Silverlight wrote:
Hey guys, sorry for the absence...I totally forgot about this. Gosh this is going to be difficult....
Okay first of all.... Please make sure you actually caught the meaning of what I said before commenting(obviously too much to ask in any case(see; all philosophical problems ever... lol)). It was quite a dense post... so there's a lot to be unintentionally ignored.
So, I read literally every single one of your guys' comments and not one understood what I was saying. I shall reiterated as follows(take your time with it): Aspergers is a relative diagnosis. The 'referent' of the diagnosis, so to speak, is NOT concrete or well-defined*. Therefore it does not make sense to say you can only ever learn to cope with it because this implies that Aspergers(or, the referent of that name) is something concrete. In other words, when one says, "She has Aspergers" there is no reference being made to a prescriptive identity as much as it is simply a way of describing a general condition.
You are speaking of how AS is diagnosed, which does not have any bearing on whether AS is a concrete thing, which it happens to be. You seem to be committing a fairly classic error in your assessment, in that you appear to be using a Cartesian mind/body duality to claim that AS is not a "physical" condition, despite the fact that it is fairly solidly identified as a consequence of neurobiological development, hence being referred to as a
developmental disorder. Current research indicates that autism will probably be diagnosable with brain scans within the next five years or so, which I think does not support your contentions in this post.
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To the person who denied that you can't learn anything: you are simply wrong. You CAN become any of those things given the time. It is simply a matter of time and effort and no, there is no limit on how much effort you can extend towards something if it is not a purely physical task. When we're dealing with psychological entities such as mental effort, the relations of quantity collapse.
This is factually incorrect. Read about
ego depletion (link). People do have limits on cognitive effort. Everyone does, whether they're neurotypical and have no mental illnesses to speak of or whether they have numerous neurological and psychological diagnoses.
Further, not everyone's brains work the same. Not everyone can easily grasp any particular concept you care to name. Not everyone's brain works in such a manner as to enable learning some skills. This is why, for example, learning disabilities exist. Because some people find learning particular things fairly difficult, and are not easily able to wrap their minds around the necessary information or processes in order to be able to manage such topics very easily.
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To the person who said that you either never had it or you're lying to yourself: this is actually less favored in terms of how logic works. It's something that people commonly say to validate their personal condition.
You keep appealing to logic as if being able to apply logic to a flawed premise means you have to be right. The problem with logic is this: Garbage in, garbage out. The concept is, simply, if you start with a flawed premise, your conclusion will also be flawed. For a large number of conditions, neurological and otherwise, if you "grew out of it" odds are very good you never had it. This is actually mostly applicable to the autistic spectrum. Some people reach a point of being subclinical or having a "shadow" disorder, which means it never went away, it simply became less impairing over time. However, even in cases where people really did meet the criteria and don't meet it as adults, it likely has very little to do with how much effort they may have put into trying to overcome it.
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To the person who said that people don't bear the responsibility over their diagnoses. Yes, they do. You can change anything, it's just all a matter of time. There is no such thing as immutable if, as I've said multiple times, it's not clearly physical**. It's just all a matter of time and will power. You are saying the exact opposite of this but you have no proof. Mine makes more sense because naturally it calls for less parameters.
Your definition of "it's not clearly physical" is rubbish. This paragraph displays a general lack of understanding about neurological and psychological disorders. You
can't change anything you want, and time and willpower will not cure all ills.
Your claim does not make sense because you are changing the definitions to suit your argument. Autism is clearly understood to be rooted in the brain, which happens to be a physical organ. Not that being physical or not is what determines whether something can be cured or healed or changed. A broken limb is physical, but it can heal. Acute stress reactions are very much like PTSD but only last for a few months. But ALS does not heal on its own. It's progressive and degenerative. Similarly, Alzheimer's Syndrome does not heal on its own either, and is also progressive and degenerative, and is by your definitions "not clearly physical" (even though it is entirely physical, unless you think the human brain is made out of ectoplasm or something).
You're not making a case, you're making assertions, many of them unfounded, and claiming that your conclusions are logical because of some facts you just made up to support your assertions. A logical argument requires far more than the claim that it is logical. It also should be based on a plausible premise, not on one that could easily be debunked with a google search.
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There is such a thing as neuroplasticity, also. The brain itself is susceptible to reprogramming. I am not here saying that people with full blown autism will be particularly able to become 100% veritably neurotypical given the effort. There probably just isn't enough time for that sort of development within the limitations of an average lifespan. What I am saying is that it is possible to change, in general. If you don't find that what I've said is correct then feel free to dig up a replicable, credible study which conclusively demonstrates the necessary aspect of immutability that exists within Aspergers. Although, good luck finding it because it simply does not exist, nor does any study like it exist for any other comparable diagnosis. This is because nothing is immutable. Things are only very difficult and we just don't understand them at all(but we think we do, and therein lies the problem).
