing that.

Instead, they've learned to substitute its functionality with the quasi-religious faith that they are actually any good at inferring what others think. (Take that precept away and see em flail, it's disturbing.)

At population scale, this resolves to either mass violent panic or a society living under the constant self-fulfilling prophecy that fewer things are thinkable than those which are possible, while screaming that it's the other way around. (Instead of, you know, aiming for the parity between interpretation and reality which is necessary to accomplish anything at all.)

The main neurotypical trait is lack of inherent revulsion to delusion.

> delusion

I hope you see the irony some day.

Why, how would that help you?

Because I have empathy for other people (on top of an innate sense of smugness)

Empathy is so where it's at. Especially after a few decades of rats in boxes taught the corporate parrots to bring themselves to say the word.

So, then: when was the last time you expressed empathy, and whom did it help?

And also: when was the last time you expressed empathy for someone you were told you should have no empathy for?

Cmon, give us that sweet, sweet emotional vulnerability. Because, surprise for whoever's not looking: insisting that a legitimate society can be built on the magical belief that performing an emotional emulation somehow equates to giving a damn about someone's actual well-being - that kind of thing is a big part of what's wrong with you guys.

slowpoke edit: s/expressed/experienced/

Those are some pretty extreme views. I hope you find a place in this world where you fit in. And I also hope that I am very, very far from that place. It doesn't sound like it would make for a society that matches my values.

This is an extremely typical reaction.

Hey, I understand if what I'm saying is making you upset. Not necessarily why, but let's say I can imagine.

Your countersignal references "a place in the world to fit in", this presumes a strong belief that the world fits together, right?

You're pretty invested in the view that social consensus is essentially fair, and does not, for example, hinge on tragicomical amounts of epistemic sleight-of-hand, or anything like that?

You'd find living with that sort of awareness kinda depressing, over the long run prone to lead you to what they call them bad places?

Yeah, well.

In any case. What it would be helpful of you to be aware of. And I don't usually mean things in that sort of sense anymore - but this time I do mean it in the sense of "do this to make the world a better place" helpful: please remain mindful that the world that gave my "views", if they can even be called that, is the same one that gave you yours. There's no essential difference, beyond the paths we've walked through it (which I'm happy to confirm are different enough that you're completely safe from any harmfulness that you've been so kind as to proactively ascribe to me, thank you very much, jfc)

I don't think our views of the world are similar enough to have any sort of meaningful discussion. Good luck (sincerely).

Our views of acceptable utterances differ, which is basically the same thing, right? All the best to you as well :-)

Unthinking the unthinkable is typical delusion elision.

To be clear, I'm not proposing any specific mechanism for or details of the difference in input filtering, just that this seems to be central to the impact of autism. (And, of course, it seems very likely that there is no "one true mechanism" here, just as autism has no "one true presentation".)

> Neurotypical people lack (or only have remnants of) this second filter.

This statement didn't scan for me, did you mean "autistic" instead of "neurotypical"? (And "neurodivergent" doesn't fit, there are many more neurodivergences than just autism.) Everything I know about neurotypicality does indicate something like that "second filter" is present (if possibly distributed).

Both have the selective attention filter. Autistic people also have another, dimensionality reduction filter.

So in autistic people it goes (raw sensory data) --> [dimensionality reduction] --> (latent space of abstract features) --> [selective attention] --> (higher thinking)

While for neurotypical people it goes (raw sensory data) --> [selective attention] --> (higher thinking).

Positing the emergence of an entirely distinct layer of processing is a pretty extreme divergence. It goes counter to a lot of established theory and, in general, seems like too big of a difference. Abstract feature determination hardly seems to be unique to neurodivergence.

I think any common neurodivergences that still result in more-or-less functioning adult brains are going to appear as different weightings or emphases, not entirely different effective structures.

One possible contribution to the behavior you are seeing is that sometimes brain behavior that is missing or ineffective gets lifted to the cognitive (conscious or semiconscious) layer. The cognitive layer of the brain can do, essentially, anything. But it has to work a lot harder than the lower layers, so you notice it a lot more. This can result in "squeaky wheel" syndrome, where one counterintuitively notices only the things that aren't working as well as they could be.

The filter is obviously supposed to be there, it's "neurotypical" people who have a problem.

It means you need to use your higher thinking to do sensory processing. It's like if your GPU had burned out. So you had to find a way to do everything on the CPU. It sucks, and you don't have much capacity left for the actual thinking.

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