Dark matter is one of the worst misnomers in scientific history. It’s the word we ascribe to the cause of strange phenomena at the truly macro scale we can’t explain with current physics and matter concentrations alone.
It doesn’t mean it’s actually matter.
When someone says; “Uhhhh, actually here’s a theory that says dark matter isn’t actually matter but a tweak of physics.” they are misunderstanding the problem. No scientist is actually claiming dark matter has to be matter, just that it there is a problem with the density and rotation of galaxies that could be explained by a large amount of invisible matter.
Before, I was a bit suspicious of the label "autism" when applied to a diverse set of comparatively high-functioning individuals. During that last few months I have been reading more on the history of high-functioning autism and I'm getting increasingly convinced that it is all a big mistake.
I don't doubt that autism exists. But I doubt that five percent of the children of Stockholm actually have specific autistic traits like stereotyped speech and movements, special interests and hypersensitivity for sound or touch. Still, about five percent of Stockholm children have an autism diagnosis. Because five percent of the children of Stockholm are loners in some sense.
I believe that psychiatry are squeezing all loners into the autism mould. Psychiatry makes it look like all people who have lower-than-average relationship skills are at least moderately similar to people with hard autism. There is no reason to believe that. There are so many people with low relationship skills that they can't all be caught in one, very specific description. It is all just stupid.
For that reason I no longer believe what I wrote about the causes of autism. Real, hard autism has probably totally different causes than general social insensitivity. For that reason I think it is stupid to confuse those two phenomena. I regret that I did.
Since I'm a slow writer I can't come up with something more elaborate until later. However, I'm happy of having been promoted from 60 percent right to 70 percent right, although as far as I remember I was never convinced of the creativity-madness link to begin with. The only thing I firmly believe in is a link between some mental illness and something-positive. For example, there should be a link between mental illness, or borderline mental illness, and religion.
Obviously, a lot of mental illness is of the accidental type. Just think of Down syndrome. No one tries to link Down syndrom to any positive traits, because we know the reason why it exists. As you acknowledge, a lot of mental illness should be of that kind, but caused by more complicated mechanisms that are not entirely known.
I have never been the most eager proponent of the idea that outright psychosis is linked to creativity (in relatives or otherwise). But I am an eager proponent of the idea that there are upsides to lighter versions of mental illness. There is no sharp limit between sanity and mental illness - it can be summarized as human variation. I'm convinced that some of that variation has been adaptive.
I will return to the autism question later (we have valuable daylight here right now), but my thinking in the area is more informed these days, in no small part thanks to you.
The disintegration is one angle of investigation, another might be a related area, where peeps have little to no idea of boundaries, i.e. their self is not falling apart but the world has no stratigraphy or differentiation. ( I regard selfing as a type of worlding and vice-versa.)
I have a highly empathic friend who appears very very ditsy because of this, and before you know how she copes with a lack of boundaries her responses and reactions lead to a lot of misunderstandings, but once you realise that she copes (masks?) by using a mark (actor's mark) , and she appears ditsy because the mark she has chosen to 'implement' something you have said is out of whack, but once we get to the right mark, and so on to an agreed itinerary of marks then they are absolutely fine. But getting there can be an effort and a completely mystery if you do not know this.
Here, the fixedness is of help as her mark (actor's mark) but the openness allows a correction (and the ditsy-ness I suspect). Fixed fixedness looks like madness looking at me. A fixed stare.
thanks for this in depth post, the creativity-madness index has been an interest of mine since forever
① I've noted the lack of healthy creativity in the absolutely bonkers for quite some time and been suspicious since my teenage years too, of the creativity-madness index. ( you don't have to be mad...) Mad peeps when mad are not very high on openness I'd guess, that's what I found, both weird ideas and very straight ideas held very fixedly. That linkage makes sense to me. It might be openness that 'disciplines' creativity into utility (we can argue a lot about that utility but if we define it negatively as not absolutely bonkers...?)
②the other thought regarding the framing of the madness-creativity index is that it makes sense if you are square as 'they' (the creative & mad) are all to the right of you on that graph.
Also, on masking, it takes a certain amount of improvisational creativity, at least the more successful versions of it do.
Seems you're commendably following in Lord Kelvin's footsteps ... 😉🙂:
“When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts advanced to the stage of science.”
But, since I'm sure you've been waiting with bated breath for the latest from me on the gender front ... 😉🙂, that is part of the reason why I created that a "multi-dimensional gender spectrum" model:
Though I'm not entirely sure that "multi-dimensional" is entirely accurate, at least if one doesn't see each of the "Big Five" as a separate dimension -- something that Regan Arntz-Gray seems to be arguing in favour of:
But more credibly or usefully, a case where each of those five is, as I've illustrated above, simply a separate "colour" in a gender or personality spectrum. Any thoughts on that argument? 😉🙂
Synchronicity on 'disintegration' but not quite a 'snap'.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-93317748
Images of Ego Death
I'll note that I do not think disintegration and ego death (via meditation or psychodelics) are the same.
However.... 'disintegration' affects 'worlding' as well 'selfing'.
