The Downward Spiral

Jordan Peterson: Autism

“….and The Cows didn’t like anything 

that wasn’t supposed to be there, basically,

 and they had a hell of a lot of difficulty

with trying to map it, properly —”

"Now here's.... 

Here's Something Interesting -- 

You can Think about this for a minute :

I went and saw an autistic woman speak, at one point; 

Her Name was Temple Grandin, she's really worth looking-up : -- Temple Grandin is a very interesting person; she [was] very seriously autistic, when she was a child, but Her Mother and her worked her out of it, so that she could be she's very functional she works as a professor I don't remember where it's in the Midwest somewhere now she's famous not only for being a highly functional autistic person who talks a fair bit about what it's like to be autistic but also for designing slaughterhouses across the United States and the reason she can do that as far as she's concerned is because she thinks she thinks like an animal thinks and so she doesn't and she's identified maybe at least part of what the core problem is with Autism.

So, the talk I heard her out was in Arizona and and it was a was a really entrancing talk; she so just showed some really interesting pictures of animals --

So, what she's done is she's redesigned slaughterhouses so that when the animals enter the slaughterhouse, they go in like a spiral basically they can't see what's around the corner and the walls are high so they're not distracted by anything outside so one of the things she showed for example was a bunch of cows going through a standard sequence of of gates essentially and off to the side there was a windmill spinning and the cows would stop because the windmill they didn't understand what the windmill was and they'd stop or showed other pictures where the cows were going down a pathway - and there was a coke can sitting in the middle of the pathway and the cows would all stop because they didn't know what to do with it or she had another picture of cows out in the middle of the field all surrounding a briefcase and they are all looking at the briefcase and the cows didn't like anything that shouldn't be there and had a hard time mapping it now she said here's a little exercise she did she said think of a church okay? 

So, maybe you think you imagine a child's drawing of a church a it's like your standard house like a pen tag Pentagon right which is basically how children draw the front of a house with a steeple on top and maybe a cross on top of it or something like that which actually isn't at church it's an icon of a church you think about how children draw is to Pentagon rectangle what is a trapezoid chimney almost always with smoke which is quite interesting it's I don't know where kids get that exactly but they almost always draw a chimney with smoke even though chimneys with smoke aren't that common anymore but anyways you know you can see what a child's picture of a house looks like in your imagination one of the things that you might want to think about is that is not a picture of a house at all right it's an iconic representation that's kind of like a hero glyph because no house looks like that and then you think about how a child will draw a person circle stick stick stick stick stick and you show it to someone to go that's a person it's like really it looks nothing like a person right it I mean you you immediately recognize it as a person but it looks nothing like a person well what Grandin said was that when she thinks of a church she has to think of a church she's seen she can't take the set of all churches and abstract out an iconic representation and use that to represent the set of all churches she has she gets fixated on a specific exemplar and she thinks that one of the problems with autistic people and they have a very difficult time developing language by the way is that they can't abstract out a generalized representation across a set of entities they can't abstract and then the end well and of course if you can't abstract and it's also very difficult to manipulate the abstractions you see very strange behavior with autistic children for example so they don't like people and that's because people don't stay in their perceptual boxes like a human being is a very difficult thing to perceive because we're always shifting around and moving and doing different things like we don't stay in our categorical box so autistic people have real trouble with other people but they also have trouble so for example if your autistic child gets accustomed to your kitchen let's say and you move a chair then then especially if they're severely autistic, they'll have an absolute fit about it, because -- You Think 'Kitchen, with chair-moves -- They Think, completely different place because they can't abstract the constancies across the different situations and represent them abstractly --

So I made this little diagram : 

I made this little diagram here to kind of give you a sense of what you might be doing when you're abstracting perceptually and so you could say think about something that's that complicated it's sort of my model of how complex the world is but the world is a lot more complex than that but the world is made out of everything is made out of littler things and those littler things are made out of littler things and so forth and those things are nested inside bigger things and so forth and where you perceive on that level of abstraction is somewhat arbitrary it has to be bounded by your by your goals that's the other thing is that your perceptual structures are determined by the goals that you have at hand I mean some of that that's not completely true because your perceptual systems also have limitations right there's things you can't see or hear even if you need to so there are limitations built in but within that set of limitations you're still trying to tune your perceptions to your motivated goals and that's also very useful to think about when you're trying to understand artificial intelligence because for human beings without goals there's no perception because there's no filtering mechanism that you can use to determine the level of resolution at which you perceive anyway so there's the there's a thing made of smaller things which are made out of smaller things and it's so it's kind of my iconic representation of the complexity of the world and then you could think well what is this how can you see this object and I think if you just look at it you can detect it's like a Necker cube you know those cubes that that are line drawings that you can see the front of an N it'll flip to the back have you seen those so this is kind of neck or cube-like or at least it is for me and that when I look at it my perceptions play around with it sometimes I focus on the kind of cross like shape in the middle and sometimes I can see these other lines and then sometimes I'll focus on that square and sometimes I can see the little dots there maybe one dot and my perceptions are going like this trying to fit a pattern to it and I can kind of detect that when you're watching it and so I would say well you have the options of perceiving this in its full complexity or you can simplify it essentially there's lots of ways you can simplify it but some of them are there so you take the complete complex thing you make a low-resolution representation of it so that's it's rough that's the rough area that all those dots occupy that's the rough area broken down to its four most fundamental quadrants that might be how you would look at it if this was a map of an orchard and you were trying to walk from south to north that would be a useful representation this combines this and this that's uh huh that's the highest level of resolution that you can perceive this object at that's lower resolution than the object itself