I am not my Autism. Am I? Well drat... #
From r/AutisticAdults, my reply got too long and reddit's server kept not wanting to let me post it, so I'm writing it here.
Wrestling with some thoughts, and wanting to hear some opinions.
I put a banana inside myself this morning, nothing dirty, I just ate it. The reason I phrased it weirdly is that I realized I've been making a mistake in my thought process involving that banana and many other things. I assumed, falsely, that my skin encompasses all that I consider to be me, and that vice versa everything within my skin can be considered me. But that banana is clearly not me, yet it exists within my skin. I don't talk like a banana, I don't walk like a banana, and a lot of that banana will leave me shortly. So now I realize that there are things inside me that aren't me.
So I've done a bit of stripping, nothing dirty, I just tried to remove everything that isn't me from my idea of what is me. Asking questions like: am I my bones, am I my blood, am I my vaguely triangular jawline? There's a lot of evidence, in my opinion, for those not being me. These things have done a great job of convincing me they're me. Yet evidently, they're not. It's all just the machine I use to interact with the world.
Then I asked; am I my brain? Well, my brain is having all these thoughts and feelings. Some of them I identify with. Some of them, not so much. So I can assume that at least part of my brain isn't me. So have my thoughts and feelings convinced me they're me this whole time? I think so. I think I'm just witnessing a process, alarms going off in the form of emotions, options for the next action or protocol being considered. And then who decides whether those actions get carried out, or whether those protocols become part of my standard programming? Well, that's me. I decide. Even if I don't realize I get to make that decision, even if I decide not to decide. I'm still in charge, or could choose to be once I realize it.
That brought me to the question I haven't figured out quite yet: Am I my autism? My first reaction, off the cuff, is no. If I follow the train of thought above here autism might just be a quirk in the machine that I'm controlling. It's got those wheels that keep wobbling, ignition that keeps sparking, and a klaxon that comes out with all kinds of inappropriate garbage. But all of that implies autism is something you could or would need to fix, and I feel a lot of resistance to that idea. I have experienced it as a terrible burden at times, but also this incredible gift within the right context.
If I am not my autism, then why do I identify with it so strongly? If I am my autism, then why is there a part of me that wants to poop it out like the banana? Any thoughts, feelings, additional theories on this subject would be greatly appreciated.
I love this. Major topic of speculation, nothing dirty, I just like looking into my own mind.
and a lot of that banana will leave me shortly
Just getting the shit talk out of the way early, this is a common misconception. Poop is mostly water (about 75% by volume) and the majority of the dry weight is a mix of living and dead bacteria, only a tiny amount of undigested food. The food you eat is almost entirely turned into energy, turned into more you, and used to feed the bacteria living snuggled up in the lower part of the wet center of the meat torus. Those bacteria smell real bad, and mix with the undigestible bits of the banana (mostly fiber), to make the foul smelling paste we call poop. It's actually still got quite a lot of calories in it, and the bacteria in it keeps on feasting after it leaves you. The main reason we think it's stinky is because it's real bad for us to get it in other parts of our meat machines, so evolution tuned us to try to avoid and dispose of it. (E. coli and Stroptococcus bacteria anywhere else, very dangerous.)
But to the point of the post here, I am going to say a lot of words about this, because I think about it often, and have been pondering it rigorously, for many decades now.
Let's say you write a program, it's an algorithm that does some computation. The program is running on a computer. Is the computer the program? Of course not. You could conceivably copy the program to another identical computer, and it'd be the same program, but on a different computer.
Ok, so is the program the specific bits that make up the program at any given time? You'd maybe be tempted to say yes, but what if the program is such that it can modify itself? Even then we could say, sure, the program is the bits, but the program changes.
But what if we then wrote the exact same program, that functioned in exactly the same way, responding with the same outputs to the same inputs, etc, but wrote it in a different programming language. Would it be the same program? Maybe it'd be a different version of the program, but remember, the program changes over time anyway, so is this really any more different than the "same" program one moment to the next? This rewritten version changes itself in the exact same ways, behaves identically, so it feels right to say it's the "same" program, even though it has different specific bits.