You're misusing neuroplasticity. It is fairly well-known that neuroplasticity enables people to adapt to traumatic brain injuries or removal of parts of the brain. To relearn skills via different routes than previously existed. For example, people who have hemispherectomies sometimes relearn the skills they lost with half their brain and continue to function in a manner approximating "normal."
However, neuroplasticity does not work like this for developmental issues. Knowing what I do about autism and ADHD, if I had to make a guess, neuroplasticity's
already at work. For example, for people with ADHD, the part of the brain that would normally deal with regulating emotion for the purposes of motivation may not function well, if at all. Instead, they use a part of the brain that is more directly related to emotion to handle motivation. The thing is that neurotypicals use that same part of their brain for initial enthusiasm/motivation, but switches to the other part for long-term motivation. So people with ADHD can manage that motivation for a short time, but once that's over, they can't really force it back very easily. Whenever they try, they try to use a part of the brain that won't do that.
It's understood that neuroplasticity does not allow for easy adaptation to developmentally different brains because such brains are typically not damaged. It allows for easier adaptation to brain injuries because it used to have that function. Neuroplasticity does not mean the brain has limitless potential. No one has limitless potential. It's a wonderful thing, but it won't do what you claim it will do.
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Lastly, to the people who say "I have tried my whole life to grow out of it. It's not possible. You have a poor theory of mind if you assume that what seems to have worked for you will apply universally." You're simply not changing in the 'right ways'. It's not so much me having a poor theory of mind as it is the fact that if something is asserted in a universe, it necessarily bears relation to that universe, universally. In analogy, if a book exists within the physical universe, I should be able to 'universally apply' that book in some way or another, that is, if it exists in one spot within the universe, this entails that it could also exist in every spot within the universe. If what I'm saying is true, and if we are all of the same fundamental make(as in, we all have fundamentally human brains), then my case does, more or less, in some way, shape, or form, apply to you all.
Actually, it does not, because brains are all variable, and much more complex than any book. Also, said book could not exist anywhere within the physical universe due to the limitations that prevent reaching or exceeding the speed of light.
But you can't simply assert that if one brain can do something then all brains can do something. That is such an overly simplistic and impossible to support argument it leaves me wondering how much reading on this you've actually done. The fact that brains function differently are precisely why we have diagnoses like autism and ADHD and OCD and Tourette's Syndrome and Parkinson's and schizophrenia and the list is endless.
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* - I find it quite ironic how one person responds to me with a link of an MRI study trying to negate the claim I made that Aspergers is not the explicit result of any neurological abnormality. The fact is, we simply don't understand the brain well enough to have that kind of knowledge over anything that does not translate to something at least ostensibly physical. What portion of the brain is responsible for OCD? The question itself is flawed. You could find a link but the two do not necessarily translate to each other. You cannot ignore the psychological aspect of it. Yes, these abnormalities definitely have something to do with Aspergers, but it's just not correct to say that there is a one to one correspondence between them and Aspergers(and that's precisely what one says when they posit that it can be thoroughly explained in terms of our understanding of the underlying neurology).
It is not ironic, it is simply true: Asperger's Syndrome is a matter of "neurological abnormality" if that is the phrase you want to use. It is essentially autism.
Also, I believe if you actually did your research rather than posting half-baked unsupported theories relying entirely upon your own uninformed or misinformed thought experiments, you would be aware that there are multiple actual studies that discuss variations in brains of people diagnosed with AS, PDD-NOS, autism, and CDD. I think you would also find is that the understanding of the human brain has been increasing rapidly over the past two decades. Given your claim here, I suspect you would be amazed at what's currently known and understood.
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** - I saw at least 2 analogies trying to refute something but they were both physical. Diabetes is physical. Growing back a leg is physical. I already mentioned in my first post that physicality in this sense IS different... but that Aspergers in particular is not relatable precisely because it is NOT physical as in the diagnosis of 'Aspergers' does NOT have a well-defined referent.
Asperger's Syndrome and autism are physical, as they are derived from how one's brain develops. You can no more teach yourself to stop being autistic than you could teach yourself to regrow an amputated leg.
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Well, I think I've just wasted a good 10 minutes because I really don't get the feeling anybody is up for reading all of that. Oh well. I'll check up on this once more and then resign. Cheers!~
I forgot to check the time when I started this, but I am sure that I have wasted more than ten minutes in responding to your claims. I do not expect you will take any further refutations to your theories any better than you took previous refutations, but I remind myself I am not actually posting this for your benefit. Obviously, discussion with you is not particularly fruitful, given your blanket rejection of facts and your insistence that your misunderstandings be accepted as factual.
17 Jul 2012, 9:58 pm
I would like nothing better than to find a group of quirky, "weird" people to hang out with. I've never really had friends I could relate to.
