Divergent Minds

Banner Artwork: “Tide Mark” by Emmi Whitehorse (2023)

Neurodivergence: Differing in mental or neurological function from what is considered typical or normal

In this blog post I want to write a bit about differences in perception and thought. As I will touch on many tangents, this post can be seen as a set of teasers into interesting topics around the mind and Neurodivergence.

Can your blue be my red?

When encountering this question, one tends to think that we can never know the answer to the question. In general we will think of the same things as red as we map colors to the wavelengths which are emitted back to the eye. But what the question really gets at, is the question whether your internal representation of those wavelengths is identical in experience, whether color qualia are the same for all humans. One might argue that we also tend to agree on which color combinations fit and which do not, indicating relative similarities in the mappings. But in the end we are epistemically bounded, we can not experience beyond our own models.

Qualia

Qualia are the features of perceptual experience at the interface of self, they stand for the subjective experiences of colors, feelings, smells, sounds et cetera. To research phenomenal experience and Qualia is difficult but efforts are taken trying to measure those mental states. The Qualia Research Institute (QRI) is an initiative, trying to mathematically formalize subjective experience and its emotional valence. I did not dig deep enough into their ideas, so I will not pretend to understand exactly how their methods apply, but it appears to be an interesting mathematical-philosophical bridge with esoteric features, including research of mind-altered states induced by meditation and psychoactive substances.

The world you perceive is formed by your assumptions

Your believes shape your reality.

What you know is derived from axioms, certain initial believes. How you perceive the world, the universe and even physics itself is based on your perspective and attributes, initial assumptions, shaping what and how you can perceive. Stephen Wolfram explored those assumptions and how they might lead to the physical universe we perceive in his article about Observer Theory. In there, he states that the Second Law of Thermodynamics emerges from the observer’s assumption that it believes it is persistent in time and that it is computationally bounded.

On a higher level, your inclinations towards certain ideologies as well as aesthetic preferences, shape your reality to noticeable degrees. Especially ideologies are dangerous in the way that they can warp your reality to a point where your thought space is cut off from opposing perspectives binding you to your current ideology as you can not consider ideas outside as possibly true. An example for such belief attractors is a person believing in a god who punishes the disbelievers. If you initially believe this idea, it is hard to get away from it, as disbelieving entails punishment. You have to make the leap, take the risk and be convinced to free yourself from such belief space vortices.

With the dependence on initial believes (axioms) in thought and perception comes a constant risk. Alan Alda formulated it quite nicely:

Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won’t come in.

If you want to mantain an unbiased and rational perception and thought space, you need to reassure yourself constantly that your initial believes are valid and that your reasoning is consistent. A typical paradigm for rationalists is that the confidence in a believe must equal the weight of evidence supporting it.

Neurodivergence

So far we looked into the dependence of thought and perception on believes, but there is also the factor of differing brain chemistry and brain structure. Everyone has different hardware; some think faster, some think slower, some think deeper, some think broader. Some are happy per default, others have less luck. Some experience traumata, some do not. So many factors… too much for one post.

There is a certain threshold in differing neurological function, where we call someone neurodivergent instead of neurotypical. Typical neurodivergence cases are Autism, Synesthesia, Schizophrenia and sometimes even Giftedness.

I think especially Autism, Synesthesia and Schizophrenia are interesting conditions, where one can see how different people experience the same environment.

Autism

Autism is hard to summarize. According to Wikipedia, Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by symptoms of deficient reciprocal social communication and the presence of restricted, repetitive, and inflexible patterns of behavior. In general Autism lives on a spectrum, the social deficiencies can appear in many forms with differing intensities. In combination with high intelligence autists can excel in specific environments with clear boundaries and processes, such as Mathematics, Computer Science, Physics and other hard sciences.

Indeed, I encounter a noticeably increased amount of individuals with autistic traits in the field of Computer Science. It may be the clear ruleset in which computers operate and the missing obligation for social interaction in CS fields or the physical distance in interaction, that digital systems offer. There are many possible reasons.

When trying to grasp key differences in perception and thought of autists to neurotypical people one important trait is that autists are usually fastly overwhelmed by perceptual input, such as crowded places, loud noises, smells, felt textures and more. Per default, they lack the innate input filter of neurotypicals, ordering stimuli by relevance and getting rid of irrelevant background noise.

You may be able to empathize as a neurotypical by understanding how overwhelming it is to live without such an input filter, as imitated by this short video:

Autism: Perceiving without an input filter

This missing ability to shut off irrelevant inputs in combination with missing intuition for interpreting social cues, such as facial expressions, irony, sarcasm and other counter-factual behaviors impedes daily life with many necessary social interactions.

In the interpretation of Kegan’s stages of the Self by Joscha Bach, intelligent high-functioning autists seem to typically skip stage 3 (Social Self) first and go directly to stage 4 (Rational Agency) meaning that they tend to develop rationality and epistemic autonomy instead of intuitively adapting to social norms, thoughts and ideas first, which further feeds misunderstanding and exclusion, especially in childhood and youth. Incorporating Stage 3, the Social Self is done by understanding how others function in this world and what cues to actively look for: This process is not intuitive for autists and has to be learned by consciously discovering the underlying rules, allowing them to integrate better into society.

On the upside, the missing input filter gives them an eye for details, in combination with high intelligence they might flourish in clear, logical environments. They tend to like order, rules, predictability as it feels controllable and thereby calming. Hyperfocus and obsession on single, often highly idiosyncratic topics allows some to become exceptional in a specific field.

