Autism is in many ways just a more intense, detailed, attentive, increased perception of reality in numerous senses, be it auditory, visual, tactile, etc, which is why certain noises, textures, lights or other sensory triggers that normative lifeforms simply blend out might even be painful for an autistic individual.
In more complex neurological terms, these different processing modes of the brain are often referred to as task positive (TPN) and the default mode network (DMN). You could describe the TPN processing as more attentive, conscious, analytical, whereas the DMN processing is less detailed, subconscious, intuitive.
An autistic individual might process an entire day like a non-autistic individual would try to process a more demanding, complicated math test, they’re always attentively and detailedly processing reality, which can result in sensory overload, all the little sounds, lights, textures they come into touch with are not as easily, subconsciously blended out as in a non-autistic brain.
While this higher capacity to perceive can result in many sensitivities to particular sensory stimuli, there has been more and more proof emerging over the years that this comes with an increased ability to comprehend reality in general, autistics are less likely to be religious and believe in fantasy creatures for which no evidence exists, to attribute some kind of fate-esque meaning to every day events, that seems to simply be the result of increased analytical processing.
Persons with autistic spectrum disorder were much more likely than those in our neurotypical comparison group to identify as atheist or agnostic, and, if religious, were more likely to construct their own religious belief system. Nonbelief was also higher in those who were attracted to systemizing activities, as measured by the Systemizing Quotient.
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.207.9951&rep=rep1&type=pdf
As compared with 34 neurotypical people, those with Asperger’s syndrome were significantly less likely to invoke a teleological response—for example, saying the event was meant to unfold in a particular way or explaining that God had a hand in it. They were more likely to invoke a natural cause (such as blaming an illness on a virus they thought they were exposed to) or to give a descriptive response, explaining the event again in a different way.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/people-with-aspergers-less-likely-to-see-purpose-behind-the-events-in-their-lives
This indicates that people with autism use a different strategy when making decisions. Instead of using intuition and emotion like people without autism, they were not following their heart and don’t use emotional information to guide their decisions. Instead, they viewed differently framed, but numerically equivalent, options more rationally than typical people. So they gambled just as much as non-autistic people, but did so using the numerical information instead of making decisions based on how those numbers made them feel.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/people-with-autism-make-more-logical-decisions/
The reason why a sharper, less distorted, more accurate perception often to the surprise of those with it is in the minority is likely because evolution favored rapid, intuitive acting rather than prolonged analysis, there was with all chance more pressure to be processing with the default mode network for the ”social stuff”, rather than with the task positive network.
It was and is in some ways arguably evolutionarily beneficial to function in a way that enables religious delusion, you could provide many easy examples of how a certain way of thinking that would help one comprehend reality objectively and critically, is on the other hand not really conducive to evolutionary fitness.
If you use logical fallacies to exploit others, such as it is what it is, it’s normal and what everyone else would do, it’s in my nature to do so, then it is obviously beneficial to not notice that you are contradicting yourself and these bad arguments could be just as easily applied to yourself, a caveman who would even be able to ponder such things when about to slay another caveman and take his resources would not be as successful.
Organisms rationalize to block negative feelings they may have about what they are causing to happen in the world, as in this example, let’s say it’s one caveman vs. the other, you steal his resources or you die of starvation.
Bashing him over the head with a stone might elicit some kind of empathetic response from the understanding that the other caveman is a sentient, pain-feeling organism similar to yourself, so at some point humans developed all sorts of different coping mechanisms to be able to get the job done, whatever it takes to advance their position – the nigger is just a subhuman animal, and non-human animals are of course worthless anyway because they have no souls, says god.
- Hyperactive agency detection:
A caveman stands in a front of bush, hearing noises from it. It could be the wind, or it could be a wild animal waiting to attack.
Guessing wrongly that it is just the wind before you see objective evidence for a wild animal waiting to attack could have fatal consequences, he gets eaten by the animal, guessing wrongly that there is a wild animal when it was just the wind blowing would not be as big of a problem.
