Whether the deviation of observed reality from expectation would induce the unsettlement that triggers inductive reasoning depends on the person's perception, conception, the circumstances, the person's state of mind. However, to the extent that a magnitude could be assigned to this deviation, such that it is ‘small’ in a case of a cat observed crossing the room on two feet, and ‘large’ in a case of a cat walking around with little shoes on his hind legs, leaning an elbow on a stool, scratching his neck with a free paw before turning a fixed gaze at you and meowing, to the extent that mild surprises could be said to be small deviations and seemingly highly improbable events to be large deviations, it is my hypothesis that humans have an inner threshold —subject to changing moods— that determines whether the surprise is perceived as ‘noise’ or as a challenge to one's understanding of the world which must be figured out. Further, my hypothesis is that this threshold is a steady property of each person, a facet of one's personality which varies between people.
It is a long time now that ‘autism’ is no longer spoken about as a binary condition but as a spectrum; as a disorder it ranges interpersonally from ‘healthy individuals’ to those with few or mild symptoms to those with severe symptoms. What I'd like to propose is that the range of this spectrum which runs up to the severely autistic does not begin at the healthy/ neurotypical condition, but at schizophrenia. In other words, that schizophrenia and autism are two ends of a single spectrum in which the ‘neurotypical’ are in the middle. In my simplistic model, the one dimensional spectrum is that of the value of the threshold mentioned above, and the symptoms associated with each point on the range are emergent cognitive/ behavioural patterns. To put it crudely, schizophrenics have a low threshold such that they constantly perceive novelty and their ‘inductive reasoning’ gets triggered even when, to take a normative point of view, the situation is familiar. Autistics have a high threshold such that novelty is rarely perceived and they apply their known reasoning to novel situations.
With regards to the triggering of inductive reasoning, I'll further postulate that it is not a binary, all or nothing response, but that it's graded. The process of inductive reasoning involves the unwinding of high-level conceptions and the reweaving —as well as de novo weaving— of new ones from low-level perceived phenomena. The stronger the inductive reasoning response, the further down the abstraction levels get unwound and the further up the abstraction levels conceptions get weaved, until the potential but unlikely extreme of unwinding all the way down to the point of distrusting one's senses, like Descartes but on an intuitive, you might say unconscious, rather that discursive, level. I suppose that somebody who gets an insight about how to play a game or about the events of a movie with a twist towards the end would be less prompted than she who experienced a shaking event that prompted her to rethink her place in society, history, the world. Still, the difference between the former cases and the latter might merely be that of point of attention, that is, the subject/ topic of one's thoughts. We regard our life as more important than any game or movie, but the mental apparatus we apply to think about it is the same as we use to consider any petty matter.
And yet, I think that the grade of the response does vary, such as one, watching the film, might stop short at reconsidering the interactions of the movie's characters and events, while another, for whatever reason, would wonder what that twist suggests of the life of the screenwriter's, yet a third would reconsider his own life in the light of the movie.
A corollary to this postulate is that there is not a single threshold and/or that it is not binary; greater aberrations from expectations, contingent on circumstances and mood, would prompt a greater response, i.e. stronger/ more expansive inductive reasoning.
Autism
Let us pull some characteristics of autism and inspect them in this light, conveniently drawn from the Wikipedia page.
Restricted interests – An excessive interest in a particular activity, topic, or hobby, and devoting all their attention to it. For example, young children might completely focus on things that spin and ignore everything else. Older children might try to learn everything about a single topic, such as the weather or sports, and perseverate or talk about it constantly.
We all, I'd say, have a creative drive, the wish to engage in meaningful activities, in discovery, on top of our needs and wants. What activities we actually engage in are a result of a negotiation between our perceived prospects in them, the pleasure/ pain involved in them, and their meaningfulness. So called ‘guilty pleasures’ are activities we enjoy engaging in, but, although meaningful at the immediacy of their execution, seem to us to have little meaning in a broader context. Nothing is achieved, as it were, when we engage in them. There are ‘jobs’, which if we are not necessarily good at them, we have at least developed the skills to be adequate; we might not enjoy them, but at least they go to satisfy our needs by paying a salary; they might or might not be perceived as meaningful, by rendering a positive change on the world or by conferring us an elevated status. If not necessary meaningful in their impact on the world, satisfaction can arise from appreciation by our superiors or colleagues. If we are good at them, they are enjoyable and our work draws admiration from others then it is a ‘dream job.’ What is not particularly enjoyable, nor awarding a personal advantage, but is meaningful through its impact on the world, would be ‘charity,’ perhaps.
For the sake of explanation, I'll conceptualize activities (as opposed to behaviours and actions) as games: systems of rules and rewarded goals. ‘Eating’ generally consists of pieces such as foodstuff, utensils, furnishing; rules about how to manipulate them towards the goal; success results in satiety, failure in the pains of hunger1 (or in bloatedness). Professions, hobbies and other activities have their own rules. Engagement in the game restricts our attention; after a concert begins the musicians pay attention to sounds and would be more or less oblivious to who is present or absent in the audience. When we play basketball the world shrinks down to the players, the court and the ball.
We're not born knowing any of these games. At first we misbehave, over time we behave and then start to pick up games and try them out. Autistics' reduced novelty perception activation leads them to recognize and subsequently pick up a smaller variety of such games, leaving them to play the few they are familiar with. To take an extreme analogy, it's as if neurotypical people are like Swiss-knives to which new tools are gradually added, the autistic is like a hammer for which the world is constituted entirely of nails. Not lacking in energy or a drive for exploration, they spend their time and attention discovering the myriad ways in which one can hammer the world.
