One presumption of autism is the lacking of cognitive ability. Another may be that the cognitive ability is there but would stop developing or regress due to the inability to communicate with the world through language or through action. It is incredible that the cognitive ability would continue to thrive within that circumstance. The mind continued to develop and mature. I want to know how this is possible.
The problem posed in the spell-to-communicate approach for autism is a broader problem for all of us. We are all spelling to communicate for increasingly larger proportions of our communications with others. For all of us, this introduces the doubts that the thoughts and ideas are truly our own. The slowness of spelling things out gives the opportunity for someone or something to insert their thoughts into our consciousness. As that happens, we lose the diversity of thought we once enjoyed when we relied much more on in person verbal conversations.
We do not acknowledge an intelligence that is too fast or too slow, and we don’t acknowledge one that is not cooperative. Instead we acknowledge intelligence that is at the high end of normal intelligence: those who take at least 30 minutes to finish the test and get close to 80 percent of the questions right.
The hide and seek experiment started with a blank slate for the agents. They had no prior conditioning and can learn entirely from the situation they are in. Something very different would happen if the agents were born from successful parents but find themselves in an environment different from what they parents excelled in.
As with the door lock where the fully expected response is to clean up the corrosion and to remember to check the batteries more often, the body’s response to the vaccine is to clean up the noxious stuff and be more prompt about cleaning it up in the future. Missing from our expectations of the vaccine response is the analog of my immediate decision to replace the entire lock.
My point here is that life has access to level of literacy that humans have yet to achieve, and may never achieve. We enjoy our current prosperity with too much confidence that it will last forever. We have no permanent record of how we got this to work. Once we collapse, our predecessors may never be able to anything more than scavenge through our ruins. They would be as likely to rediscover how to make megalithic monuments as to rediscover how to create modern life, and that likelihood is near zero.
In context of distinguishing bright data of observations from the dark data of theory, I should categorize the existence of a scale itself to be a form of dark data. For a purely data driven decision making, it may be beneficial to prefer finding and defining clusters or categories instead of scales.
There is a benefit to opening our processes to the possibility that the reality may be changing, where the changing is from an evolving intelligence or even from a plethora of competing intelligences that have transitions of power much like our political systems. Admitting dark data into our algorithms blinds us to this possibility, especially when we allow dark data to have priority over observations.
Its been more than 4 decades since I’ve handwritten in paragraphs over multiple pages. I have a lot to discuss with myself.
There is intelligence in biology but the intelligence is more like a house renovator or house-flipper than like an architect or design engineers of some project built from scratch.
Hypothesis Discovery 