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The Human Protocol

Humanity is a spectrum. Some people move through human society without ever belonging in it. I'm such a person. Every thought, every emotion, every sensation, everything your internal organs do, your balance, your muscle tone, your proprioception, every experience you have, from the big ones to the little ones, corresponds to something that happens in your brain: a neural event. Most neural events are beyond our direct control. Every neural event has a trigger. Someone says your name and you turn. You like a song, so you turn it up. What triggers neural events is determined by things like your genes, your upbringing, your culture, and your values. Many neural events are reserved for human-to-human interactions. If you encountered a mosquito that spoke English, you'd recategorize it, and you might change the way you went about trying to keep it from biting you. It would qualify for a kind of consideration that we don't usually offer mosquitoes. It would be more than just an ...
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Recent posts

Man Is Not Great: The Evolution of Anthropocentrism

Why do humans care whether their species is special? Why are they so invested in their specialness that they're uncomfortable with the idea that they aren't? Why is it a bitter pill to swallow that humans aren't uniquely important in the universe, that they aren't the intended end of evolution, and that their wondrous and diverse subjective experiences emerge from the same physical processes observable in "lower" animals? I think that the maladaptive human tendency to insist upon their specialness in the universe is an extension of an adaptive tendency to self-advocate in their tribes. Consider fear. The predisposition to turn around when you feel like something might be behind you is likely to save you when there really is something there. Most of the time, when you can't help but turn around on the dark basement steps, there's no threat. From an evolutionary perspective, it’s better to turn unnecessarily than to do nothing in a moment of danger. That...
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How to Save the World

The following isn't related to autism.  It's an edited transcript of my side of a conversation with an AI.  I'm including it here because I think it's important. It should be pretty easy to arrive at the notion that, if we want to minimize our environmental impact, we should look back at a time when we were making a minimal impact and return to that. But that is not a suggestion anyone is making, and I don't think it's a suggestion anyone is likely to make, wherever these conversations are being had.  The conversation about conservation always begins with the tacit question, "How can we continue breeding unchecked forever, and how can we continue to deplete natural resources indefinitely?"  If you start from the idea that what we are doing now must not be impacted by whatever solution we come up with, then you're not going to come up with a good solution. This issue seems complex.  I don't think it's actually complex at all, however. I thin...
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Nobody Actually Likes Humans

Cameras were set up in New York City and Dublin, Ireland. Passersby in each city could see people in the other city on portal-shaped screens connected to those cameras. Less than a week after their installations, these screens were shut down because some people behaved inappropriately in front of them. One New Yorker said, "[H]opefully, when it comes back, people will use it as it was intended." How no one involved in this portal art project anticipated this kind of thing is beyond me. How a resident of New York City could be optimistic about human behavior is equally bewildering. I tried to fit in. I struggled for years and have still had no success. I learned that people had expectations they couldn't reveal. Socializing was a game, and the rules were kept secret in order to keep people who couldn't guess them from playing. I was constantly on the outside because I was only capable of being myself. For all of my early life, this was baffling. I couldn'...
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Threat and Opportunity

Humans see everything as either a threat or an opportunity. These are the only classifications they have. A threat could be a corporal threat, like a violent person, or it could be a threat to their attention, like a boring person or a waste of time.   You're not in control of whether something looks like a threat or an opportunity. You can certainly apply control to turn one into the other, but your first impressions of anything are unconscious. I'm a waste of time. There's nothing to be gained from socializing with me because I'm profoundly socially impaired. I have no status and no way to earn status, so I'm a threat to attention. People who choose to pay attention to me find the endeavor prohibitively expensive of their energy. Attending to me is necessarily a struggle against the Darwinian impulse to conserve energy.  We can call this a rejection response.   I've said that humans naturally have a psychological allergy to me, but that's not a good...
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Why Aren't We Special?

It's unclear why and how neurons firing in the brain produces subjective experience. This is the hard problem of consciousness. Why should there be something that it's like to, say, feel pain or see the color red? My opinion is that the subjectivity of consciousness is attributable to physical differences in neuroanatomy and to the closed nature of neural processes. Our synapses only fire in our own brains, and our interpretations of our experiences can only come from us, even if something outside us influences them. I suspect that neurotransmission produces subjective experience as a matter of course. That's one of the things our brains are adapted to do.  Consciousness, in my opinion, is the ability to think about the extremely complex webs of associations that our minds naturally create. Qualia make these webs stronger. Furthermore, I submit that interpretation, sensory integration, and high-level cognitive processes are all dependent on neurotransmission. There...
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Tribeless

All work requires energy. Thinking is work. Therefore, thinking requires energy. Organisms conserve energy. The more energy you spend, the more food and rest you need.  If you don't conserve energy, you might die. Energy conservation has a clear evolutionary benefit. Humans are no exception.  Tribes have to think about the energy it takes to support their members. The more members a tribe has, the more work has to be done to care for them. Some people require more work than they can contribute. Others may misuse the tribe's work. Humans have evolved safety measures that help them and their tribes conserve energy.   It's worth pausing here to note that humans didn't evolve in cities. Our minds and instincts are still those of hunter-gatherers. Many of us live outside of the environment our species is best adapted for, and some of the ways we tend to think and behave confer less benefit to us now than they did millennia ago.  Every thought and feeling yo...
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Persistent and Convincing

In some contexts, if we can make statements about X that can be said to be true, we can make statements about X that can be said to be false. For instance: if "Orangutans are arboreal" can be said to be true, then "Orangutans are nonarboreal" can be said to be false. "Orangutans have orange fur" is a statement about anatomy. "Some orangutans live in Borneo" is a statement about geography. "Orangutans are arboreal" is a statement about behavior, thus it goes to essence. Here, I'm using "essence" to refer to the way a being tends to be. It's physically possible for orangutans to be more nonarboreal, but they aren't. Arboreality is in their nature. It's essential to orangutanity, so to speak. I've claimed that I am not a modern human ( H. s. sapiens ).  This claim is based on my belief that there are aspects of being that are essential to humanity. These aspects are not anatomical or geographical. They ar...
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The Other Mind

I've said that I don't identify as human.  What do I mean by that?  I've spent a lot of time thinking about that claim.  Does it even make sense?  As my parents are fully human, it's reasonable to assume that there's an aspect of me that's fully human, too.  But there's another aspect that is something else.  I don't know what.  We generally think of conscious creatures as comprising a body and a mind, with the latter being dependent on the former.  We take it for granted that a human body will only have a human mind.  In this, we presume that the humanness of the human mind is necessarily determined by the humanness of the body, but what if it isn't? If the nature of the mind, such as it is, emerges from neuroanatomy, suffiently divergent neuroanatomy could create a mind that diverges significantly from humanness.  On a spectrum between more typical and less typical human neuroanatomy, an anatomical configuration nearest the least typic...
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The Invisible People

Care is gatekept. Compassion is not available to everyone. It's reserved for people who can socialize normally. This is very difficult for normally-social people to believe. There's a whole world of invisible people who have no connections to anyone and no way into the spaces that contain everything they need to be not just happy but alive. These spaces are controlled by the normally-social majority, who purport to see the world as mostly fair and to believe that every person in it is as capable as they are of getting help. Many invisible people have social disabilities and can't engage productively with anyone else. Others become victims of social systems that see their victimhood as impossible.  I saw a YouTube comment that said, "Suicide is a serious issue. If you ever feel down, please reach out and talk about it to anyone around you." This advice presumes that people who are struggling with suicidal ideation necessarily have people to reach out to and...
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