Morally Speaking...

 

SSC-004_RashadHayes_Mos Def tribute by Ssc_Too on Mixcloud

 (I was listening to this while writing, you may want to listen to this while you read. Or not.... Whatever, I don't care!! Also Check out creatingreciprocity.wordpress.com/, it's pure class like.)


 So if you didn't read that post, this post won't make a huge amount of sense but as you have a life that extends outside my blog I'll try to recap with as much brevity  as someone with a fondness for their own voice can muster... sorry.  Basically I was trying to articulate an issue that relates to difficulties in rapport building between people with ASD and "neuro-typical" people. I attempted to do this by referencing the concept of The Uncanny Valley. This is essentially an expression of how people are uncomfortable interacting with robots that look too human, because we know that they are not human even though they almost  perfectly resemble human beings. They still can not replicate the involuntary motions caused by "self talk" and internal processing that real humans learn to recognize in each other, essentially the process of inferring the emotions of another, or of "mind reading" or non verbal empathy. I once again Direct you to the past for the full "discussion" (Jesus, it's hard not to sound like a pompous ass... when you are a pompous ass... This one is very based on oppinion and inference, so I apologise now if anything said is offensive, or seems half cocked. Essentially I'm just trying to order my thoughts.)
   
     I have been thinking a lot about "Wrongness" a lot recently:
 
  If something is "wrong", it is incorrect, it is inappropriate or inefficient, it doesn't work. But also, if something is "wrong" it is often viewed as morally wrong or evil, (not always, I'm really trying to not over generalise here). By way of example, we all know of the story of the student who has been demonised by a teacher for scoring low on exams, or for not understanding a subject or many subjects, hell, go back far enough and children were physically chastised and forced to wear a special hat and sit separately from the rest of the class. Not only were his answers incorrect but he must have been morally wrong for not understanding, he must have been "bad" because "good" children learn well... Then Oswald Berkhan identified Dyslexia, and it took a really really long time but more and more educators started to understand that maybe having trouble at school is has more components then merely binary morality, and almost daily there are excellent examples of how a moralising approach to education and discipline is incorrect, it doesn't fit the situation, it is inappropriate or inefficient, it doesn't work... We are starting to come to grips with this idea, not fast enough, but we're getting there. But I think the reasons why we end up moralising, the reasons why we get angry have a lot to do with the Ideas I spoke about in the previous post, and maybe understanding what influences the emotions around wrongness could help us develop better ways of dealing with them without fueling the fire.

  I'd like to present you with an example:

   Imagine you are in the jungle, merrily trudging over ground you clearly have a right to trudge over because you are, after all, a human being and this means that one can jolly well roam where one jolly well wishes don'tcherknow. While basking in the "fact" that an all powerful deity, who, coincidentally, happens to look very much like your grandfather, after shaving had become to much of a bore for the old boy, put this jungle here for you to ramble, you are suddenly faced with a very large, very close Tiger. A tiger with a very different set of priorities and opinions on land rights. The rest of this story is very short and probably involves you being transported in handy bite size chunks from the jungle to a much darker and more humid locale and thus the circle of life continues.

   Now you have millions of years of experience and evolution impelling you to not enter blindly into a situation in which you may find a man eating tiger, a series of mechanisms in your brain who's purpose is to search out patterns that represent danger and so you are well within your rights to be a little upset that it has failed in it's job. But is the tiger wrong?Assuming it's working well, your brain works in part by generating feelings of fear and discomfort to impel you to not be in a context that may contain a man eating tiger, there has been some really great stuff published about this and I don't need to reiterate all of it here, but basically in order for an animal wired for empathy and exploration to avoid unnecessary risks and there by survive long enough to make adorable little copies of itself there must evolve an internal regulator that makes sure the rank and file to limit the amount of stupid risks we take, and part of this is a fear of that which is unknown so that as we explore, we can do so without taking unnecessary risks.

  It's these feelings of discomfort, the intuition that something is not conducive to our survival and propagation that inform our sense of what is right and wrong. To go back to the tiger, this is animal that you can verbally reason with, it will not empathise with your sorrow and fear, motivating it to not eat you. As I spoke about in the last post, people much smarter have used a lot of words to point out, that the vast majority of people love to anthropomorphise things that are not human, to apply words like evil to animals, because they can and will kill us without a second thought... Until we begun to understand that they are just simply animals responding to programing. Not evil, just behaving in the best way they can to get their needs met. People learned that if they enter the habitats of animals , being aware enough to not metaphorically tick the "food or threat" box in the animals brains then relationships of merit could be built. In other words, they move past "The Uncanny" and to override the discomfort and learn how to build rapport with the animal in question, a living brain with a different approach to empathy. What would happen if as a society we were to learn to override the discomfort presented by those with physical, mental or social disabilities, to turn off the moral filter?

   The moral rightness or wrongness of maladaptive behavior is, for the most part, the lens through which society views issues like educational discipline and psychological treatment but this is itself  maladaptive behavior informed by emotions produced by organs that were originally designed to keep monkeys safe. We're no longer monkeys, so maybe we should try to change the way we use this systems. Maybe using it in a way that leads medical professionals to speak only in terms of morbidities and not the people who are suffering, that leads a society to medicate and sedate people instead of trying to help them to live with dignity. To put this little boy in the corner instead of helping him do this...
                                                                                                             
    Now as I said above there is literally millions of years of evolution and habit behind this response, but maybe if we can change it now, and I know first hand people who have done it, if we can learn to see a context that is broader than immediate discomfort, to redefine what empathy and rapport actually means I think that could lead to a very different image of a human being living with dignity, one that includes more people.
 

