Object personification in autism: This paper will be sad if you don't read (2018)

I remember in the 1990's when I felt very strongly that in chess, rook pawns could be advanced far more often than they were in Grandmaster games. And in recent years modern computers confirm that (it has been called "the rook pawn revolution"). Looking back on it a bit later, I realized I had no logical, left-brain systems support for it, only one of the strongest "systems" feelings I can remember ever having. I also grew up on the spectrum, with a side of moderately severe anxiety disorder, and extreme difficulty sleeping.

I like the Japanese concept of Tsukumogami[0], where certain objects that live to be 100 years old become imbued with a soul.

It's easy to get sentimental over neglected things because I seem to have an innate appreciation and sense of duty toward objects that are designed to help people. It only seems fair that the contract includes care and maintenance from the user.

I live in an aging neighborhood and weep for some of these homes. I visited an abandoned unit just this weekend and went through the spectrum of sadness and anger that such a beautiful building had been allowed to fall into such disrepair. The unit was unsafe to live in, the foundation is cracking in two, one wall has a crack so large that you can see the outside and in several places, the floor is close to caving in. But the outside of the building is so nice. :(

We just bought a house in the neighborhood that is in mostly good shape considering its owners were older and lived there for over 20 years. I look forward to shaping her up, replacing the roof, refinishing the floors, repairing the foundation, fixing some water damage, etc. She's a great little home and it pains me to see her not at her best.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsukumogami

> A good example would be a dull knife. There's something "sad" about an object whose nature or purpose it is to be sharp to lose or lack that sharpness.

Interesting - I think you've just explained "Tear-Water Tea" [1] (Arnold Lobel's classic childrens story) for me.

[1] https://archive.org/details/Tear-waterTea-English-ArnoldLobe...

> It's (usually) easy for most people to care about other people. It's a little less easy, though still pretty common, for people to care about animals. The further away from recognizably human you get, the less people seem to care

I think this also explains a lot about how normal people behave. They not only care mostly about humans but mostly about their tribe. The operation of some system which is designed to protect everyone is only important when it's protecting their own people and can be disregarded when that isn't the case. Whereas people whose empathy extends past their own walls can feel a harm to the whole society when that happens.

Even now I'm sure there are people reading this and thinking "yes, the other tribe does that all the time! They're such hypocrites!" But that's the easy one. The hard thing is to recognize it and stop it when you're doing it.

I relate to this easily. My family finds it so strange that I can look at a flat tire and say something like "aw, poor thing". And I'm half-joking, yet... Well, it gives me an emotional response. I think a lot of people can relate to that example in particular because there is a sort of 'deflated' sense of self most people can experience, but not so much with the dull knife or a rock being split in half.

Something I found which coincides somewhat well with what you're saying: it seems like a disproportionate number of vegans are not neurotypical. I'm mostly plant-based because I can't separate animals from humans enough. It feels wrong to eat them. Not that I lower humans to animal level, though. I raise animals, or the hierarchy is flatter. I also find insects so much more amazing—and neurologically salient I suppose—than virtually everyone I know. Yet in the isopod collecting hobby, you'll find plenty of people who love insects and arachnids and so on, and they seem to lean towards neurodivergence as well.

I relate to that. I wouldn't say I attribute human characteristics to non-human objects, but I definitely feel emotional distress when I see objects destroyed harmed, throw away, etc.

For me, I think a big part of it is a sense of waste or lost potential. If the object hadn't been broken, it could have had longer useful life, and it upsets me that that was cut short.

Are you familiar with Shinto, you might enjoy the perspective.

I don't find this surprising at all. Humans are tool-users, and valuing an object's utility and experiencing a feeling of something like loss when it's neglected or loses efficacy would seem to be an advantageous trait.

I can't take this kind of pressure

I must confess one more dusty road

Would be just a road too long

Worthless

IYKYK. A few touches:

- "I just can't / I just can't / I just can't seem to get started" mimics a car trying to turn over

- Pairing the wedding and the funeral

Better than Toy Story, but Toy Story is much better known and does the same thing

I think there's different kinds of autism, which imv, you could spread across a schizophrenia axis -- "low reality" and "high reality" sorts. My own classification system:

The more schizophrenic kind imparts a fantasy framing on everything which can give rise to a disorganised imparting of mental capacities that I think is fairly uniform across objects, including people. This appears as "too few mental capacities" on people, and too much to objects. This a "living in their own world, dreaming" type. Dreamer-type.

At the other extreme, it's a difficulty in establishing any kind of fantasy framing (without significant support, eg., in video games / films). This is an officious, "the rules really exist, and we must follow them" type. Officious-type.

Incidentally, imv, there's a third sort you might call dissociative, where irony is the main mode of relation to the world and others. This is an unstable blending of the two perspectives: the ironic performative frame is at once a kind of fantasy, but a sort of fantasy which seeks to make the very adopting of fantasy impossible. Irony-type.

I think quite a lot of "high-engagement culture" (ie., the type which requires a lot of its audience) is really autistic culture of these varieties in interaction.

> I always had the impression it was the other way around, non autistic 'normal' people personifies non human objects.

The paper says, they do!

The surprising part is that autist do it too, at approximately the same rates, which was unexpected.

Some scientists believe that autistic people have different levels of empathy than allistic people. Sometimes this manifests as higher levels of empathy for objects and animals, or higher emotional empathy.

I'm dx'd autistic, and I am someone who will weep openly or experience unbridled joy alongside, say, a movie about a bunch of animals surviving tough times. But if I see an adult human make a poor choice and suffer consequences I feel nothing. I have to teach myself that my values are that we should care for everyone -- even the people I feel no intrinsic empathy towards.

In speaking with my doc about it, it's apparently not at all uncommon for autistic folks to have this sort of extremely strong empathy response in some cases, while a totally flat empathy response in others.

I'm not fooled whatsoever into thinking LLMs are human, but I am polite in how I interact with them because the language that I use impacts my experience. Same goes with how I interact with anything, linguistically or not.

Lot of languages assign gender to objects.

One should control for foreign language knowledge.