Do you see people as people?

Post Reply New Topic

No I see them as the starspawn of Cuthulhu

You are correct in that! The worse part, 'they' believe it. And even worse...many who are the neuro/psych profession read that exact same stuff, and they believe it. Then treat given Autist accordingly. Which is why it doesn't work. I'm a scientist, not a voodoo priestess.

AmberEyes: As always, cogently written as very true. I love animals as well.
raisedbyignorance: I actually do agree....sad, but true. I've met them and they are painfully hurtful beings. So ignorant they don't even know they're ignorant. Cannot reason their way out of a paper bag (sorry for the euphamism, I don't usually use those terms).

On a left-wing message board I frequent (Democratic Underground) there is a gang of Curebie posters that treat us Aspies as if we were sociopathic monsters because we "have no empathy"

LMAO!! !! !! !! !


Noisy skin bags?!?!?!?!?!?

LOL!! !

People with autism suffer from a defect of the mind where they cannot perceive other humans or animals alike as real, living, breathing people and pets. They view us as just other objects in this world that do unexpected things and make unexpected noises that they cannot calculate.

The physiologist Alison Gopnik explains what it would be like to have autism.

“This is what it is like to sit around a dinner table. At the top of my field of vision is a blurry edge of my nose, in front are waving hands…. Around me bags of skin are draped over chairs and stuffed into pieces of cloth, they shift and protrude in unexpected ways…. two dark spots at the top of them swivel relentlessly back and forth. A hole beneath that spot fills with food and from it comes a scream of noises. Imagine that the noisy skin-bags suddenly moved towards you and their noises grew loud, and you have no idea why, no way of explaining them or predicting what they would do next.”

Wow, what a bunch of bigoted crap. Not treating people as mere "things" is a major aspect of my ethical thinking.

I am sorry to resurrect this thread but I found it through reading a series of blog posts and it intrigued me, because of the relation, and lack of relation, to my experiences.



Asperger and Kanner studied roughly identical cross-sections of autistic people. People who have made much of purported differences have not done a close enough reading of both of their works. By close enough, I mean separating out their observations of autistic people, from their often false conclusions about autistic people. Both of them saw autistic people who would today be stereotyped as high and low functioning, Kanner and Asperger. The only differences if any are the lenses they saw them through, and even that is dubious at times. Its entirely accidental that the names weren't reversed.

(I was diagnosed as autistic. I reject functioning labels but the only one I have seen in my official file was low. That says more about prejudice than it does about me.)

I believe I know an exact subtype of autistic people I belong to because my experiences strongly resonate with a number of people I have known, including the experiences I am about to describe. But there is no formal name for this subtype and the people in it span every single name that has been developed into formal subtypes. (So do the people outside it.). As far as I can tell we are not a majority of autistic people but not the smallest minority either.



Since I didn't give my original perceptions of the world, I'll describe that here as well.

Basically I have always perceived the world as a lot of shifting sensations. Neither exactly how that professional described things nor exactly how people here have described things. I made no distinction between living and unliving things. People's biases assume I mean treating people as objects but I mean more that the entire world seems alive, although by no means does alive mean "like me". I do perceive a lot of shifting shapes and stuff (same in all my senses, vision is just the easiest to describe). But there is something entirely missing from that professional's description and if it resembles my perceptions it is almost entirely an accident based on standard views of autism (imagine a model that manages to simulate an aspect of reality but uses assumptions that are entirely wrong to power it).

So all those shifting perceptions remain how I perceive the world. I did not leave it behind in childhood like most people seem to describe. But along with never leaving it behind, comes abilities to find patterns in it, to navigate those patterns, and to find ways of understanding and interacting with the world that those who leave it behind (or who only dip into it occasionally) will never develop. And within those abilities (few of which have words for them, owing to a phenomenon I tried to describe in the latest issue of Disability Studies Quarterly) are the ability to have respect for other beings, human or otherwise. The mere fact of how my raw perceptions of the world handle things does not mean I cannot respect, resonate, pick up on emotions, or find patterns in the world outside of me. But while it includes humans it does not stop with humans. And my perception of the world has never been the bare blank and lifeless description of many professionals in the field, it has always been full of life and emotion even in a totally and completely different manner than those of standard neurology.



Anyone using this board to answer these questions is interacting with others.

My preferred way of interacting is wordless but entirely different from standard nonautistic interaction. It involves picking up on each other without necessarily having the most direct contact. Like two people separated by a firm line but sharing awareness in certain ways, picking up on each other more peripherally than directly but not lacking in a deep level of connection.

It tires me out to use language, and blunts my awareness, but I can do it sometimes, and even do it well despite the strain and the foreignness. Understanding language is incredibly hard and drops out a lot though.



That's a hard question to answer because "think of ----- as objects" is a word-pattern that carries a specific meaning light-years away from my experience of the world. And totally different than even my experience of objects. Most people give objects a barrenness I would never give anything. Humans aren't that special but neither are they barren. They are worthy of respect, can be resonated with, and are not in the slightest bit how most people think of objects. But I don't relate to them or any other part of the world the same way most people do either. The trouble is the language people use around such things has all the wrong meanings and anything I say can be misinterpreted in ways far more offensive or inaccurate than the reality. (Even if I said I thought humans were special in a way the rest of the world wasn't. But equally misunderstandable if I say they're not.)

Humans are fascinating creatures, as are birds, praying mantises, ants, snakes, and cars.

I add in cars, because I get the impression that a car has a soul, and that soul is simply to roll. I get distressed when I detect a poorly aligned part rubbing or thumping, crashing over potholes makes me wince, and I reflexively check out the damage done to the vehicles in a crash, not the condition of the passengers (unless they're still in the vehicle and I'm the first on the scene, in which case I am compelled to assist) so much.

Cats are my favorite though, being one myself makes me biased.