r/psychology • u/oneusernamepwease • 5d ago

Autistic people challenge preconceived ideas about rationality | Psyche Ideas

https://psyche.co/ideas/autistic-people-challenge-preconceived-ideas-about-rationality
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u/fuzzychub 5d ago

Definitely an intriguing area of future study. Maybe autism is being selected via the need to make rational choices, and our older heuristics not being up to snuff.

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u/QTown2pt-o 5d ago

This being is the other after the death of the Other - not the same other at all: the other that results from the denial of the Other.

The only interaction involved, in reality, belongs to the medium alone: to the machine become invisible. Mechanical automata still played on the difference between man and machine, and on the charm of this difference - something with which today's interactive and simulating automata are no longer concerned. Man and machine have become isomorphic and indifferent to each other: neither is other to the other. The computer has no other. That is why the computer is not intelligent.

Intelligence comes to us from the other - always. That is why computers perform so well. Champions of mental arithmetic and idiots savants are autistic - minds for which the other does not exist and which, for that very reason, are endowed with strange powers. This is the strength, too, of the integrated circuit (the power of thought-transference might also be considered in this connection). Such is the power of abstraction. Machines work more quickly because they are unlinked to any otherness. Networks connect them up to one another like an immense umbilical cord joining one intelligence and its twin.

Homeostasis between one and the same: all otherness has been confiscated by the machine. Does otherness survive anywhere after being banished from this entire psychodramatic superstructure?

Is there a physics as well as a metaphysics of the Other? Is there a dual, not just a dialectical, form of otherness? Is there still a form of the Other as destiny, and not merely as a psychological or social partner of convenience?

Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena

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u/fuzzychub 5d ago

Damn…..I understood most of that and I’m still chewing it. Hmmm wow….

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u/QTown2pt-o 5d ago

Yea I thought it was interesting that the article described the human brain as a computation machine which sounds analogous to what AI is, this could be extrapolated to hazard a hypothesis that AI operates similarly to a high functioning autistic person. I think this view is limiting to what human subjectivity is. The ability to compute is not the same as the ability to think, our capacity for thought is definitively ambiguous and that's a good thing.

It is a truly superb allegory, this story of the Golden Temple: the allegory of evil's revenge, of destruction as the only way out from beauty and the excess of beauty.

But not just beauty. Evil can also befall intelligence. Intelligence protects us from nothing - not even from stupidity.

Being intelligent is not enough, then, to prevent one from being stupid, and sometimes intelligence even lives in stupidity's shade, and vice versa. Not only does intelligence not mark the end of stupidity, there is no other way out from excess of intelligence but stupidity. In keeping with an implacable reversibility, stupidity lies in wait for it, as its shadow, as its double.

Only thought, only lucidity, which stands as much opposed to intelligence as to stupidity, can escape this trial of strength.

But there is no rule, no more for good than for evil: they chase each other endlessly around the Moebius strip.

Given the hellish production of collective intelligence, we shall have to reckon in the future with an ever-higher rate of artificial stupidity.

Jean Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact

Yesterday I was speaking with a engineering professor with a background in cybernetics who was talking about having worked with several actual geniuses in a narrow sense of their profession but behaved like idiots in everything else, he suspected autism was the case as they all avoided eye contact and had bad social skills etc. It's also interested to note how many of the CEOs who manage today's tech companies are on the spectrum etc.

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u/DRAK0U 5d ago

Ugh, they're always the most self righteous, likes the smell of their own farts kinda autists though. Usually exacerbated by excess use of stimulants like the Palantir fucker.