Resistance to change – A strict adherence to routines such as eating certain foods in a specific order, or taking the same path to school every day. The individual may become distressed if there is any change or disruption to their routine.
A resistance to the triggering of inductive reasoning makes the dealing with novel situations difficult. Imagine that you are playing chess, and to make the stakes higher, that it is the finals of a local league competition. At her turn, your rival nonchalantly makes an inexplicable move: a rook is moved diagonally. The audience and judges are unfazed, as if it was a perfectly legitimate move. For you it's incomprehensible; it throws your planned strategy completely off, to say nothing of the fact that you now at a point where you feel not only incapable of knowing what the rival would do, but what she could do. This is analogous to the experience of a person finding himself in an unfamiliar situation whose novelty he cannot recognize. The premises of his understanding were violated and he is thrown into the uncertainly of incomprehension. Sticking to routine is a manner by which to safeguard oneself from being thrown off into such unpleasant situations.
Something like “eating certain foods in a specific order” might seem too puny to compare with a high stakes match, but I think at heart it's of the same kind. I believe all of us to an extent are like that; we all, I imagine, have a routine of eating. We eat in a certain order: the dessert after the main dish, for example, and the subdishes of the main we might eat interchangeably or one item at the time; there are foods that we would only eat for breakfast, or only for lunch, or dinner. However, we are able to contextualize our ‘eating game’ and adapt when the situation is novel. Eating alone at home is different enough from eating as a guest that we change our expectations and adapt our behaviour according to the given situation. We'll accept the dishes as they come, employ the utensils the way our host does and so on. A person who cannot be adapt to these new circumstances might be stalled like a person, to try to find a comparison, who is served something unusual as a frog or goat's brain to eat.
Sensory reactivity – An unusual reaction to certain sensory inputs such as having a negative reaction to specific sounds or textures, being fascinated by lights or movements or having an apparent indifference to pain or heat.
To make a distinction here, we need to differentiate first between the case special to autism and the general one. We are all averse to certain noise, such as screeching sounds.2
The autistic aversion is in part something else. We all pay attention to anomalies, to the breaching of expectation, of a pattern. If we are shown a grid of flowers, all white except one, our eyes would jump to the red one. Hearing people talking loudly in the background is a part and parcel of being in a party, but outstanding in the library, as we try to concentrate reading a book. And so the corollary: when entering a library we expect it to be quiet, but we would feel that something was going on if as we entered a house party everyone was silent. The not minding the expected effect goes even to reduce the aversion of naturally aversive stimuli: jogging's sourness while we run or a chest-pain after doing pushups is ignored while chest-pain otherwise might panic us into worrying about an impending heart-attack. The ongoing crying of a stranger's baby is bothersome because we would not do anything about it and expect the parents to take care of it, while the crying of our own child is a call to action. Our child's crying might be concerning, it might be bothersome if catching us at an inconvenient moment, but like the sourness of training it is but a part of raising a child. I'd even say that the mere identification of a stimulus' cause could mitigate its disagreeableness. A mysterious sound in a room might be bothersome the way that an explicable sound would not.
The less a pattern is conceivable to a person, the less opportunities there would be to subsume a stimulus of that pattern. It would keep on drawing our attention the way the red flower among the whites did. To the extent that the stimulus is not inherently pleasant or is dividing our attention as we try to concentrate on something else, it would be bothersome. As autistics have more difficulty to recognize novel patterns, they would experience this more often. Same goes with the fascination “by lights or movements”, but without the negative valence. Again it's the attention drawing nature of anomalies. We are fascinated by the inexplicable,3 not by the mundane. As for the “apparent indifference to pain or heat” — I cannot explain it.
Repetitive behaviors – Repetitive behaviors such as rocking, hand flapping, finger flicking, head banging, or repeating phrases or sounds. These behaviors may occur constantly or only when the person gets stressed, anxious or upset. These behaviors are also known as stimming.
To me this seems like a response to the above, to unpleasant stimuli. Self-stimulation averts attention from external stimuli, or even screens them. It's an effort to shift perception from inexplicable phenomena to familiar ones. This is especially the case with self-injury, which above all distracts the person from his environment. To quote Hannah Arendt: “Indeed, the most intense feeling we know of, intense to the point of blotting out all other experiences, namely, the experience of great bodily pain, is at the same time the most private and least communicable of all. [...] it actually deprives us of our feeling for reality to such an extent that we can forget it more quickly and easily than anything else.”4
Impairments in social skills present many challenges for autistic people. Deficits in social skills may lead to problems with friendships, romantic relationships, daily living, and vocational success. [...] Until 2013, deficits in social function and communication were considered two separate symptom domains of autism.
Human language is codified, versatile and ambiguous. To learn it at all is a great cognitive effort. It is not trivial to associate signifiers with the signified. People use metaphors, allusions, innuendos. But beyond the bare language, interpersonal communication is highly contextual. I recall an anecdote of a friend who had Asperger's. It was on college campus, he bumped into another person —even more autistic then he was, he told me— on a path. They began talking and continued to do so for hours (at some point they sat down, right there, on the path, if I recall correctly). It was getting late, dark. One of them remarked that he needed to go, they said “bye” and each went his own way.
