 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's very... I had Temple Grandin on my podcast actually. I think he's had her on a podcast when I was looking for this video. Interesting woman. 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 she... The talk I heard her at was in Arizona and it was a really... Yeah, it's quite like a... I think it's become quite like a conservative figure. The reason why is popularity kind of skyrocketed because he was in this whole debate about the use of pronouns, I think. In trancing talk, she 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 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 cows were going down a pathway too 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 were 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, imagine a child's drawing of a church. It's like your standard house, like a 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. And you think about how children draw houses too, pentagon, rectangle, what is it, trapezoid, chimney, almost always with smoke, which is quite interesting. 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 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 somebody and go, that's a person. It's like, really? It looks nothing like a person, right? I mean, 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 gets fixated on a specific exemplar. I think it's really important to highlight here that what Temple was talking about and what Jordan was trying to explain is this idea of thinking in pictures. And Temple was a really big proponent that all autistic people fought in pictures like this, like the way that he's talking about. The interview that I did with her, when we were talking about some of the changes that have happened since she was within the autism agist, she's kind of one of the biggest autism advocacy people around. She kind of brought it into the mainstream very much so, very influential kind of figure of a time, but obviously got a lot of things wrong because it was from just her perspective, just her perspective on things. And there's actually a lot of autistic people, as she said, Kerry, if you have a fantasia, it's probably going to be quite hard to think in pictures. Some people think in language. I'm a very much language thinker. That's why I'm very interested in psychology, philosophy, things of that nature. There is another one that I think she was talking about, maybe it's more like kinesthetic, based in terms of practically manipulating objects, things of that nature. But that's basically what he's talking about is this idea that we think in pictures, which is not completely always the right thing, but for her and for some autistic people, it can be like that. And the idea about the iconic representation of a house, it still holds true to some degree, not because it's not a house. And I think I've had a lot of those experiences of being like, what? As a child, because obviously, it doesn't make sense that people have these icons that represent something, but it's not actually the thing. It doesn't really make sense to me when I was a kid. It's that abstract idea, that non-certain, more, I guess, different way of thinking about things. Non-specific is probably the best word for it. One of the problems with autistic people, and they have a very difficult developing language, by the way, is that they can't abstract out generalized representation across a set of entities. They can't abstract. Of course, if you can't abstract, then it's also very difficult to manipulate the abstraction. It's less natural. We can. It's more lent. It's less transiently learned. It has to be an active process. 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 the perceptual boxes. Like a human being is a very difficult thing to perceive because we're always shifting around and moving. They don't like people. I think a lot of autistic people might agree with that, but I love people. I think people are great. I don't like people because they're indirect, usually, and they're sometimes a bit hard to understand objectively, which is always going to be hard because lack of certainty, subjectivity, it's a quite scary thing. I guess that's kind of what he's trying to get at. 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 especially if they're severely autistic, they'll have an absolute fit about it because you think kitchen with chair moved, they think completely different place. I would say I've had experience with this recently. I don't live moment with my dad, but he recently renovated his front room. And I had quite a hard time like feeling comfortable in that place because I've always been, you know, thought of the dining room like that. I mean, throwing a fit definitely not the best language there, Mr. Jordan, but Mr. Peterson. Meltdown over stimulation, possibly not a fit. They can't abstract the constancies across the different situations and represent them abstractly. So 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 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 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 are line drawings that you can see the front of, and then it'll flip to the back. Have you seen those? So this is kind of necker cube like, or at least it is for me, in 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 you 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 laid out there. So you take the 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. I think for autistic people, we can sometimes perceive things in a much kind of different way to people, I guess. And we might see the details a little bit more clearly. Perhaps sometimes have a difficulty seeing the bigger picture from my experience. This is just me talking about myself. Good in certain situations, perhaps not another of ones. Highest level of resolution that you can perceive this object at, that's lower resolution than the object itself. So the first issue is, how should you look at things? Well, that's a problem that intelligence has to solve. So that's one of the problems that intelligence goes after. And then I think what happens is we have the thing in itself, and then we simplify it with a perception. And that's like an iconic representation. And then we nail the iconic representation with a word. And that's how we compress the world's complexity into something that we can manage. We take the complex thing, make it into an icon and represent the icon with a word. And then when I throw you the word, so to speak, you decompose it into the icon and then decompose it even further into the thing if you know the icon and you know the thing. And so then we can use shorthand, right? Because you have representational structures and so do I. And I'm just tossing you markers about your representational structures and you can unfold them. That's what you do when you're reading a novel. Because the novel comes alive in your imagination in your own idiosyncratic way. And it wouldn't if you didn't understand the references of the novel. Reduce the speed. The novelist has to assume that your basic perceptual structures and your intuitions and your instincts are basically the same as his or hers. Because otherwise they have to assume that because otherwise they would be lost in it. So one of the criticisms I think a lot of people have of Jordan Pearson is that it's very