It makes sense that being good with details is advantageous in hard sciences as Occam’s Razor minimizes unnecessary specification and all that is left is important and necessary for reasoning and understanding.

A personal tangent

In general, one can see how especially the math-heavy fields favor the ones with depth-first, rule-based, analytical thinking and can confuse creative, associative, breadth-first thinkers with apophenic tendencies.

I live between both worlds and have interests in math. My thinking is breadth-first and associative, with a visual yet abstract, conceptual thought style. I often observe that I learn in an asynchronous manner compared to my peers. To understand something, I usually try to generalize a concept and break it down to its invariant across all known examples. I then embed it into my previous knowledge by relating concepts, and I gain intuition by visualizing it whereever applicable.

This helps me to discover relations between disciplines but may hinder me in diving deep into a single thought chain without loosing grip of the initial conditions. It’s like the difference between depth-first and breadth-first search algorithms with limited memory, they both find solutions in the end but their speed and effectiveness depends on the specific task.

Synesthesia

Joscha Bach has a quite intriguing perspective on how the signal processing of autistic individuals might differ from neurotypicals. His basic idea is that signals are not traveling deep over enough layers to intuitively find hidden states in patterns. The pseudo opposite, integrating signals to deeply, also exists in specific realms such as Synesthesia. Although it often occurs together with autism, indicating that autism is specifically about the divergence in social signal interpretation.

Synesthesia exists in many forms, my shortest definition is that Synesthesia is about correlating qualia dimensions in an unintended, automated manner. Examples include, feeling numbers, giving them personality, colors, smells or seeing shapes for sounds. However I do want to pronounce that Synesthesia is about involuntary connections between qualia. I too connect shapes to sounds and see music in this way, the difference is that it happens voluntarily and that my associations are not reliably stable.

Joscha shared some nice perspective on Synesthesia, in some way it is about gaining experiential access to underlying otherwise unconscious modeling, such as experiencing the geometric structure of sound. In Neurotypicals, the processing of sound, which includes linear algebraic computation is not part of the experience. However, when taking psychedelics we “tune the hyperparameters of our thoughts and perception”. For example, increasing temperature in the softmax of models or increasing the prior probability for unknown theories may result in apophenic thinking, experiencing new connections, as well as phenomena like Synesthesia. For some people, these experiences may help to overcome local minima in their belief space. For others it may result in a more suboptimal local minima afterwards.

Schizophrenia and more

Before this post gets to long let me mention and shortly interpret some more neurodivergencies from the perspective of thought and perception.

According to Wikipedia, Schizophrenia is a mental disorder characterized by hallucinations (e.g. visual and auditory), delusions, disorganized thinking and behavior as well as flat or inappropriate affect.

Joel Krueger a Philosophy Professor working in Philosophy of Mind and Phenomenology explains the core difference in perception with Schizophrenia in a concise and beautiful manner:

Schizophrenic individuals lose their practical grip on the things around them. The world is no longer experienced as presenting an interrelated network of things with determinate meanings and interactive possibilities. Instead things are saturated with a pervasive sense of strangeness.

(Joel Krueger in his paper Schizophrenia and the Scaffolded Self)

Somehow we have to get to an end here, but there is still much left. We did not dive into

• Aphantasia: the inability to construct mental imagery
• Hyperphantasia: the opposite end, the ability to construct exceptionally detailed mental imagery
• Tetrachromacy: Perceiving 4 color dimensions instead of the typical 3-dimensional colors as in RGB or the 2-dimensional colors for color blind people. (A rare genetical condition, only possible in biological women)

…and there is so much more. One can’t even start to imagine a world with 4-dimensional colors. Maybe one is able to remotely grasp the possible difference by comparing color-blind filter images to the real image.

Final thoughts

We touched on many tangents and examples for differences in perception and thought with much still missing. We did not discuss how humans form models of the world, extracting and relating patterns from their senses, building representations for important features (sounds, colors, textures, feelings). We did not talk about the interesting idea of adding new senses to humans, as done with Neuralink and co.

For example, the work of David Eagleman on adding senses through haptic feedback allows a person to create distinct mental representations of features in the haptic signal, giving them a sense for electromagnetic fields and other previously imperceptible phenomena.

In the end, we can not know how strongly our phenomenal experience differs. We assume many convergencies, similarities, which allow us to communicate effectively, using symbolic language. Still, it is not clear how far minds can potentially diverge in thought and perception. Stephen Wolfram with his concept of the Ruliad, the entangled limit of all possible computation, tried to semantically relate the Ruliad, to something like a concept space: Using generative image modeling, he uncovered its inter-concept space of “cats with party hats”, presented in this article, which is worth reading. His article underlines how unrelated alien minds might be to what we humans can process and think of, based on our limited knowledge about ourselves and all life on earth.

With alien minds so far from everything we can grasp, it remains an open question if we are even capable of noticing their existence, even if they appear in plain sight.

Thanks for reading! :)

Further resources

• Joscha Bach on the stages of the self, The Stages of Lucidity
• Daniel Tammet, an autistic synesthesist on the beauty of numbers and more: Lessons from an extraordinary mind
• A YouTube short about Joel Krueger’s interpretation of Schizophrenia by Sisyphus55
• The longer version, touching more than just Schizophrenia: The Myth of Mental Illness by Sisyphus55