Gustavo Lacerda

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?