I want to draw your attention to two of the interaction's aspects. One is the abruptness of their departure. “Normies,” as my friend calls them, after hours of conversation, would have engaged in a leavetaking ceremony. One has a sense of the relationship with the other person —a relationship that arises, indeed, from the pattern of such individual interactions and forms mutual expectations— as well as what would be considered appropriately polite or rude. One departs differently from a friend whom one bumped into for five minutes on the street, for an hour, from a friend whose party one attended, from a flatmate when one is leaving to buy groceries and when one is leaving for a two weeks long vacation abroad.
The other aspect is the stasis of their situation. For them to have moved to a place more convenient for their chat they would have had to perceive it in context and engage in meta-conversation, i.e. conversation about their conversation. Of course, everyone gets into those elongated moments, unplanned yet pleasing, aware that a suggestion to translate it somehow might prompt the other party to say they had to go. And yet, that one or both sat down right there on the spot wasn't but could have been a clear message expressing both an inconvenience and a dedication to the present interaction.
Related is an observation upon my own experience of people ‘in the spectrum,’ that they tend to voice and accept disagreement freely. They do not take personally such interpersonal incongruencies the way other people might. A contradiction is taken as an expression about the idea discussed rather than as an expression of the person voicing it about the receiving self, i.e. an affront. The notoriety of online discussions' tone has to do with the absence of the interpersonal aspect of ‘real life discussion,’ of even the merest relationship of momentarily sharing the same space which evokes a diplomatic attitude in most people. I personally find it pleasant to discuss ideas without pussyfooting around interpersonal politics, but being oblivious to such meta-cues, communications about the relationship —the minding of which necessitates contextual awareness, brought about by novelty perception— might make the establishment of relationships with others more difficult.
Schizophrenia
Now to Schizophrenic symptoms.5 These are grossly divided into ‘negative symptoms’ —reduced faculties— and ‘positive symptoms’ — additional cognitive phenomena.
Positive Symptoms
Among the positive symptoms are delusions and hallucinations.
Hallucinations and delusions are false perceptions; the former are of low-level, sensory phenomena, the latter of higher-level phenomena. Examples of the former are hearing speech, seeing shapes, patterns or objects; examples of the latter are believing that one's organs are somebody else's, that the government had implanted a chip in one's brain, that one is god.
Since the current attempt is to place schizophrenia on a spectrum that includes ‘normal people,‘ we should begin with a trivial remark on the definitions. The perceptions are ‘false,‘ i.e. not true. Truth is related to reality but mediated through consensus. The pieces of paper in my wallet are not ‘really‘ worth so and so euros/ 30 kg of rice/ an entry to a concert. But it's true that they do: if you'd ask anybody they would confirm. This is explicit in the DSM 5, for example, which makes a distinction between delusions and “what almost everybody else believes” & “articles of faith.” Therefore, believing that two millennia ago a virgin gave birth to the son of God, who had actually always existed and is distinct yet one with God and a third divide entity, who later by suffering capital punishment (though not really dying) atoned for a sin common to humankind perpetrated by the first human being, is not a delusion because people in power have reported it to be the case. Language is a dialect with an army, religion is a delusion with an army.
The kind of perceptions whose truth value determines whether they are delusions or not are high level in the sense that they cannot be directly observed. None of us has ever seen or smelled ‘the economy,‘ GDP, evolution, the state (or, for that matter, Jesus of Nazareth), which many treat as real. They have not observed these but were told about them and their subsequent life experience has confirmed the ideas. Still, there must have been somebody who first conceived these notions for them to be related and acquire existence in discourse. They perceived a pattern in directly observed phenomena and reported it.
I wrote that ‘truth is related to reality but mediated through consensus,’ but it seems to me that even that is not quite correct. Rather, I'd say, truth is determined by consensus, and consensus has a relationship with reality. Until Snowden's whistle-blowing few had perceived mass digital surveillance. Few have perceived it afterwards, but it was accepted to be the truth: it was thence not delusional to believe that ‘the government spies on us,’ laws were made to prevent it, technologies guaranteeing privacy became more common. Still I suppose a person who had believed before Snowden that a governmental agency was reading his email might be perceived delusional even retrospectively, unless he could have articulate his case convincingly.
Schizophrenics conceive high-level patterns more rapidly than others. Many of them are not true, and many of those likely get discarded like the outlandish ideas that pass anybody's mind from time to time. But some, perhaps motivated by a concurring anxiety, stick; some only for the relevant duration of time (“the friends who are currently at my house conspire to hurt me”) while others persist for a period (“the government is after me”). Their elusive (in the sense of dealing with covert agents such that failure to detect their actions is taken as evidence of their successful clandestine operation) and abstract nature, coupled with the common confirmation bias, makes them resistant to refutation in the eyes of the beholder.
