I have started a blog called Aspberger's World which I intended as a "lightning rod" for the Mind vs Matter or Mind vs Brain debate. A central place will lead (I hope) to less clutter and thread drift in the normal forum places.

Please visit my blog and post there.

Thank you,

Ba'al Chatzaf

Do you have a URL for that?

The blog is embedded in this forum. Just look under blogs and you will find it.

Ba'al Chatzaf

Try
http://www.objectivistliving.com/forums/in...;blogid=33&

Doesn't work. I get "IPS Driver Error".

I am unsure about some kind of administration problem with the blog, but it is technical. I haven't messed too much with the OL blogs. Please bear with me while I figure it out.

I just hit a "publish" option on Bob's first post (which I see whether it is published or not) and it went public.

The blog should work now.

Bob, please try to see if there is a "publish" button when you make your posts to the blog. I see it on this end and there is no moderation or anything like that going on, so I presume you see it too.

Michael

The rest of the world does spell it "Asperger's," with or without the possessive.

Someone once freely tried to diagnose that I had this ... who wasn't a psychologist, and who had only my Net posts and private messages to go on.

One reason I'm getting weary of the Net *sigh*

Steve,

What a fool.

It's obvious as all get out that you are a paranoid schizophrenic.



Michael

I am NOT.

You are TOO!

{g}

My Superego has regained control of the OL password. Id, Ego, go stand in the corner.

Bob, I'd be very interested in reading your blog. I had no idea you were an Aspie. Several years ago my son Sean was diagnosed with PDD-NOS but it appears to be evolving into Aspergers. Apparently there is some controversy over the diagnosis criteria and whether things like delayed speech rule out Aspergers. I've started reading Tony Atwood's Complete Guide to Aspergers Syndrome and it is very helpful. Sean recently started back into treatment and his therapist recommended that book to me because despite my sons developmental delays, the behaviors are very aspie-like and the more I read about it, the more I can see it. It is one of those books that, like Atlas Shrugged, you wish everybody would read it and get a clue.

Thanks for putting this out there. I'd love to hear your story.

Kat

Actually there is no story. Like Popeye, I yam what I yam. While being an Aspie made for some difficulty while I was young I eventually caught on to the ways of the N.T. s and by my 40's I was able to pass for an N.T. in most social situations. I am still literal minded (oops! I said the M-word!) and that is the way I naturally operate.

You process social cues at an intuitive nearly instinctive level. I had to learn to process the clues and cues "by the numbers" (so to speak). Learning to be "normal" was like learning a second language as an adult. It is not easy, but it is doable.

Aspbergers is not a lack of wit or intellect, not at all. Us plus 9 Aspies doe a hell of a good job in the computer business, where many of the processes are rule driven and require an algorithmic type of intuition. You handle social cues and body language nearly by instinct. I am a high grade Turning machine by instinct. Deriving results from abstract relationships and rules is as natural to me as breathing. It is no work at all. I just do it. Which is why I am good a math, science and relational data-bases. I suspect many of the physicists and mathematicians were Aspies to some degree or other.

There is a view of the condition (it is NOT a disorder or disease!) which links it to autism, but I disagree. I never had the sort of difficulties forming rleationships with my family that autistic folk very often exhibit. It just did not "get" some of the subtlties and I had to apply an empirical learning process to learn the ways of the N.T. It is mostly an N.T. world so the burden of adapting to it is mine.

Bottom line: I do not consider the condition a disadvantage given what is required by modern technology. Perhaps the autie way is the latest biolgoical adaptation to conditons created by human intelligence. It would not surpise if the early scribes of Egypt and Babylon were auties and aspies. Writing and reckoning is just the kind of thing that would come naturally to an autie or aspie. In those days being a scribe as a high status function so aspies had a kind of social advantage.

No doubt you have heard stories about Albert Einstein. He did not speak until he was past three years old and was thought to be retarded (imagine that!). It is very possible that he was an aspie. Ditto for Newton, who was a difficult child who related more to his machines and other products of his tinkering. He was not a particularly sociable person and could glom on to technical matters to the exclusion of everything else.

Since I am a flesh and blood Turing machine (with lots of states!) you shoujld understand why I object to the notion of Mind as a seperate substance not governed by physical laws. I run strictly on my organic brain. There is not one immaterial element to my being. I am a flesh and blood machine. No spirit, no soul, no ghosts in the attic. Just organic material doings its thing. Maybe you N.T.s having something ghostly upstairs. I don't. Think of me as Data from ST:TNG, but with better social skills.

Ba'al Chatzaf