Self, Self, Self!

I was going to write something about libraries about which I was extraordinarily excited. That has passed and I can't actually bring myself to put anything about libraries here. Which leaves me without a defined subject. What's new! Anyway, this has reminded me of the strange book I chose from the library on Friday. It is Send in the idiots: Or How We Grew to Understand the World, a book by a UK Policy Advisor about the lives of his autistic former class mates. The author is autistic himself though I suspect that on the spectrum it is quite mild. I am only just starting the second chapter but his description of his own repetitive behaviour and that of others does not yet seem very much beyond my own or that of quite a lot of my colleagues. That of course may just be the line of work which I am in and that any behaviour that I exhibit cannot possibly be abnormal for me. The style of the book is a novelistic mix of narration regarding the reunions with his classmates interspersed with his personal opinions on behaviour and language. It doesn't drag me in like some books but it does seem to have a mysterious draw from the fact that it is so strange. It is well-written and structured which I suppose is what you might expect.

My own personal theory is that we are all autistic to some extent. Thinking about things, I can pick out internal conflicts between my desire for order, resistance to change and the practical necessities of living in a world which is anything but these things. Disorder is maybe the result of the conflict between the individual views of every person in the world as to what order actually is.

Nature, for all its fractal randomness is an order created from the settling of things. Change in nature takes place on a scale far wider and lasting longer than human change which is why we are at odds with nature. The differences in scale and time frames between different groups of humans and different age-groups within those groups creates the disorder. Autistic people trying to live in the non-autistic world survive only by making an intellectual effort to work out what the non-autistic world expects of them, things which non-autistic adults instinctively feel and probably do not even register in themselves.

I look back and wonder if I haven't had to carry out some of this conscious work to be able to interpret the real meanings behind actions and behaviours. I am sure I have but now it seems to be an unconscious things; I have learned this and now the learning has sunk into the regions of my mind where it just comes as "second nature". Maybe this is what all humans do - it just happens faster in most and they are able to pick it up before adulthood. Could it be that emotional traumas at certain ages lock a person into a particular stage and the severity of that trauma decides how long that hiatus lasts. My general criterion for ending such a speculation as this is when I judge that the whole discussion breaks a certain boundary for the complexity of the discussion and this has now been reached in that I see that this is impinging of the whole area of developmental behaviours - Genie and the other so-called feral children.

We are trying to understand our own machine code, a giant self-reference which I think might be the key to consciousness.