Part of this process is magical thinking applied on others; a failure to trust that others are just like oneself; a sense of oneself as unique (uniquely incapable). By itself this notion is not so bonkers but based on experience. First, people differ; each person is not just like any other. Second, we do experience ourselves differently than others. I'm not talking about being conscious of our body and mind but not of those of others', though this is part of it. Rather, I'm referring to the fact that there is often a gap between society's idea of the human (or any classes thereof) and what the human really is — a gap, to fall back on my former terminology, between the true nature of the human being and its real nature. The extent to which a person gives the consensus credit is the extent that she would see herself as different. A person in a strongly Catholic society, or of the proverbial Victorian England, might see his sexual desires as evidence of a unique deviation (if not of the workings of the devil, shifting the deviation to an extra-personal factor). A citizen of communist Romania might feel himself alone in finding Ceaușescu to be a terrible leader. I recall that in elementary school I, a shy child, had the notion that ‘the popular kids,‘ which in my mind consisted of almost the entirety of the class save myself and some of my friends, was a cohesive group whose members were all friends of each other. You might have felt something similar, coming to a house party where you only knew the host, when you sensed that everybody else knew everybody else and that you stood awkwardly out in that crowd.6 Shrewdness, not equally allotted among people, is exactly the utilization of the recognition of the rendered facade, of the gap between truth and reality, of the ability to generalize to others from as little as oneself.7
Even among those who are not diagnosed with any sort of schizophrenia, this kind of magical thinking can give rise to blatant delusions, as exhibited by various so called conspiracy theories.8 The theory about the “International Jewish conspiracy” ascribes supernatural properties to members of a group, Jews, namely, the ability to cooperate and coordinate without any barrier, a single common interest and a single agency; 9 10 all other such conspiracy theories similarly attribute to particular groups unrealistic interests and abilities to coordinate. However, while the common conspiracy theorist merely accepts theories put before him, the schizophrenic, equipped with a psychotic mind, creatively renders new fantastical delusions.
A delusional thinking of this kind that is yet closer to the experience of the common person is exemplified by those who fall prey to swindling. The conperson presents the victim a ‘too good to be true’ story which the latter accepts, motivated by prospects of gain. Just like conspiracies are real things, so does the world occasionally presents opportunities of easy riches to those who can detect them. I'd think there's less of the latter —particularly the kind that is forwarded out of the blue by a stranger— than the former, but there have been many more people who believe a scheme whereby solely by giving money now they would receive more money later than those who believed that Princess Diana was not accidentally killed but murdered, or that Paul McCartney died in an accident and was replaced by a doppelgänger, which the other Beatles members explicitly denied but to which they alluded in their songs. There may be quite a distance between believing that your wife has been replaced by a doppelgänger and believing that it really is a representative of a Nigerian Prince who is emailing you for financial help and a beneficial exchange, or even merely that a broker would bring you fortune if you play on the stock exchange, but it is a quantitative difference. These are all false, and it is merely that some are closer in appearance to phenomena that are true, i.e. they seem more plausible. Part of the definition of delusion is that it persists despite contrary evidence. On the one hand the sly swindler curates the information provided to the victim such that refutations would not come in view; nevertheless, I suspect that even those who do fall prey to such schemes would have been incredulous had they heard that their neighbor made it big by helping a Nigerian prince with whom they made an acquaintance through a cold approach email. On the other hand, few arguments could at all be made to dissuade the psychotic with the substitute wife. True, the notion of personal substitution defies any normal person's understanding of the world. But what arguments could be made against such an existing notion? The world is full of wonders and getting the truth, reality, correctly, is not always trivial. It seems to me that the problem of this patient and of the therapist facing him has to do a lot with language, with ‘reporting matters correctly,’ and anyway not so much with the supposed event of substitution itself. I think any effort to convince the person that the event didn't ‘really happen’ is bound to fail since it concerns an event that happened out of sight and does not address the experiencing of the substitute wife. Think of the Ship of Theseus whose parts were replaced but whose identity was or wasn't altered. What's the difference between a person and an exactly identical person? Don't we all change a little from moment to moment? I wouldn't call it a delusion, but the notion of the persistence over time of individuals is itself ultimately false. The question, I think, should be ‘what does it matter’ that the wife has been substituted if the present person is identical? The point, anyhow, is that our perception is limited, and that ‘evidence to the contrary’ is not always available, credible or as debunking as the other might think.
The DSM presents delusions and hallucinations as distinct phenomena, but as I have already presented before, I see them as one of a kind, merely different points on a spectrum of the misperception's level of abstraction. I'd like therefore to touch on borderline phenomena. One such is the delusion that the TV is talking to you, personally. I take it to be borderline since it has to do with the interpretation of a directly observed phenomenon. It is neither the sensation (seeing, hearing,) of something that is not really there as in a hallucination proper, nor is it a perception of a non-directly observed phenomenon (like the “real identity” of a person, being tracked by the government &c) as in a delusion proper. The television is indeed really talking at one's presence, the matter is in the interpretation of the meaning of this speech. On the one hand, in some sense the television is indeed addressing the audience at home; assumptions are made about this audience such as what language they understand, what they are expected to know and what needs clarification, the lifestyle they have; sometimes the second-person pronoun is used to address the audience at home — as a whole, of course. Information is conveyed or, as in advertising, an effort at an imperative is taken. On the other hand, people employ innuendos, referring to third parties when really they direct a statement about the second party; or, more simply, talk to us without directly looking at us, the usual meta-conversational signal that we are being addressed. The delusion of a personally addressing television is, again, simply the conception of a high-level phenomenon —a false one, as it happens— that is based on lower level directly observable evidence.