"People fear what they do not understand and hate that which they can not conquer."

    -Andrew Smith-

 "But do we have to?"

    -The Thinking Troll- 

  

  .... Not strong

 Only aggressive Not free We only licensed Not compassioniate, only polite Now who the nicest? Not good but well behaved Chasin after death So we can call ourselves brave?...

(PS. This took a really long time to write, this was the other really good mix that I came across)

DJ Tamenpi - Jay Dilla Changed My Life Vol.1 (2006) by Sopedradamusical on Mixcloud

Aproaching the Uncanny

       (This has been a tough Idea to articulate, and so I'll be back to this post to edit it...   a lot.) 

 

There is an idea in robotics called The Uncanny Valley , and basically,  (so that you don't have to read the wikipedia article, although you totally should. Because you should, OK!?!) this articulates the fact that the more closely a robot physically resembles a human being, without being a human being, the less we likely we are to trust or form a bond with it.

For example:
  Imagine a Furby or Johnny 5 from the classic movie "Short Circuit", or Oon (if you don't know who that is... seriously, just get your shit together.). Generally speaking most people will be attracted to toys/robots like this because (again generally, I personally hate Furbies, but that's because I'm very sensitive to sound) we love to anthropomorphise things, to see human qualities in things that are clearly not human. We're programed from birth to seek out faces and we love to find things that loosely match that pattern. (unless we find it under the bed or in a closet, that's just messed up, right?)

 Now look at this giant ball of messed up:

  It's wrong. It has all the right shapes on the right surfaces, but it's still wrong. There is something about it that causes discomfort....

 Why am I blathering on about this? Because I want to talk about an extension of this that I has been bouncing around in my head.
 
    And it goes a little something like this....

  A huge amount of communication is non-verbal, it's about "mind reading", looking at the tiny movements of facial muscles, paying attention to intonation, even posture and inference from previous experience; a host of factors that only become more subtle and nuanced as the number of contexts in which people have interacted grows. The fact that automata can not (as yet, I don't wanna have to call in Deckard) display these micro expressions, because they lack the machinery that generates them, that's the human brain in case that wasn't clear, is a huge part of what generates the above mentioned discomfort.

  Part of what allows us to engage with other human beings is essentially the mechanics behind empathy, our high speed checking that they meet all prerequisite unknowns that lets our limbic system read these people as... well, people. We call it intuition, or being a "good judge of character" and those terms are as good as any to metaphorically describe reading non-verbal cues from someone to get a sense of them before they've had a chance to verbally account for themselves. Or, to use the vernacular, to lie about themselves.

 Now to get to something that resembles a point, from a distance. And in bad lighting.

 Imagine that you met a human being, an anatomically typical human being, but almost everything they did was wrong.  Not just the big stuff, like dressing incorrectly, which is not cute after a certain age, but everything, the physical movements, the facial expressions, everything. There was no way to empathize because what you were looking at could not be read, and nothing to suggest that this person seeks any empathy with you, this leads the amygdala, basically the part of the brain that controls the flight or fight response, to kick in, reading this person as an unknown and therefore a potential threat. But you're not looking at something that is inherently threatening, your looking at something that anatomically looks very much like you, and this can cause discomfort. You are looking at this person from one of the summits on either side of the uncanny valley, and in some cases you have just had your first interaction with an autistic person. (Jesus that took ages to get to, and that isn't even my final point.)

   For most of us, unless we have a mastered certain skills, interacting with autistic people is jarring before it becomes as rewarding as interacting with "neuro-typical" people, because learning their cues are off. So there is a name for why people feel awkward around people disabled in this way, something is wrong and we feel off, but we shouldn't so we feel more off, and until we get to really know the person in question, and develop enough context for their reactions to or actions in relation to things that feeling of "offness" continues.

  There is another side to this that has been bouncing around in my head for the last couple of weeks: If you are looking out from the uncanny valley then surely the feeling is the same as if you are looking in?
Now I could be off here, I mean Autism literally means morbid self absorption, but to an autist we are similar but wrong, the reason that autistic behavior seems wrong is that autistic people don't understand why we behave they way we do. There are studies that indicate when autistic people are asked to match emotions from faces, i.e. from a photo, or just to infer from looking at someone, their amygdala fires (the fight or flight area of the brain I was talking about earlier), the very act of trying to "mind read" is threatening to autistic people.

  It causes discomfort.... and honestly, I think that coming to understand that discomfort will be a huge part of helping autistic people to live with dignity in the years to come, as this becomes a more relevant to how we teach an increasing population of People with autistic spectrum disorder.


 When I've recovered from writing this, and stopped returning to edit it I'll write about what I think that teaching could look like. but now it's late. But I would like to leave you with what it looks like once you get to the other side of the "Valley"

  And I'll probably just let that speak for itself.
















...Gently whispered hope....