[qoez]

I always had the impression it was the other way around, non autistic 'normal' people personifies non human objects. Anyway I always had a pet theory that the reason some people are fooled into thinking LLM text output is a real human with feelings, and some aren't, comes down to this difference in brains. (Personally I never feel like the LLM is a real human and I'm kind of autistic too.)

[mjburgess]

I think there's different kinds of autism, which imv, you could spread across a schizophrenia axis -- "low reality" and "high reality" sorts. My own classification system:

The more schizophrenic kind imparts a fantasy framing on everything which can give rise to a disorganised imparting of mental capacities that I think is fairly uniform across objects, including people. This appears as "too few mental capacities" on people, and too much to objects. This a "living in their own world, dreaming" type. Dreamer-type.

At the other extreme, it's a difficulty in establishing any kind of fantasy framing (without significant support, eg., in video games / films). This is an officious, "the rules really exist, and we must follow them" type. Officious-type.

Incidentally, imv, there's a third sort you might call dissociative, where irony is the main mode of relation to the world and others. This is an unstable blending of the two perspectives: the ironic performative frame is at once a kind of fantasy, but a sort of fantasy which seeks to make the very adopting of fantasy impossible. Irony-type.

I think quite a lot of "high-engagement culture" (ie., the type which requires a lot of its audience) is really autistic culture of these varieties in interaction.

[LiKao]

Interesting that you use some kind of schizophrenia axis.

There is actually some scientists that hypothesize schizophrenia and autism are exact opposites of each other. It's call the predictive coding hypothesis of autism.

In essence the predictive coding hypothesis assumes that large parts of our brain function like a modern video codec. Always predicting the next states and reducing information by only picking up on prediction errors that need to be encoded separatedly.

Under this hypothesis schizophrenia arises, if there is a very strong predictive coding and very little influence of the prediction errors. You hear voices out of noise, because your prediction mechanism tries to encode these noises as something sensible.

On the other hand in autism you have very little prediction and high external influence (i.e. the normal information reduction doesn't take place).

There are some studies that try to pick up the prediction vs. error components in simple cognitive tasks that support this idea.

[mjburgess]

I was using one aspect of schizophrenia, which isn't this "salience disregulation" feature you're talking about -- but something more schizotypal, a general feeling of being slighly askew from reality, ie., a kind of magical thinking. Maybe better put as "the qualitative feeling of being around someone schizotypical", than exactly the clinical issue.

I would say in dreamer-type autism, the magical thinking doesnt have the same character -- it's more abstract, typically. In schizotypalism you have a literal sort of paranoia often behind this. However, I think the clinical study of autism very often focuses on the literal-minded type, i think who are probably more common amongst the low-functioning -- but I don't believe this exhausts the autistic.

One common feature of autism, imv, is a stickyness to one's own context and a resistance/difficulty in "social contextual osmosis" which is common both to schizotypals and autists (, schizoprhenics of course, but by way of severe impairments of functioning that would apply to any extreme mental disorder ).

In any case, one of my "clinical cultural analysis hot-takes" is that a lot of intellectual culture war issues are schizophrenics arguing with literal autists -- that was my analysis of the "richard dawkins vs. jordan peterson" youtube debate/video which you can find. If you attend to peterson's trains of though, he's barely able to obtain any deductive depth. At one point i think he manages two sequential premises, before another tangent. Highly characteristic of flight-of-ideas thinking.

Whereas dawkins is basically wholly deductive and literalist in his thinking, anti-wonder and anti-free-association. It make the "debate" primarily interesting as a clinical case study.

It's just another retred of the eternal war between these modes of thought.

I think socrates is a worthwhile case study of someone i'd say of a mixed schizophrenic-autistic type, fully in the dissociative category i outlined -- an ironist. Though, that he's so fully in that ironic category, the alleged schizoprehnic elements to his psychology could simply be a performative ploy to indict his audience -- using their own commitment to the divine against them.

One can see socrates' internal compulsion to question those around him as this dissociative-mode autism at work, ie., an inability to exist in the social-fantasy context of others, but an ability to impose a kind of (ironic-)fantasy context of his own. "I know that I know nothing" is this ironic self-characterisation which kinda stages both contexts at once: I (literally) know that... + (fictionally,) I know nothing.

In a sense, in this mode of autism, you have Richard Dawkins in one ear in war with Jordan Peterson in the other.

[jancsika]

> I think quite a lot of "high-engagement culture" (ie., the type which requires a lot of its audience) is really autistic culture of these varieties in interaction.

What is an example of "high-engagement culture?"

[adamgordonbell]

Echoing the other comments here, you should write down your classification system and share it.

Maybe others would benefit from understanding your intuition about this.

[kreyenborgi]

Is there anything published on this?

[_0ffh]

> I always had the impression it was the other way around, non autistic 'normal' people personifies non human objects.

The paper says, they do!

The surprising part is that autist do it too, at approximately the same rates, which was unexpected.

[LiKao]

Not at the same rates, but at higher rates than the general population and even stronger:

""" Together, our results indicate that object personification occurs commonly among autistic individuals, and perhaps more often (and later in life) than in the general population. """

This is well known for many autistic people. "I put this thing there, and now it has to stay at that position, because otherwise it will be very sad."

The surprising part is not that autistic people do have empathy for inanimate objects (this is so well known, it's even covered in some diagnostic tests), but rather to find further confirmation and compare it to the general population. Mostly because this is surprising, as in general autism is related to empathy disfunction, so it is surprising to observe empathy at higher rates (see below).

However, as many researchers have pointed out that is exactely what would be expected. Empathy disfunction is incorrectly interpreted by many as "lack of empathy". But empathy means understanding and representing the emotional state of another living creature. Assigning emotional states to inanimate objects is by definition an empathy disfunction, because you are mentally representing something that is not there in the real world. Same with over-empathy that is reported by some autistics. Since these are over-representing the emotional states of others, this is also a disfunction (i.e. a mismatch between observed subject and the representation).

So the article builds strongly on the false equivalence between empathy disfunction and lack of empathy.

[energywut]

Some scientists believe that autistic people have different levels of empathy than allistic people. Sometimes this manifests as higher levels of empathy for objects and animals, or higher emotional empathy.

I'm dx'd autistic, and I am someone who will weep openly or experience unbridled joy alongside, say, a movie about a bunch of animals surviving tough times. But if I see an adult human make a poor choice and suffer consequences I feel nothing. I have to teach myself that my values are that we should care for everyone -- even the people I feel no intrinsic empathy towards.

In speaking with my doc about it, it's apparently not at all uncommon for autistic folks to have this sort of extremely strong empathy response in some cases, while a totally flat empathy response in others.

[footy]

> it's apparently not at all uncommon for autistic folks to have this sort of extremely strong empathy response in some cases, while a totally flat empathy response in others

to add another datapoint to this, the only movie that's ever made me cry is Wall-E. I felt so sad for him at the beginning of it, all alone and trying to complete an impossible, unappreciated task.

I'm sure there are objectively sadder movies out there, but not for me.

[sctb]

I'm not fooled whatsoever into thinking LLMs are human, but I am polite in how I interact with them because the language that I use impacts my experience. Same goes with how I interact with anything, linguistically or not.

[sdwr]

The normal version is anthropomorphizing - projecting humanity onto something (state of mind, emotions, reactions).

The autistic version is interpreting the state of objects emotionally, which is closer to synesthesia.

The normal version is practice for interacting with people, the autistic version is consuming emotional attention that could otherwise be used for people.