That hallucination, the false perception of a sensory phenomenon, is of the same kind might be hard to see due to the illusion of stability of our sensory faculties. The senses are more limited and less reliable than we give them credit. The shapes falling outside the high-resolution fovea at the center of our vision are highly ambiguous, an ambiguity corrected by our knowledge's expectations. To say nothing of that which falls completely outside our vision; we never doubt that the room behind us didn't disappear just because we averted our eyes. It is our experience that objects do not simply morph into others, and so the perception that the white blob at the edge of our field of vision is our white lamp-shade is reasonable — and true. It is also the case with audition; the production of sound effects for animation relies on the fact that some sounds would be perceived as others in the given context — to say nothing of the animation itself which gives rise to the perception of non-existing objects, characters, movement and depth using nothing but drawing. Speech, too, would be scarcely comprehensible otherwise; our brain ‘hears,’ as it were, more than the ears do, what with all the concurring background noise, people slurring and many words, consonants and vowels sounding similar to others. Think of the McGurk effect, or the effects presented in this video. Or people not being able to distinguish two sounds that are separate phonemes of another language but a single one in their own. What is a meaningful difference to one listener is ‘noise’ to another as low-level perception is organized into established high-level patterns. Or how being provided with a text —and therefore with expectation— we hear the embedded ‘secret messages’ in songs being played backwards. More personally I can add that in my early teens, not particularly musically trained, I was baffled by a certain song. There was an instrumental passage that sounded like words to me. I didn't hear the words —otherwise I wouldn't have been baffled— but somehow they were there. As it is always the case, retrospectively, wiser, it is clear what sort of effect was going on there;11 the melody, the succession of tones, of the instrumental part was the same as the melody of the singing in another part of the song; this is why the two sounded somehow the same, even though in in one the words were missing. It felt like some sort of magic and it remained inexplicable to me for a while.
The current opening sentence of Wikipedia's entry on hallucination is inaccurate and, strictly speaking, false. “A hallucination is a perception in the absence of an external stimulus that has the qualities of a real perception.” There was an attempt to describe technically and more generally the phenomenon of “seeing a giraffe that isn't there.”
As it happens, everyone hallucinates during elongated absence of external stimulus,12 such as under the condition of an isolation tank. The effect is brought about by a cognitive adjustment in the brain that is analogous to the more familiar mechanical adjustment that occurs in the eyes. When we enter from the sunny outside into the dark indoors, it takes a while before we adapt and are able again to see our surroundings; our irises enlarge, permitting more light to come through, and the photoreceptors in the eyes regenerate. The eyes, in other words, become more sensitive to light when it becomes scarce. Similarly, when perception is reduced, sensitivity to it increases. Once the stimulus is completely gone our expectations do not anymore play the lead in a tango with the senses, but rave a solo, making something out of nothing, as it were. We dream.
What goes on with the schizophrenic's hallucination is not, I suspect, that they sense something imaginary on top of the real, as if a source of stimulus that is only sensed by their mind was added to those sensed by all, but that they perceive more than others in the phenomena observed by all. Their inductive reasoning is at work, their brain becomes more sensitive to perception —to the detection of meaningful patterns— which in the case of hallucinations, as opposed to delusions, happens on a lower abstract level.
Until provided with subtitles you hear nothing but gibberish in reversed songs. The humming of a fan is nothing but white noise; it doesn't make sense, but your mind is not looking for a pattern, for sense, in the hum of a fan. But for the brain of the schizophrenic, with its low threshold for novelty perception, it is not noise but a pattern whose meaning demands deciphering that would relate it to a greater concept than its mere thereness. Tinnitus is not merely an illusory noise but the obvious presence of a government implanted tracking chip, and the inner monologue so familiar to us all is not self-generated but —for whatever reason it makes more sense to be the case— voices from without or thoughts inserted by another.13
One study that supports this is the 2005 Weak suppression of visual context in chronic schizophrenia that found that in a visual task, schizophrenics were more attuned to contextual information than controls and thereby performed better on the task by one metric.14 In other words, they saw a greater pattern than controls and successfully utilized the information.
The episodic nature of schizophrenia, characterized by psychoses —spells of delusion and hallucination— supports the notion that inductive reasoning is triggered or modulated —by novelty perception, I claim— as opposed to being at a constant level. At this point I'll bring the notion of a graded response and say that schizophrenics don't merely have a low threshold but that their threshold-response is inadequately calibrated,15 such that the response overshoots, it is more drastic than necessary — more drastic than would have been adaptive. On the other hand, among autistics it is miscalibrated in the other direction, such that their understanding of the world does not update enough in the face of contrary evidence. Their world (as conceived) is too simplistic and stable vis-à-vis the encountered reality, the world of the schizophrenics' is too elaborate and volatile.16
Negative Symptoms
Apathy accounts for around 50 percent of the most often found negative symptoms and affects functional outcome and subsequent quality of life. Apathy is related to disrupted cognitive processing affecting memory and planning including goal-directed behaviour.
Apathy is described in the paper cited by Wikipedia as “a multidimensional symptom composed of cognitive, behavioral, and emotional facets including impaired motivation and reduced goal-directed behavior.” To me it sounds like a behaviour that might likely arise in an unstable world, a kind of analysis paralysis. In a game with simple rules and goals it is easy to know what to do next. If complexity is overwhelming, the rules and goals shift, it might be not so clear. To me this stands out vis-à-vis autism. If we inverse the description of the symptom, we get “a multidimensional symptom composed of cognitive, behavioral, and emotional facets including overly heightened motivation and increased goal-directed behavior,” which sounds a lot like autistics' common narrowly focused interests. Indeed, we would say of a person that his interests are narrowly focused if he could neither be made interested by other things and if his focus is on something that we deem not worth it. People who are overly dedicated to their work are ‘workaholics,’ which we perceive as essentially different than over dedication to, say, the pieces of a particular classical music composer. The workaholic is aware of alternatives but feels obligated to work. It is too much motivation which makes somebody, autistics, disregard other possible, potentially ‘better,’ goals than those they pursue. And the inverse is true about schizophrenics, whose motivation is divided across a shifting complex world.
