Brain Junk, Et Al

[handful_ofdust]

With apologies to sovay, who's seen a lot of this in our recent email conversations, some thoughts about potential neuroatypicality and the coping mechanisms developed to deal with life inside it:
One thing I've learned, being-whatever it is that I am-is that people really don't like it when you set limits, ie when you explain the parameters of what

Comments

[sovay]

With apologies to sovay, who's seen a lot of this in our recent email conversations, some thoughts about potential neuroatypicality and the coping mechanisms developed to deal with life inside it

No apologies necessary! Brains are important. So is talking about them.

[handful_ofdust]

;)

[asakiyume]

Nodding the whole way through. I agree entirely with the practical-minded get-along-when-we-need-to and do-not-engage when that's a feasible option.

And I really *love* having online friendships. It's much more accepted online to be intimate and yet also private (or so it seems to me).

[handful_ofdust]

Thanks. Sometimes I really do question myself when I hear how I put things, but...it's the only way that makes sense to me.

[moon_custafer]

Free To Be You And Me (look it up)
I had the LP. I listened to it frequently enough that I suppose I must have liked it, but my chief memory is of being fascinated/disturbed by the fact that most of the characters in the sketches were meant from context to be children, but were very obviously voiced by adults.

If you say a cat's not a dog, are you making excuses for it not being a dog?
I think people who dislike cats believe them to be malfunctioning dogs; as opposed to people who are actually phobic of cats, which as far as I can tell is a completely different reaction. I type this with Nana curled up in my lap and purring loudly as she watches the cursor on the screen.

Just having the time to gather my thoughts and put them into words makes email or text a great improvement over most verbal communication.

none of these behaviours are “natural” to me, at this point in time; they're all entirely practicalI think I may have told you once about how as a teenager I tended to view myself as a "machine with a conscience," wanting to

[handful_ofdust]

IIRC, you were very strongly affected by the movie A.I.

True. The movie as a whole probably isn't very good, but what got to me was the way that all the A.I. characters' personalities were simply an increasingly or decreasingly sophisticated system of interlocking programs; how Gigolo Joe's interactions with the people around him were all about "Do they want to fuck me? Should I try to fuck them, or make them want to fuck me?", while David's were all about "Do they love me? Can I get them to love me? Can I show them I love them?" The worst was David's Teddy, whose entire response to everything that happened was to say either "You'll break" or "I'll break." And suddenly I realized that every human being's brain/personality worked in the exact same way, simply more complicatedly; that we're all just interlocking nets of impulse and imitation, shored up by competing "tapes" of experiential memory: this is what should happen when this happens; if that doesn't work, try this; etc.; etc.

[moon_custafer]

I've always felt that despite the orga being all impressed with David's quest, Joe was the mecha who really evolved and who they ought to have been studying -- after all, I can't believe there was anything in his original programming telling him to help a robot kid trying to become a real boy.