(note that I don’t leap to the conclusion that aspie prose is nonsense. it’s not.)
—‘…just gossip (about Langan)’—
Um. Hmmm….
Symptoms of ‘being on the Autism spectrum’ which physically means ‘possessing and extreme, male, compartmentalized brain structure’, which produces certain speech and reasoning traits (just as an extreme female, integrated brain structure produces certain speech and reasoning traits).
These equate to differences not only in semantic scope(permissible and impermissible references) but differences in grammar (rules of continuous disambiguation).
All brains vary across the spectrum from extreme female (psychotic and solipsistic), and the extreme male (analytic, and autistic), because humans grow organically with wide variations in development caused by minor differences in endocrine influence.
It is painfully obvious in writing, speech, and body language, that Chris’s speech (very much like mine) makes use of autistic semantics and grammar. Whereas, say, someone like Chomsky (who is a great public example of a very high IQ regular male brain) can make use of long arcs of relations without engaging in that speech – the difference being the use of short term memory to explain detailed relations between states, whereas this tends to be difficult for those who intuit relations but cannot introspectively articulate them, and use analogies -which is what chris used to describe his theory.
The… I won’t call it an error … but ‘imprecision’ in Chris’s explanation of his theory is in the category that people on the spectrum make, until they develop an operational language for it – if they ever do. And it is the ability to develop that operation vocabulary that demonstrates the survival of the identification of a pattern, from criticism by in operational (existentially possible) grammar and semantics. Which is a more operational means of say somewhere between mathematics, which is a grammar of using positional names for relational consistency, and a test of categorical consistency, internal consistency, empirical consistency, operational consistency, scope, limits, and coherence we call ‘science’.
The original paper says something I would consider mundane, and it is a great leap to anthropomorphize the obvious results the ‘computation’ by trial and error that is possible in the ‘grammar’ that the physical universe is able to express (subatomic, atomic, chemical, biological, and sentient layers of complexity with any design or intent, other than whatever underlying field the perceivable universe exists of produces some set of fields that produce all other complexity we currently comprehend.
So as someone very little different from Chris in almost every possible respect, but is not so much the victim of self-anchoring, it is rather trivial exercise to explain his ideas and his behavior, just as I have in helping many many other people on the spectrum understand themselves.
Cheers.
PS: Again, someone asked me to look at Langan’s work, and that is the reason for my analysis. It is entirely possible that Langan sees something that I do not, and it is even possible he can articulate it, or has articulated it, but I haven’t seen it. And what I have seen I understand is … certainly not the false-patterning of the borderline or schizotypal reasoning. But neither is it the painful analytic detail of a prosecutor of one’s ideas, trying to falsify one’s hypothesis and continuously failing to – and therefore having to accept it.
PS: fwiw, this is what aspies sound like. Extreme detail. Extreme precision. And statements in non subjective semantics using compound references to compensate for the absence of terminology by which to express our extra-normative perceptions of relations.
-Curt