Timing of schizophrenia's onset
Schizophrenia most commonly onsets during young adulthood. This seems to me indicative as well. I speculate that this is an overshooting of a process that all humans undergo.
I'd claim that adolescents/ young adults experience a surge of novelty perception, i.e. of a lowering of their threshold for it. Teens' rebelliousness is rather notorious, and in essence it involves questioning what they had been told, sending them to find the answers and establish themselves accordingly. There's an advantage in being docile when young, ignorant and helpless, and in being skeptical when emerging into the world as a physically mature individual. It's all the more so the case in our modern times when the world drastically changes not just from one generation to the next but on sub-generational time-spans, where the entrenched traditions of one's parents and elders are not adequate to the new realities, but it was already the case in ancient times when little changed even in the course of centuries. As a child one was assigned a place in society which merited reconception by the self and renegotiation with the community as one transitioned to adulthood and parenthood. In other words, young adulthood is high time to reconceptualize the abstract notion of one's self.
What I think therefore is that individuals, who are afflicted with schizophrenia, have their parameters set somewhat off such that when this transition into adulthood comes, their heightened novelty perception is overshoots. That poorer socioeconomic circumstances in childhood and early adolescence is associated with earlier onset seems to me to point to the same thing. I speculate that individuals of poorer families “have to mature quicker,” are thrown to face the world, as it were, earlier, triggering thereby this transitioning-into-adulthood mechanism at a younger age.17
Nonetheless, there are some issues with this view. First, while adolescent rebelliousness is transitory, schizophrenia remains with the individual for life. It might be that this heightening of novelty perception (lowering of the threshold) is not transitory but permanent, and that it is simply that ‘normal’ individuals, once they found their answers and reestablished themselves in society, cease with the “rebellious behaviour,” despite retaining the skeptical outlook, which in schizophrenics is manifested as psychosis, but intuitively it doesn't seem to me that adults are as open minded as teenagers are, even less so that they are more open minded than children. If anything, I'd think that adults are the most conservative (least likely to experience awe, have their novelty perception triggered) of the three age groups, and that teens are more open minded than children that immediately precede them in age.
It could be the the transient duration of the heightened novelty perception is not biological age-dependent but result-dependent. The inductive reasoning threshold of growing individuals returns to normal once they found their answers. This doesn't occur to people with schizophrenia since their world had been brought to such a flux that they never reach the satisfaction of having found a firm grasp of the world and their place in it. This possibility's just-so-storyness is too great to be convincing.
Intelligence
I speculate that the relationship between the inductive reasoning threshold and the manifestation of these two disorders, autism and schizophrenia, is mediated by intelligence. I imagine that the more strongly inductive reasoning is triggered, the greater one's intelligence must be to cope with it. Inductive reasoning's tendency is towards complication; the more abstract a notion is, the more numerous are the constituting phenomena, between which is an even greater number of relationships. Ideas about ‘agriculture’ are more complicated than ideas about ‘spades’ and requires greater capacity of memory and ability to analyze.
Thus one's level of the threshold and one's intelligence codetermine the manifestation of these conditions. Within limits, when the two fit each other we get a ‘normal’ person who might be either stupid, of average intelligence or smart. If the threshold is relatively too low, if inductive reasoning is frequently or strongly activated but the person hasn't the analytical faculties to deal with it, they would have schizophrenia. The matters are not completely symmetrical here; it's the absolute value of the threshold which determines whether the person has autism or not. However, it is the level of intelligence that determines its manifestation. Individuals with low intelligence would have a rather severe condition, while those of high intelligence would be those that have Asperger's (or even savant syndrome?), being limited by their ability to reconceptualize but adequate in their application of analysis upon the concepts they comprehend.
Individuals with schizophrenia have lower IQ already before the onset of the disease.18 According to my speculation, people with autism should theoretically have roughly average IQ, which is not the case. The problem is that unlike schizophrenia, autism is congenital, and thus starts the person on a disadvantaged developmental trajectory from birth such that by the age their intelligence is tested, it has not adequately developed. To makes matter worse, I'd further imagine that people who are relatively autistic but who have enough intelligence to function normally or even exceptionally at such scrutinized circumstances as school would not get diagnosed and therefore would not enter into the statistics of studies which then find that the average IQ among the relevant population as lower than it really is.
I'd like to adduce a finding that I'd say deals with ‘relatively schizophrenic’ people and their lower intelligence. One study, encompassing several experiments, found out, among other things, that ‘conspiracy theorists’ (not their words) are less intelligent.19 I imagine that the association between conspiracy theories, tin-hats and schizophrenia is commonly strong enough to not require further elucidation, but I'll say a few words about it. Conspiracies —which, as already mentioned, are a real phenomenon— are complex phenomena and their conception is abstract; they involve a complex behaviour of several people of key positions. Believing that there's a device in your brain to record or implant thoughts in your brain is believing that there's an agency within the government that is busy with this sort of tracking (in secret, as no public knowledge of this agency exists, making it a conspiracy), that the development of the necessary technology has been kept secret and that at some point in your life, unobserved by you, your parents or anybody you know, said device was inserted into your brain without leaving obvious marks on your head. Or, to take a recently more common conspiracy theory,20 namely that ‘covid was a hoax,’ that is, that if it happened at all it wasn't that bad, only that its reputation was manufactured by the government (or whoever) in order to further their interests. A single government is already a huge organization all of whose individuals would have had to conspire in order for such a conspiracy to go through, but in the case of covid you'd also need the tacit cooperation of the media and of hospitals, and that not only in your country but internationally.
