The human experience

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I have two questions:

1. How do words and phrases that describe the human experience relate to you?
2. Does how other people's common descriptions of their perception relate to you?

I have always found that a lot of language used to describe the human experience, doesn't make sense when applied to myself. There are whole range of words and phrases that are completely redundant. This is not exaggerating. It is not possible to perceive that way, on the same token there is a void in words/phases that describe some of the ways I think and experience. It is on the same level of asking a blind person if they can see (if that helps to understand what I'm talking about). I used to take this with a pinch of salt, but now I try to use language quite carefully in order not to give the wrong impression.

When I 'hear' other people talk about their experience of life, and even allowing for differences, I don't marry up with them in some fundamental way. They would understand these experiences that they share with one another, not in simply content but in medium. There are key things in common. This is not an illogical assertion. We have a genetic blueprint; however diverse, and I truly believe we are a diverse breed. But given physical constraints of how you would expect a nervous system to develop, we have shared functional processes.

I probably have more in common in content than in medium of experience, so in that respect I share a lot. Sometimes when I share some experience despite the common ground, due to different pathology, these experiences aren't as relevant or timely, etc to the other person. It is funny what some people find important and not as important.

It doesn't really change things talking to other ASD, if anything it has brought it home.

Even though we ain't what they call "normal," we have much more experience with life then NTs. They get it quite easy, fit in with others without effort. We have to break our backs and bust our asses to earn our own respect.

I get what you're saying, but can you give some examples of things that people say (the way they say them)?

That is a very difficult thing to do, as I'm sure you will appreciate, because I don't have a way of doing it and the simple fact that I am mainly talking about the medium of experience rather than the content makes it all the more difficult, given that is the way they would asses the input.

Examples of words that are redundant are: imagine, visualise, envision, picture (to picture), etc.

Those four words do basically mean the same thing. I use the word "imagine", but I have a distaste for the other three, because they assume a kind of primacy of the sense of sight. I can think without using words, and I can imagine things. However, when I mention "imagine things", I use the word "things" lightly, as things are only a linguistic convention that people use to organize our experiences in a way that allows us to use words with agreed-upon definitions so that we can communicate (we probably all wish that telepathy were possible). As to those words that refer to the sense of sight, people often say something like "I see what you're saying", and they only mean it as a metaphor; you can't actually see with your eyes the content of their speech. In a sense, language is all metaphor and idiom.

both are meaningless to me