good at explaining why things happen in any kind of a way. But it's not necessarily like a revelation, I guess. Basically what he's trying to say is you convert ideas of things into icons and then those icons into words. So you just like instead of thinking of things as like pictures in your brain, like a picture of a house and saying, oh, that was a house, you think of, you see a house and then you see an icon and then you see a word and use that word. And it's just a basic way of interpreting communication, I guess. Infinite regressive explanation. So it's problematic often. For example, if you start reading Victorian novels, you may find that it takes a while to get into them because the presuppositions, the expectations are slightly different and so is the language. You have to update the representation. But anyway, so that's roughly, as far as I'm concerned, that's roughly a representation of what intelligence is doing in the world or a big part of it. It's how in the world do you look at things so that you can use them for the purposes that you need to use them for. And then the next problem that intelligence has to solve, which is related, is once you've got the perceptual landscape sorted out, how do you abstractly represent the action patterns that you're going to implement in the world? So it's, how do you perceive where you are now? How do you perceive where you're going? And how do you construct up and then implement strategies that enable you to move from where you are to where you're going? How are you doing things? What are you going to do with things basically? So it's a continual process of mapping and movement. And so it's navigation. That's what we're doing in the world all the time, is navigating through it because we're mobile creatures. We're navigating through it, attempting to make the world manifest itself in accordance with our wishes. And that's the fundamental problem that intelligence has to solve. And animals have their perceptions to rely on. But we have our perceptions and our ability to abstract from those perceptions multiple times and then to abstract finally into language. So we live in a very abstracted world. And it's not also something that's just that humans experience. Animals do as well. I think the best example of that is a crow. Crows are probably one of the more intelligent animals that you can come across. I think it's a crow. It might be raven. It's a particular breed, particular species of crow. Very highly intelligent. You kind of perceive things in order of their use to you. It's kind of not really... I guess so. But then you could say, oh, what is the use of grass to me, other than I like looking at grass? I suppose if you're doing your gardening, Ned, you might perceive the grass as a task to be managed. So it means that we can learn a lesson in one place and generalize it across many other places, which is also something that animals have a hard time doing because they don't know how to do that initial perceptual generalization. See, that's an interesting part. And I feel like the whole thing about autism was kind of like a springboard to talk about perceptions and things of that nature. I thought it was going to be a lot more to like the title of the video, how autism and intelligence connect. It's not really that, is it? It's definitely not what the topic of it was about. It's basically about how we perceive things. One thing that does seem to be quite apparent in autistic people that I've talked to myself and through the literature, that we do struggle to transfer skills between areas in life. So this very much plays into the idea of the spiky profile. Some things we are exceptionally good at, other things that people expect us to be good at, but not so good at. For a long time, I've been very good at public speaking. I wasn't so good at chatting to people, actually socializing with people. But people make the connection that he speaks well, he communicates well, should be good to talk to, like good in social interactions, not necessarily. It's the generalization of those skills. Sometimes it's quite hard for us to apply them to new situations that we haven't experienced before. So that kind of leads us, I guess, to a little bit about the autistic experience, which I thought this was going to be a bit more comprehensive on that. But there we go. That is Jordan Peterson, how autism and intelligence connects. I think it was posted by philosophy insights. Didn't really feel like philosophy to me, to be honest. But like a bit of psychology. I mean, it's a psychology person. So, you know, me and my dogs are very similar with buses and noise. Dogs and curts and autistics don't like noise, don't like any shifts either. Yeah, and I think there's different reasons for that. I think the sensory components for dogs, cats, they actually do have better hearing than us, so they just experience the world very keenly. Whereas for us, the sensory overload component of our sensory experiences, what causes us to become overloaded by that stuff, is due to the interaction between our sensory organs and our brains. So it's not like we have super hearing. We can sometimes be a bit more astute, like acute to recognizing small changes in our environment. But it's more like an amplifier that's built into our brain rather than better sight, better taste, better smell, better, you know, audition might make us a bit more astute to changes, but we definitely don't have super hearing. I think that's a very big misconception, I think, that a lot of neurodipicals that I've talked to about it. It's like, oh, if you must have super hearing, can you hear me whispering over here? Oh my God. And then there's the aspect of energy sifts. In childhood, we tend to struggle a lot with indirect communication. That means body language, tonality, social expressions, little things like that, that kind of morph the meaning or the intended interpretation of what someone's saying, rather than direct the actual words that they're saying to you. So usually with that, when we get into adulthood, we do become attuned to it to some degree and we can, to some degree, like, observe that something's changed the energy shifts because of the negative experiences, you know, humans very attuned to keeping ourselves safe, things like that. Very important for survival, we always notice things that are different, just because, you know, things that are normal, certain, not so dangerous, things that are different, you know, we got to analyze them, pay attention to them. And so we can almost become, can also become a situation where, in a lot of circumstances, I've heard this from another autistic person that I podcast with recently and something that I noticed in situations, especially within relationships, friendships, even parental family stuff, we can almost have like an overreaction to shifts in people's behavior, or like the energy, as you would say, like, we don't necessarily know why, what it means, or what it could mean. Sometimes we might if we're, we've worked on our indirect, indirect communication skills, it's definitely something that I've worked on. But we can sometimes be, I have very negative reactions very quickly, and that leads into like stuff like rejection, sensitive dysphoria, which you experience with ADHD a lot as well, you know, being hyper aware of changes and assuming the worst.