An idea's level of abstraction has nothing to do with how easy it is to put it in a sentence. “Covid is a hoax” is pretty short and simple. Even treating it as if it was true is not complicated; you just behave as if ‘there's no such thing as covid,’ you don't vaccinate or wear a mask or keep distance from others. It's a simplistic idea: a simple notion about a complicated phenomenon. I think it's no surprise that ‘susceptibility to bullshit’ goes with lower cognitive ability; a trivial amount of analytic application should lead a person to discard the idea that a mind tracking governmental chip is in one's head or that covid is a hoax. That being said, as far as the relationship between schizophrenia and conspiracy theory goes, I think there's a distinction to be made between people who accept such far gone theories from those who come up with them; you need less creativity to merely accept them.
Genetic evidence
Related to the above is the fact that schizophrenia, a heritable condition, is a recent evolution21 (it is a human trait proper, suggesting it might have something to do with the uniquely human cognition) and that it is universal and persistent, i.e. its genotype must confer some advantage for the people carrying it, otherwise it would have gone extinct.22 23Schizophrenia and autism are both, like height, polygenic traits (more on this below); many genes are involved and any allele provides but a small effect. These suggests that both might be gradient rather than binary all-or-nothing conditions — that is, lie on a spectrum. Moreover, a study that investigated the genetic relationship of the two conditions24 found both genotypical and phenotypical (relating to brain development) evidence that the two conditions are diametric — as well as evidence that they overlap. As far as the diametricality is concerned, the differences between the schizophrenics and autistics suggest that the underlying phenotype is a spectrum, as gene deletion is associated with the one group and gene duplication with the other. The paper also discusses the issue of comorbidity, which is a stark evidence against the theory hereby put forward: the incidence of individuals who suffer from both conditions.25 Since the one condition is congenital and the other arises later in life, it's not a definite refutation, but it leaves something to think about. A less stark contrary evidence is the supposed evidence of high incidence of autistic children of schizophrenic parents, though it might be that both conditions are caused by a shared failure of a mechanism that regulates brain development (and hence an overlap in genetics), with some cases ending with autism and others in schizophrenia.
Conclusion
The novelty perception mechanism enables humans to adapt to conceptually new situations by transiently broadening their attention, thus allowing them to discover new relationships in observed phenomena through inductive reasoning. A threshold exists to prevent minor surprises from being perceived as significant errors in predictions that would set off inductive reasoning. Its magnitude varies from person to person, rendering differences in perception dynamics. On one extreme end of the magnitude spectrum lay individuals with schizophrenia, on the other individuals with autism. The former's attention is broad and their conception of the world is at a relative flux; the latter's attention is narrowed on phenomena that adhere to an established understanding of the situation and their inductive reasoning is resistant to activation.
Consider the effect of attention here, how hunger is to an extent really the effect of failing at this game rather than the abstinence from food generally. It is particularly, I'd say, when we turn to eat and fail to obtain food that the pangs of hunger forcefully hit us. Otherwise we might not at all mind that at a given time we have not yet eaten, for example when travelling or being engaged with another activity. Various cases of people in East Asia dying after playing for tens of hours straight Blizzard Entertainment's games come to mind.
I suppose this is a sprandrel of the co-evolution that made babies' crying, seeking to recruit the caretaking help of adults, aversive. Indifferent parents would be less likely to attend to the child.
And thence the allure of clickbaits.
The Human Condition, The University of Chicago Press, second edition, pp. 50-51.
I find it curiously comical that the Wikipedia entries about autistic phenomena are better organized and more precisely articulated than those around schizophrenia.
I recall somebody's anecdote that was passed to me through a friend who knew him, which was served as evidence of Germans' racism. He, a black person, came to a party — in my imagination it was at a bar. I don't remember the details, but in effect he was not talked to or approached &c. I didn't seek to pointedly contradict the theory when I suggested that Germans were generally closed off (their women, for example, complain that guys don't approach) — which rather upset her. How many times have I come to an event alone, white among whites, and wondered why I ever bothered coming? I didn't have my ethnicity as a possible explanation. The Jewish people, after all, are known for their ability to camouflage, which is why they had to yellow patch us. But we naturally seek explanations for the unexpected in terms cogent to our minds. My father did wonder once out loud, for example, if it could not be my at the time elaborate moustache which made me being turned down by one job interview after another. There's a great variety of high-level patterns that one can dress on low-level phenomena.
Machiavelli's The Prince, in a manner a tutorial in shrewdness for leaders, deals with that gap, between appearing to achieve something and actually achieving it. It's no surprise that a book attacking society's facade would be controversial, but I find psychology's term Machiavellianism to be an unnecessary borrowing and unfair.
