Neurodivergence (May 2023)

If I had to describe the essence of "neurodivergence", I would say it amounts to having a less socialized synthetic a-priori. This means on the one hand being able to see or do things differently, but on the other hand being much less able to do things on autopilot early in life.

It's also why I think, to the chagrin of many, that ADHD and autism are related: attention and comprehension are two sides of the same coin and based on something being immanent. that is, something is trivially evident because it simply follows from the context.


If you see a handle on a door, you pull rather than push. Similarly, a certain pattern of light hitting your eyes could actually be a lot of things, but your immediate context narrows it down trivially: thus Kant's whole thing about sensory experience and concepts being related to one another as an inseparable mobius loop rather than "sense data" simply preceding all thought.


The point is that this is how attention works: "something" registers insofar that it's a peg that fits a certain hole, and the hole both selects and shapes it.

For "neurotypicals", those holes are shaped in ways that fit much more easily with the rest of society, so when learning or even just sensing things there's a much simpler process. It's like having microchips optimized for a certain kind of program and then using those to run it.


You could in fact call it "neuroconvergent" because it's as if all of their dialectics between experience and intuition converge to something that plays nicely with the wider system whereas for "neurodivergent" people that doesn't quite happen as smoothly.

Instead, it's less socialized, and therefore demands more in the way of "first principles". Immanence is not achieved nearly as much by means of social conventions but instead by more individualized postulates. I'm not saying it's "more logical", it's just a different substrate.


Whereas someone more "neurotypical" has firmware optimized for the operating systems of their peer groups, with "neurodivergent" subjects there's a need to rely more on software, to write the code from the ground up, which comes with more flexibility but more contingency.

Of course this can lead to beautiful things, but it also means that life can be very tragic in a lot of ways. I wouldn't trade away my differences for anything, but it is alienating, and while I believe some degree of alienation is necessary for invention, it can be very painful too.