I’m sure you already know this, but I think that rather than saying you are almost certainly autistic, you can say that you are on the autistic spectrum. I think psychiatry puts too much emphasis on diagnoses when it’s widely understood that many if not most issues with mental health exist on a continuous spectrum.
They’re both accurate descriptions, but I think the former is clearer: The latter would likely be taken to imply that I’m nearly NT, which isn’t the case at all.
More interestingly, can you discuss your brainbits in much greater deal? I think it would make a great top-level post.
I’ll think about it. I expect that the hardest part of that will be figuring out which aspects of it are most interesting to other people.
You’re probably one of few people in the world capable of discussing such a topic with the linguistic precision demanded on Less Wrong. I assume by brainbits that you don’t mean individual neurons, but some collection of neurons or generalized electrical patterns bouncing around in your brain?
Much of what I can perceive correlates well with identified brain structures. (But not 1:1 - in some cases I have slightly more information, and in some cases I have much less, about a given system or subsystem.) I can also perceive a few things that I believe are specific electrical patterns—extremely minor seizures (rare for me; more common in the population than you might think) and specific kinds of overload—and more general states, like specific kinds of mental fatigue.
Can you make a step-through description of brainbit activation for some basic brain tasks?
With effort, I could. Did you have a particular task in mind?
Can you only perceive conscious actions/problem solving?
This question almost doesn’t make sense, but I think the proper answer is no: I can perceive and influence things about how I’m processing information that, according to my neuroscientist friend, are not normally consciously perceivable, and I can also observe the workings of various brainbits that I don’t have any direct way of consciously influencing, to various degrees.
How confident are you that your brainbit awareness corresponds with specific neurological actions?
Pretty confident. What I perceive squares well with neuroscience, and on top of that, I do actually make use of my awareness. I’ve picked up a few tricks that way that work reliably enough to convince me even if the correlation with neuroscience wasn’t so strong. The most convincing one is that I can consciously stop a brief memory from forming, if I have warning beforehand—that particular one is rarely useful, but since I can remember having done it, and what general type of information I did it to, without remembering the actual information despite much curiosity, it makes a good proof. (A more useful, but slightly less provable, one, is ‘next time I see X, remember Y’. That one is also usefully reliable and has been known to trigger over a year after having been set, but there’s an anthropic bias inherent in it: If it fails, I’m unlikely to realize that it has, in many situations.)
Do you think that your awareness forms a model of reality that could be useful for describing brains other than your own?
I suspect so. The correlation with neuroscience implies that my neurodifference is a difference in degree more than a difference in type, and my interactions with other people since I’ve figured out how to compensate for that have generally supported that theory.
I have a lot more questions I could ask but I’ll stop there because there’s a good chance I am asking the wrong questions, until I get clarification from you. Feel free to answer the questions I didn’t ask rather than the questions that I did ask.
You seem to be on the right track. What else are you curious about?
They’re both accurate descriptions, but I think the former is clearer: The latter would likely be taken to imply that I’m nearly NT, which isn’t the case at all.
I’ll think about it. I expect that the hardest part of that will be figuring out which aspects of it are most interesting to other people.
Much of what I can perceive correlates well with identified brain structures. (But not 1:1 - in some cases I have slightly more information, and in some cases I have much less, about a given system or subsystem.) I can also perceive a few things that I believe are specific electrical patterns—extremely minor seizures (rare for me; more common in the population than you might think) and specific kinds of overload—and more general states, like specific kinds of mental fatigue.
With effort, I could. Did you have a particular task in mind?
This question almost doesn’t make sense, but I think the proper answer is no: I can perceive and influence things about how I’m processing information that, according to my neuroscientist friend, are not normally consciously perceivable, and I can also observe the workings of various brainbits that I don’t have any direct way of consciously influencing, to various degrees.
Pretty confident. What I perceive squares well with neuroscience, and on top of that, I do actually make use of my awareness. I’ve picked up a few tricks that way that work reliably enough to convince me even if the correlation with neuroscience wasn’t so strong. The most convincing one is that I can consciously stop a brief memory from forming, if I have warning beforehand—that particular one is rarely useful, but since I can remember having done it, and what general type of information I did it to, without remembering the actual information despite much curiosity, it makes a good proof. (A more useful, but slightly less provable, one, is ‘next time I see X, remember Y’. That one is also usefully reliable and has been known to trigger over a year after having been set, but there’s an anthropic bias inherent in it: If it fails, I’m unlikely to realize that it has, in many situations.)
I suspect so. The correlation with neuroscience implies that my neurodifference is a difference in degree more than a difference in type, and my interactions with other people since I’ve figured out how to compensate for that have generally supported that theory.
You seem to be on the right track. What else are you curious about?