According to this view, the best an autistic person could hope to achieve is an emulation of humanness - a conscious doing rather than simply a moment-to-moment being.

This opens up the question of whether an autistic person is human only when s/he behaves according to social expectations. Is "humanness" a variable-over-time attribute? What claim - what franchise-to-humanness - do folks with their exclusionary criteria possess which entitles them to "rule out" those of us who do not toe their line?

So for autistic folks, "humanness" becomes an interface layer rather than an inherent quality, something which may be set aside (on occasion, at least) as with booting the Linux operating system to a different "run level". This in turn begs the question of which level - the "human" or the "nonhuman" one - is hierarchically above the other...

Thus social interaction is experienced as a series of often-stressful (being expectation-laden) tasks from which one must have breaks.

What can an autism-spectrum individual see, socially? Must discrete situational rules stand separately, needing conscious support to avoid collapse, rather than sitting in an intuition-level framework? Where there is fragmentation, perhaps there cannot be generalization which forms the "glue". In the quantum terminology of the film "What the Bleep Do We Know!?", the possible positions do not coalesce into one when the social element is “looked at”.

Last revised: June 17, 2007
(c)2007 Dave Spicer
(back to project main page)