"you are like me"

[gusl]

Wittgensteinian problem: How can we know that we're talking about the same thing?


NOT DRAWN: cultural norms, the multiple levels of language production

Note that the information rate of English (entropy / time) is pretty low. This is a tight bottleneck in the communication between our brains.

When faced with the interpretation problem, the default working assumption is: you are like me. (Call this assumption "empathy"?)
Bob has a mechanism for generating English speech. Bob will assume that Alice's mechanism is similar enough to his, because this way it's possible to find a solution, perhaps efficiently.
But this assumption is probably the major culprit in human-human misunderstandings. I suspect that many conflicts between normal adults can be attributed to poor theory-of-mind.

It is said that autistics, by virtue of lacking in empathy, don't make this assumption. By this definition, I am very neurotypical. And I am very often wrong.

OTOH, the assumption "you are like me" sounds like a prepotent response that most people learn to suppress when they are 5 or so. If autistics have an executive dysfunction that impairs suppression of prepotent responses, this would predict that autistics, in effect, make this assumption more often than normals. What does the data tell us?

Comments

[azzil.livejournal.com]

I have heard it theorized that autism is stronger than simply "You are like me." And more a of a "You are not different/seperate from me or from my environment" almost up to and potentially including the idea that other people are part of their own mind and/or other people don't actually exist.
This isn't exactly "more often." Most people don't feel empathy with parts of their body except in something like a poetic sense. You can get made at a wall if it doesn't behave as expected... but I don't know if most people give objects or extensions of self the benefit of the doubt in terms of assigning personality or individual thought.
So in one sense, that idea includes more empathy, and in another it is much less.

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

<< "You are not different/seperate from me or from my environment" >>

"not different from me" and "not different from my environment" sound like very different things! "Me" is what I can control directly.

[http://users.livejournal.com/little_e_/]

I agree on the first paragraph.

I tend to make my assumptions of whether or not people are like me (because these assumptions make life much much easier) based on whether or not other people use words in the same way as I do/the phrases they use. If someone says something like, "a child needs a mother and a father," I know they come from a conservative background, and can re-phrase things accordingly. There are some cultures which I just don't know, though, and then I have to be pretty careful because I don't know how to interpret a lot of what people are saying there.

But yes, over-generalizing backgrounds leads to a lot of misunderstandings.

I dunno about autistics. But that sounds like an over-simplification to me.

I don't think people suppress you are like me at five so much as that their brains mature to the point that they can comprehend the notion of 'not like me'. Though the full details of what it means to be 'not like me' can take much longer to develop. My mum has been diagnosed with Asperger's, and certainly one of the things she has a lot of trouble with is the idea that other people are not like her, and yet not bad people as a result.

[azzil.livejournal.com]

Hmm, if you think that someone is exactly like you or very very similar to you, you won't be able to have any/much empathy for them. If they don't react in a way you understand, you wouldn't be able to comprehend why things might be different for them.

In that sense, the idea that autistics have no empathy could be viewed as correct. They can only commiserate with, recognize, and understand themselves.

Oddly, perhaps, the ability to recognize "Not like me" is probably very important to having empathy for others. Though, on the same track, having overlapping similarities/understanding also seems to be necessary for sympathy.