Far Removed

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

I look human.  My parents are human.  I've had blood work, x-rays, and MRIs.  No doctor has ever found anything nonhuman about me.  I do have differences though.  My neuroanatomy is aberrant, and there's some mysterious problem with my metabolism.  Most scientists would say, understandably, that, even taking my differences into account, there's nothing about me that makes me anything other than human. But maybe there's more to people than we can observe and test. I'm not talking about souls or anything. This isn't me embracing faith or spirituality. I'm saying that maybe there's something perfectly reasonable happening and humans either can't interpret it or can't observe it. Think of a chimp observing a human. The human has Bluetooth earbuds in and is listening to a philosophy podcast on their phone. Listening to a podcast is normal and reasonable to us, but, as far as chimps are concerned, the concepts of philosophy, digital devices, wirel...

People seem to believe that you can't have cognitive deficits if you don't seem stupid. The image many carry in their minds of a person with cognitive problems is an image of someone whose internal dysfunction necessarily finds clear outward manifestation in unusual physical proportions, motor skills, vocal quality, and speech patterns. Less objectively, it's an image of a cartoon idiot: Lennie from Of Mice and Men as depicted in Looney Tun es .  This is a suboptimal situation.  My autism involves some cognitive impairment. Because I'm intelligent and articulate, even paraprofessionals have trouble remembering or, in fact, believing that I'm not as able to apply my intellect as ordinary people are. I'm smart, I'm not Lennie, but I'm not George either. The dichotomy between those characters is the only way many people can understand the difference between neurotypical people and people with cognitive or neurodevelopmental disabilities. If I'm n...

Going up the basement stairs alone in the dark, you feel like something's behind you even though you know nothing is there. You're not in control of this feeling, but it's one of the strongest feelings you'll ever experience. You're wired to feel it. It's self preservation. That feeling exists because it helped keep our ancestors alive while they were evolving toward us. In the same way, humans are vigilant for differences. If there's something obviously different about you, even if that difference is meaningless, people will notice. They don't notice on purpose; they're wired to look for differences. Again, it's self preservation. In a purely Darwinian sense, outsiders and people who act on independent impulses might be dangerous. Even if you don't want to feel this way, you will - just as you'll feel that fear of the basement steps whether you want to or not. Humans naturally isolate and exclude people that aren't like the...

When you encounter someone, whether you know them or not, you notice things about them, and you aren't always aware of everything you notice.  The things we notice about other people help us decide how to behave around them and what we might expect from them. Everybody has differences.  We allow others to have a certain amount of differences from ourselves before we consider them outsiders.  The case-by-case process by which we set that difference threshold is largely subconscious most of the time.  We can other people without knowing we're doing it.  We can be unaware that we're rejecting someone.  Identifying outsiders is as important to humans as avoiding mortal peril, and it's often just as automatic. You may not know who you're othering.  Being around a certain person could make you feel stress that you aren't even aware of.  The only way to begin to be aware is to be totally honest and totally attentive.  Take your time and think about ...

Entertainment media depicts no real aloneness. Nobody in popular fiction is ever actually alone, as there's a tribe for everyone in a fantasy world. In the real world, permanent outcasts exist. Some people are judged ineligible for acceptance in any tribe. It can't be that everyone you encounter occupies the center of your attention all the time. Think about what makes someone forgettable. What traits could someone have that would make you, consciously or otherwise, put them on the margins of your consideration?  I'm talking about benign inattention here. We decide how to direct our care based on identifiable factors. We don't try to attend to everyone. That would take more brain power than anybody has. We have to triage, so we only attend to those people who meet a set of criteria. Within communities, criteria for inclusion usually overlap. Most groups share similar criteria for whom they will keep in their attention. If an individual doesn't meet any of the criter...