Dark matter is one of the worst misnomers in scientific history. It’s the word we ascribe to the cause of strange phenomena at the truly macro scale we can’t explain with current physics and matter concentrations alone.
It doesn’t mean it’s actually matter.
When someone says; “Uhhhh, actually here’s a theory that says dark matter isn’t actually matter but a tweak of physics.” they are misunderstanding the problem. No scientist is actually claiming dark matter has to be matter, just that it there is a problem with the density and rotation of galaxies that could be explained by a large amount of invisible matter.
The autism question:
Before, I was a bit suspicious of the label "autism" when applied to a diverse set of comparatively high-functioning individuals. During that last few months I have been reading more on the history of high-functioning autism and I'm getting increasingly convinced that it is all a big mistake.
I don't doubt that autism exists. But I doubt that five percent of the children of Stockholm actually have specific autistic traits like stereotyped speech and movements, special interests and hypersensitivity for sound or touch. Still, about five percent of Stockholm children have an autism diagnosis. Because five percent of the children of Stockholm are loners in some sense.
I believe that psychiatry are squeezing all loners into the autism mould. Psychiatry makes it look like all people who have lower-than-average relationship skills are at least moderately similar to people with hard autism. There is no reason to believe that. There are so many people with low relationship skills that they can't all be caught in one, very specific description. It is all just stupid.
For that reason I no longer believe what I wrote about the causes of autism. Real, hard autism has probably totally different causes than general social insensitivity. For that reason I think it is stupid to confuse those two phenomena. I regret that I did.
Since I'm a slow writer I can't come up with something more elaborate until later. However, I'm happy of having been promoted from 60 percent right to 70 percent right, although as far as I remember I was never convinced of the creativity-madness link to begin with. The only thing I firmly believe in is a link between some mental illness and something-positive. For example, there should be a link between mental illness, or borderline mental illness, and religion.
Obviously, a lot of mental illness is of the accidental type. Just think of Down syndrome. No one tries to link Down syndrom to any positive traits, because we know the reason why it exists. As you acknowledge, a lot of mental illness should be of that kind, but caused by more complicated mechanisms that are not entirely known.
I have never been the most eager proponent of the idea that outright psychosis is linked to creativity (in relatives or otherwise). But I am an eager proponent of the idea that there are upsides to lighter versions of mental illness. There is no sharp limit between sanity and mental illness - it can be summarized as human variation. I'm convinced that some of that variation has been adaptive.
I will return to the autism question later (we have valuable daylight here right now), but my thinking in the area is more informed these days, in no small part thanks to you.
The disintegration is one angle of investigation, another might be a related area, where peeps have little to no idea of boundaries, i.e. their self is not falling apart but the world has no stratigraphy or differentiation. ( I regard selfing as a type of worlding and vice-versa.)
I have a highly empathic friend who appears very very ditsy because of this, and before you know how she copes with a lack of boundaries her responses and reactions lead to a lot of misunderstandings, but once you realise that she copes (masks?) by using a mark (actor's mark) , and she appears ditsy because the mark she has chosen to 'implement' something you have said is out of whack, but once we get to the right mark, and so on to an agreed itinerary of marks then they are absolutely fine. But getting there can be an effort and a completely mystery if you do not know this.
Here, the fixedness is of help as her mark (actor's mark) but the openness allows a correction (and the ditsy-ness I suspect). Fixed fixedness looks like madness looking at me. A fixed stare.
thanks for this in depth post, the creativity-madness index has been an interest of mine since forever
① I've noted the lack of healthy creativity in the absolutely bonkers for quite some time and been suspicious since my teenage years too, of the creativity-madness index. ( you don't have to be mad...) Mad peeps when mad are not very high on openness I'd guess, that's what I found, both weird ideas and very straight ideas held very fixedly. That linkage makes sense to me. It might be openness that 'disciplines' creativity into utility (we can argue a lot about that utility but if we define it negatively as not absolutely bonkers...?)
②the other thought regarding the framing of the madness-creativity index is that it makes sense if you are square as 'they' (the creative & mad) are all to the right of you on that graph.
Also, on masking, it takes a certain amount of improvisational creativity, at least the more successful versions of it do.
Seems you're commendably following in Lord Kelvin's footsteps ... 😉🙂:
“When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts advanced to the stage of science.”
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/166961-when-you-can-measure-what-you-are-speaking-about-and
But, since I'm sure you've been waiting with bated breath for the latest from me on the gender front ... 😉🙂, that is part of the reason why I created that a "multi-dimensional gender spectrum" model:
https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/p/a-multi-dimensional-gender-spectrum
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1272,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F28cbde88-8a9b-4b3b-8f48-a07f889f1019_769x379.jpeg
Though I'm not entirely sure that "multi-dimensional" is entirely accurate, at least if one doesn't see each of the "Big Five" as a separate dimension -- something that Regan Arntz-Gray seems to be arguing in favour of:
"Mapping the Mind: The Lexical Hypothesis and personality dimensions, from parsing dictionaries to predicting behavior"; https://www.allcatsarefemale.com/p/mapping-the-mind
But more credibly or usefully, a case where each of those five is, as I've illustrated above, simply a separate "colour" in a gender or personality spectrum. Any thoughts on that argument? 😉🙂