I believe autism is a risk factor for epilepsy and bipolar, and vice-versa. But I don’t think I would describe the latter two as having “an intense world theory”. Epilepsy just means you get seizures; bipolar is when the brain dopamine reward system declares “every thought is great” for a while (mania) and then “every thought is terrible” for a longer while (depression), and repeat, or at least that’s my working hypothesis. Sure, it kinda intuitively makes sense that these three conditions might all share risk factors (well, definitely epilepsy + autism, actually the autism+bipolar connection is not immediately intuitive to me, I dunno), like maybe let’s say “trigger-happy neurons”. But I don’t think “trigger-happy neurons” is what I (or other people) mean when we say “intense world theory”. Trigger-happy neurons is an implementation-level thing, whereas “intense world theory” is a way to think about what’s happening at the algorithm-level. This is an important difference because presumably there are a variety of implementation-level things (a.k.a. root causes) that all result in similar / overlapping algorithm-level changes. And in particular, I strongly suspect that you can get autism without trigger-happy neurons—for example, it seems at least plausible to me that you could get autism from a certain kind of cerebellar abnormality even leaving the rest of the brain completely untouched. And if you do, I claim that intense-world theory is still a useful way to think about what’s happening.
Michael’s essay doesn’t really speak to me but thanks for the link anyway.
I believe autism is a risk factor for epilepsy and bipolar, and vice-versa. But I don’t think I would describe the latter two as having “an intense world theory”. Epilepsy just means you get seizures; bipolar is when the brain dopamine reward system declares “every thought is great” for a while (mania) and then “every thought is terrible” for a longer while (depression), and repeat, or at least that’s my working hypothesis. Sure, it kinda intuitively makes sense that these three conditions might all share risk factors (well, definitely epilepsy + autism, actually the autism+bipolar connection is not immediately intuitive to me, I dunno), like maybe let’s say “trigger-happy neurons”. But I don’t think “trigger-happy neurons” is what I (or other people) mean when we say “intense world theory”. Trigger-happy neurons is an implementation-level thing, whereas “intense world theory” is a way to think about what’s happening at the algorithm-level. This is an important difference because presumably there are a variety of implementation-level things (a.k.a. root causes) that all result in similar / overlapping algorithm-level changes. And in particular, I strongly suspect that you can get autism without trigger-happy neurons—for example, it seems at least plausible to me that you could get autism from a certain kind of cerebellar abnormality even leaving the rest of the brain completely untouched. And if you do, I claim that intense-world theory is still a useful way to think about what’s happening.
Michael’s essay doesn’t really speak to me but thanks for the link anyway.