Epistemic status: Wild guesses based on reading del Guidice’s Evolutionary psychopathology and two papers trying to explain autism in terms of predictive processing. Still maybe better than the “tower hypothesis”
0. Let’s think in terms of two parametric model, where one parameter tunes something like capacity of the brain, which can be damaged due to mutations, disease, etc., and the other parameter is explained bellow.
1. Some of the genes that increase risk of autism tune some parameter of how sensory prediction is handled, specifically, making the system to expect higher precision from sensory inputs/being less adaptive about it. (lets call it parameter p)
2. Several hypothesis—Mildly increased p sounds like something which should be somewhat correlated with increased learning / higher intelligence;
something which can force the system to build more exact representations, notice more “rule violations”, keep track of more patterns, etc.
(also if abstract concepts are subject to the same machinery as sensoria, it would be something like having higher precision in abstract/formal reasoning)
3. But note: tune it up even more, and the system starts to break; too much weight is put on sensory experience, “normal world experience” becomes too surprising which leads to seek more repetitive behaviours and highly predictable environments. In the abstract, it becomes difficult to handle fluidity, rules which are vague and changing,...
4. In the two-parameter space of capacity and something like surprisal handling, this creates a picture like this
the space of functional minds is white, the orange space is where things break (in practice the boundary is not sharp)
for functional minds, g is something like capacity c + 0.1 * p; for minds in the orange area this no longer holds and on the contrary increasing p makes the the mind work worse
highly intelligent people can have higher values of p and still be quite functional
blue dotted area is what is diagnosed as autism; this group should be expected to have on average low g
Parts of the o.p. can be reinterpreted as
in this picture, some genes mean movement to the right; they are selected because of slight correlation with g
random mutations/infections/ etc. generally mean movement down
overall fitness profile of right-moving genes is somewhat complex (movement to the left or right is good or bad in different parts of the graph)
Even if this is simple, it makes some predictions (in the sense that the results are likely already somewhere in the literature, just I don’t know whether this is true or not when writing this)
What happens if you move parameter p in the opposite direction? you get a mind less grounded in sensory inputs and stronger influence of ‘downstream’ predictions. In small quantities this would manifest as e.g. “clouds resembling animals” more for such people. Move to the left much more, and the system also breaks down, via hallucinations, everyday experience seemingly fitting arbitrary explanations despite many details not fitting, etc. This sounds like some symptoms of schizophrenia; the model predicts mild movement in the direction of schizophrenia should decrease g a bit
Note
With a map of brains/minds into two dimensional space it is a priori obvious that it will fail in explaining the original high-dimensional problem, in many ways; many other dimensions are not orthogonal but actually “project” to the space (e.g. something like “brain masculinisation” has nonzero projection on p), there are various regulatory system like g means better ability to compensate via metacognition, or social support.
Epistemic status: Wild guesses based on reading del Guidice’s Evolutionary psychopathology and two papers trying to explain autism in terms of predictive processing. Still maybe better than the “tower hypothesis”
0. Let’s think in terms of two parametric model, where one parameter tunes something like capacity of the brain, which can be damaged due to mutations, disease, etc., and the other parameter is explained bellow.
1. Some of the genes that increase risk of autism tune some parameter of how sensory prediction is handled, specifically, making the system to expect higher precision from sensory inputs/being less adaptive about it. (lets call it parameter p)
2. Several hypothesis—Mildly increased p sounds like something which should be somewhat correlated with increased learning / higher intelligence;
something which can force the system to build more exact representations, notice more “rule violations”, keep track of more patterns, etc.
(also if abstract concepts are subject to the same machinery as sensoria, it would be something like having higher precision in abstract/formal reasoning)
3. But note: tune it up even more, and the system starts to break; too much weight is put on sensory experience, “normal world experience” becomes too surprising which leads to seek more repetitive behaviours and highly predictable environments. In the abstract, it becomes difficult to handle fluidity, rules which are vague and changing,...
4. In the two-parameter space of capacity and something like surprisal handling, this creates a picture like this
the space of functional minds is white, the orange space is where things break (in practice the boundary is not sharp)
for functional minds, g is something like capacity c + 0.1 * p; for minds in the orange area this no longer holds and on the contrary increasing p makes the the mind work worse
highly intelligent people can have higher values of p and still be quite functional
blue dotted area is what is diagnosed as autism; this group should be expected to have on average low g
Parts of the o.p. can be reinterpreted as
in this picture, some genes mean movement to the right; they are selected because of slight correlation with g
random mutations/infections/ etc. generally mean movement down
overall fitness profile of right-moving genes is somewhat complex (movement to the left or right is good or bad in different parts of the graph)
Even if this is simple, it makes some predictions (in the sense that the results are likely already somewhere in the literature, just I don’t know whether this is true or not when writing this)
What happens if you move parameter p in the opposite direction? you get a mind less grounded in sensory inputs and stronger influence of ‘downstream’ predictions. In small quantities this would manifest as e.g. “clouds resembling animals” more for such people. Move to the left much more, and the system also breaks down, via hallucinations, everyday experience seemingly fitting arbitrary explanations despite many details not fitting, etc. This sounds like some symptoms of schizophrenia; the model predicts mild movement in the direction of schizophrenia should decrease g a bit
Note
With a map of brains/minds into two dimensional space it is a priori obvious that it will fail in explaining the original high-dimensional problem, in many ways; many other dimensions are not orthogonal but actually “project” to the space (e.g. something like “brain masculinisation” has nonzero projection on p), there are various regulatory system like g means better ability to compensate via metacognition, or social support.