So maybe the program isn't the computer or the bits, but the behavior, the pattern?
And what if it can only run on a single machine that exists, a bespoke computer built by hand, circuit by circuit, to run this one program. Then is the program the computer? Are they the same thing? If the computer can only run this one program, and the program can only run on this one computer, it feels almost arbitrary to say where one stops and the other begins.
What then if we rewrote that bespoke single-use computer and
program for a completely different computer, as different as
possible, in fact; one that behaves exactly the same way, but on
this other computer every 1 is replaced with a 0 and every
0 with a 1, in every instruction and every circuit. The
program bits literally could not be more different, every single
bit is flipped! But it feels like this is even more faithfully
the "same program" than the one before that was re-implemented in
a different language.
Is a "program" even a real thing? And, obviously, this is all a metaphor to back into the question: Is a "person" even a real thing? What is it?
Also, what is a "family"? "Capitalism"? "Gender"? All these things are just convenient analytical tools with no universal concrete basis in reality.
Of course, when you get down to it, and pursue physics to the edge, you'll find you can ask the same exact sort of question about the "hard" things. What is an electron, really? Is it a real "thing"? Is it just a pattern of concentrated energy that exhibits a sort of probabilistic location, mass, and charge in a way that's mathematically convenient to model as a "thing"? What even is "thingness", and what would it mean for an electron to be or not be that, or have or lack that property of "thingness"?
There's an ongoing (for the last 50 years or so, at least) open field of discussion in epistemology and philosophy of science about how to view the "weird" mathematical objects of modern physics, which accurately and reliably predict observations, and which we can thus very confidently describe to a high degree of accuracy, but which cannot be (must not be!) "real" in the sense that "my dog1" or "this cup of coffee" is "real".
But what does it mean for those things to be "real"? Isn't "this cup of coffee" itself just a conceptual model that reliably and accurately predicts observations I end up experiencing, which are presumably in some way causally triggered by various impingements upon my senses by....... whatever the fuck is actually "real"? But if nothing is "really really real!" like Arthur Fine's concept of "foot-stamping REAL", then how can we say anything about anything??
So, I always come down on the side of more or less naive realism (ie, there is a real world, we're in it, and we can describe it with ever-increasing but imperfect fidelity by doing science) and non-dualism (what happens in the brain happens in the brain, we live in reality and are real things). Anything else feels like cheating or solipsism, and is thus fake loser shit.
That means, if we're gonna say anything is "real", including me, it's gotta be: a given conceptual representation (whether "coffee cup", "me", or "electron") is "real" insofar as it reliably and accurately predicts observations, better than random chance.
"I'm" real, because the concept of the self predicts behavior better than random chance. "I'm" also a conceptual invention that the narrative machine in isaacs' head has concocted. These two things are not in conflict with one another; in fact they imply one another. I'm real because I exist, and the "I" that "exists" is a model predicting observable behavior.
Consider the pattern 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 .... You'd probably
recognize this as the fibonacci sequence. But is it "really"? Is
the fibonacci sequence "real"? What if I told you the next number
was 4231? Then you might say "oh, I thought it was the
fibonacci sequence, but it's not really, it's something else."
The pattern is "real" if it accurately describes and predicts
observations. If not, then it isn't.
"You" are not your body, "you" are what your body does. That's real. That's a pattern that can be described conceptually and very faithfully predicts observations. Autism is likely a big part of that behavior. Is it a "part of you", or is it "you"? What's the difference?
If we went into the computer and changed the program so that it's no longer accurately described/predicted by the conceptual construct of "autism", then is it a different program? Sure. But this is a self-modifying program that changes from moment to moment anyway. That'd be a pretty big discontinuity, way more than sleeping and waking up, so maybe it'd be accurate to say it's a "different program (person) entirely" from that point forward.
Anyway, that's probably already way too much for reddit. Have a nice day, enjoy your meat tube (that can get a little dirty, it's ok).