As cautionary measure so to speak, it made sense that they developed to assume consciousness everywhere, but this is also how humans learned to interpret consciousness and intent into nature where there is absolutely none, think of ”mother nature” as a person with intent, came up with explanations like the thunder or rain god for simple wheather changes, believe in karma, fate, conspiracy theories over science.
Given the disproportionate consequences for guessing wrongly, natural selection seems to have selected for caution. As a result, early man may have developed a “hyperactive agency detection device”—an overactive tendency to see agency (that is, intelligence) in nature, even where there is none. The HADD may also be where we detect patterns in things—superstition, concluding that odd events are more than coincidence, or even conspiracy theories.
If this gave early man the ideas of spirits of the dead and gods, this may help explain where early religion came from.
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/crossexamined/2012/02/word-of-the-day-hyperactive-agency-detection/
Kind of has the same benefit as hyperactive agency detection, better safe than sorry, if the primitive ape picks an apple from a tree and one of those apples is poisoned, it’s easier and the safest route to assume that all apples from the tree must be poisoned, even if that might be wrong, avoid the unknown for safety’s sake, continued, detailed analysis might sometimes become dangerous.
But this type of thinking also motivates ingroup favoritism, one jew did something bad, therefore all jews are poisonous and must be gassed.
If a caveman comes back running to his cave, running away from a wild animal that isn’t visible to the tribe yet, but signals in body language that there is danger, then it’s beneficial for the other cavemen to get the social cue and automatically start copying his panicking behavior and thus run away from the signalled threat as well. Plus, it’s simply another safety measure to follow the tribe.
Someone who is immune to social cues and hyperfocused on analyzing a stone in great detail would fall victim to the wild animal first, wondering why everyone is running away. Going with the tribe is another cautionary measure, but going with the tribe is again not something that necessarily helps you to arrive at correct conclusions about objective reality.
It’s also why humans believe in majority rather than scientific consensus, it produces discomfort to go against the tribe, so they’ll believe that the earth is flat because saying that the earth is round is socially inappropriate and linked to a loss of social status, it’s why they are prone to also be manipulated by psychopaths and narcissists crying wolf, signalling that there is a threat when there is not a threat, that is what happens when a moral panic takes place, like in Nazi Germany where Hitler signalled that there’s a wild jew waiting to attack.
Normally, kids copying adult behavior will go out of their way to repeat each and every element of the behavior even if they realize parts of it don’t make any sense.
But a new study shows that when a child with autism copies the actions of an adult, he or she is likely to omit anything “silly” about what they’ve just seen.
https://psychcentral.com/news/2013/04/09/autistic-kids-tend-to-imitate-efficiently-not-socially/53604.html
Having positive delusions, overestimating your odds and chances in life is simply beneficial to stay motivated and competitive. If you overestimate your abilities, believe you were chosen by god to win, it can motivate you to then actually compete with others for resources.
A sober, analytical caveman is not going to be super-competitive and have some kind of delusion of grandeur that he’s always going to win no matter what, because it’s destiny or karma or some other non-sense a neurologically normative hominid could very well believe in.
Previous research has demonstrated irrational asymmetry in belief updating: people tend to take into account good news and neglect bad news. Contradicting formal learning principles, belief updates were on average larger after better-than-expected information than after worse-than-expected information. In the present study, typically developing subjects demonstrated this optimism bias in self-referential judgments. In contrast, adults with high-functioning autism spectrum disorder (ASD) were significantly less biased when updating self-referential beliefs (each group n = 21, matched for age, gender and IQ). These findings indicate a weaker influence of self-enhancing motives on prospective judgments in ASD. Reduced susceptibility to emotional and motivational biases in reasoning in ASD could elucidate impairments of social cognition, but may also confer important cognitive benefits.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27757736/
As we can see from all these examples I’ve just given, an accurate, detailed, rational perception was not necessarily favored by evolution, it was beneficial in certain ways to delude yourself and ego-preserve, to think and reason in a way that doesn’t necessarily lead to an objective, accurate observations about reality.