The term “conspiracy theory” now stands to mean any bonkers idea, but conspiracies, the concerted reporting by a group of a lie, are a real phenomenon, and since their doings are clandestine, their perception is a theory, a hypothesis that waits for confirmation by the larger society. Real conspiracies include organized crime, plans of a group to seize political power, intra-company plans to produce obsolescent items, inter-company collusions to fix prices, up to the American ‘War on Drugs’ whose real purpose was to incarcerate political opponents of the government, and even such black comedy level phenomena as Putin's orchestration of terror attacks against Russian civilians in order to justify an invasion of Chechnya. To these we might add the conspiracy to manufacture a ‘conspiracy theory,’ as when the US promoted surreptitiously the notion that UFOs were alien crafts which occasionally kidnapped human beings, in order to render eye-witnesses of the testing of spy planes, which the military sought to keep secret during the years of the Cold War, discredible.
Inherent in it is a logical fallacy; "a -> b" does not imply "b -> a"; every dolphin is a mammal but not every mammal is a dolphin; that there were powerful Jews did not mean that all Jews were powerful. This fallacy, as it happens, also pertains to assertions of a similar form that nobody would call a conspiracy theory, which few proclaim and many quietly tolerate. That the most privileged in society are white males does not imply that every white male is privileged (over non-white and non-male). I don't mean to say that not all of them lead successful lives, but rather that the ones in power do not indiscriminately favour every white male they encounter. I can't help but feel that stating this is both trivial and defiant. White males had been oppressing each other long before they ever set eyes on other ethnicities, and this hasn't changed since. But that's another story.
The belief in ‘evil’ at all, as a property of a non-mythical individual, is by itself in a way delusional. That at some point the appeal of narratives about self congratulating smug Evil Villeins fades is the simple result of a person maturing to reasonably find ridiculous the notion that it would be any human's interest “to destroy the world” or that “controlling the world” is feasible with anything but real (that is political, as opposed to magical) power, i.e. through the cooperation of society, or of all of humanity in this case, and not single handedly. Even Hitler, to take the usual suspect, neither controlled the minds of his subjects like marionettes nor was perceived by them as any more evil than many in our west today, say, consider those who trade with East Congo marauders who extract the tantalum that goes to their phone and computers evil. Myth is full of evil, the world of assholes and douchebags.
I remember being baffled by the Monty Hall Problem when I first encountered it. It seemed so obvious to me now, to the point of triviality, that it is difficult for me to understand what puzzled my younger self, that I half expect it to be clear to others who are presented with it now.
zero is a number, black is a paint color and silence is noted on a music score, but absence of sensory input is just that, absence, and not a kind of stimulus. Vision is the interpretation of photons entering the eye, audition of air vibrating the ear-drums, touch the pressure on the skin and so on; the absence of these is missing stimulus.
In a sense, the inserted thoughts are related to the ‘substituted spouse’ delusion. Our sense of our own person, however persistent, is if not quite an illusion then still an abstract concept —like the sense of another's person— whose composition is not trivial. Where are our borders? Where are those of our actions? Where does the unity end and the rest of the environment begin? Did you not ever do something that you knew you shouldn't be doing? When we speak of ‘our genome’ we refer exclusively to the DNA of our human somatic cells although half of the cells in our body (and that's the conservative estimation) are, as it were, foreign, the members of our microbiome, an essential part in the operation of our body. So much so that humans who were born through a Cesarean section, who did not pollinate through the zoological garden of the vaginal canal, are the worse for it health-wise. Clones as we know them are only partially so.
The boundary between self and non-self is not just a cute exercise in philosophy, but has societal consequences. Though not explicitly so, the Protestant-Catholic schism, for example, as well as the debates in Christianity's infancy on the Council of Chalcedon that ended with a prevailing dogma and persecuted heresies, redounds to this question. But this is for another time.
I admit that I could not completely follow the text, but I trust their conclusions.
The final arbiter of what is an adequate response is the person and/or society; by whatever metric of ‘success,’ a stable simpler environment calls for a weaker activation of inductive reasoning than a more dynamic, complex environment.
To give one example of how a theory of the world might be maladaptively too complex, I hereby evoke a simple experiment, for which I regrettably couldn't find the source. Before the subject is a screen that presents a consecutive series of one of two stimuli at a time; a red square or a blue square. At each presentation the subject must predict what the next one would be by pressing on a corresponding lever; if the subject guessed it right, it receives a reward. Their order was random, the stimuli had a chance of 75% and 25%, respectively, of appearing next. Pigeons did better at this task than did human subjects. Pigeons, after getting the picture within a few rounds, persistently predicted red —the more frequent and as it indeed happened, the most likely next stimulus— while humans variably predicted one or the other, as if trying to match an underlying pattern. This paper presents a different kind of experiment, but I think its results are suggestive of the above. Humans, even when compared to chimpanzees, tend to imitate with more fidelity, that is, conforming even to the details of more complicated patterns.
I'm quite satisfied with this demonstration of variable outcome, but conceivably a too complex picture of the world might be maladaptive in other ways, for example by putting a greater computative effort on the brain, or, alternatively, by compensations through simplifications on the lower-levels of perception, a “not seeing the trees for the forest” blindness —as with the friend from the last part who couldn't detect my having shaved— which would be maladaptive when the trees are decisive and the forest is of little importance.
as it happens, just last week I met for the first time in my life a person of this kind, and though we had but a short conversation, he managed to put forward this theory. Curiously enough, before he came and talked with me I heard him speaking with another person. I sat near but a little too far to hear more than the tiniest bits of his question, but immediately sensed that was something off about him, enough to ask another person, who stood a little closer to them, what he was talking about.
Note that schizophrenia has genetic causes but it is not anything like chromosome abnormalities which usually occur de novo, a result of a failed mechanism of cell division, rather than being inherited in the usual sense of the word from one of the parents.