Non-autistics don’t suffer sensory overload and meltdowns like autistics, but as such also have the downside of being unable to recognize non-sensical, inconsistent, religious beliefs that are beneficial to them that they hold as false, every evidence or valid counterargument to their delusion is simply easily blocked into subconsciousness automatically, this is how the religiously delusional are able to maintain delusion, no matter how much evidence to the contrary is shown.
The ability to spout grotesquely, blatantly inconsistent arguments and to ignore what their conclusions would be, such as it is what it is, therefore you should accept it if I harm you, although they wouldn’t accept things as they are if someone harmed them, just because that would then be how things are.
I can beat my neighbor to death with a club and rape his wife because it’s natural, but he shouldn’t do the same although that is also just as natural, it’s easy to see how it has a primitive evolutionary benefit to be able to perform such mental gymnastics.
Autistics perceive more and try to order the chaotic surroundings, use logic and create predictable systems, routines, which is then completely destroyed and molested by neurotypicals constantly creating contradictions and rationalizations for creating more and more suffering.
This is why life amongst the normative lifeforms can be extremely frustrating, miserable and crippling for autistics hardwired for logical thinking and analysis to the point some become extremely hateful towards them and perhaps even more likely to become mass shooters, they’re driven to homicidal rage by their constant non-sense, incoherence, disorderliness.
It doesn’t have much to do with a lack of empathy, which is what the media always makes it about. Autistics don’t lack empathy, they lack primitive social instincts that motivate religious delusion that lead to harm.
An autistic, as an alienated outcast of the tribe might be able to see the logical flaws in the arguments of nazis or slave owners prior to them recognizing (if ever) they’re doing anything wrong, then feels urged to shoot them all as he generally starts noticing the irrational normative lifeforms don’t even respond to logical argumentation most of the time and just spout more fallacies at him.
One could even say it’s the opposite of low (affective) empathy, the autistic is the one that ”fails” to rationalize and come up with logically inconsistent arguments to justify their behavior, the non-autistics are ones running on these coping mechanisms and incoherent thoughts to justify their behavior.
But this is a slightly different topic. In conclusion, I believe autism is simply in many ways a more intense, accurate perception of reality that was simply not favored by evolution, a delusional condition persisting to this day was largely favored.
Just because something has an evolutionary benefit though, that doesn’t mean it is truly the ideal, as in, most harm-reducing behavior, rape has a primitive evolutionary benefit, but we still recognize it as a harm causing, bad act.
Negative sensation avoidance could be said to be the ultimate goal of every sentient organism, every action sentient organisms take is in some way conducive to this goal (e.g. even a masochist wouldn’t inflict pain onto himself, if he didn’t ultimately experience any sexual frustration by not doing so, he’s just in a predicament where he has to inflict the pain onto himself to get relief) and how the organisms feel is something that evolution of course cannot care about.
The non-autistics essentially developed to the point where they can deny, ignore, blend out that unpleasant sensations exists to keep them going, they’ve acquired rationalization, coping skills, the ability to delude themselves into blissful, naive ignorance, but not to become better at analyzing and systemizing, ultimately conducive to the reduction of unpleasant sensations.
Someone who can blend out and rationalize the fact that they’re harming others temporarily feels better, but if every organism acts in this way, it ultimately creates a more unpleasant sensation-laden planet, the non-autistic perception is better than autistic perception in the same way as being a rapist is better than being a non-rapist.
The rapist has a primitive evolutionary benefit, he overpowers others and produces more offspring, same for non-autism, by suffering from religious delusions en masse, accumulating into large groups sharing the same distorted reality perception, due to sheer numbers, not intellectual superiority they can crush everything in their path beneath them, but it’s nonetheless harm-promoting behavior.
Autism, asperger’s syndrome, higher TPN activity, etc is better for analzying ethics, comprehending reality and improving its conditions, considering normative humans at least recognize pain as a problem when it happens to them, want it to be recognized and taken into ethical consideration, benefit from various technological improvements of reality manufactured by those with a more autistic mindset for systemization, it’s rather hypocritical they would just declare their condition to be per se superior to the autistic one, just because their behavior has a primitive evolutionary benefit in the same way one could say rape does.
Counterintuitive conclusions 