Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is traditionally conceptualized as a pathological condition characterized by impairments. However, a growing body of scientific evidence supports understanding autism as a naturally occurring neurodevelopmental variant shaped by complex genetic and environmental factors and maintained through evolutionary mechanisms. This review synthesizes current knowledge from genetics, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology to argue that autism represents a natural neurotype rather than a disorder. It also addresses common misconceptions rooted in deficit-focused medical models and highlights the neurodiversity paradigm’s implications for research, practice, and social inclusion.
Reflections of the Mind: How Large Language Models Illuminate Human Language & Brain Function
The metaphorical alignment between Large Language Models (LLMs) and human language processing offers a transformative lens for bridging artificial intelligence and neuroscience, revealing profound insights about both systems and catalyzing reciprocal advancement. Despite their fundamentally different substrates—biochemical neural circuits versus engineered tensor networks—LLMs and the human brain share core computational principles manifest in attention, predictive processing, memory, and hierarchical representation dynamics.
Rightful AI: Multimodal AI & Diabetic Care – Patterns
Diabetes, especially Type 2, is usually monitored with simple lab tests like HbA1c. But new research shows these tests miss much of the story. A recent Nature Medicine study reveals that using multiple tools—like continuous glucose monitors, fitness trackers, food diaries, and even gut microbiome analysis—can give a much clearer view of blood sugar control and health risks.
The ‘Sacred Triad of Being’ & The Importance of Your ‘Why’
Much of the deepest wisdom in life arrives in deceptively simple packaging. Ancient cultures often distilled immense truths into symbols, short sayings, or small practices that contain layer upon layer of meaning. What initially appears simple often turns out to be what I think of as a Matryoshka doll of concepts; ideas nested within ideas, each entangled with larger social, cultural, and even biological systems. This is how the concept of the Sacred Triad of Being emerged for me. It is at once individual and collective, personal and political, psychological and philosophical. The triad is composed of three equilateral spheres […]
Don’t threaten me with a good time (#theory)
This paper proposes a formal framework that reliably reduces semantics and epistemology to syntax within American English and integrates mechanisms to identify and remove lexicons of known biases and associated ontological or ideological slants. Drawing from linguistics, logic, epistemology, AI ethics, and computational bias detection research, the framework is outlined with demonstrations, objections addressed, and future work clearly defined. The incorporation of bias detection and mitigation ensures the system’s neutrality and epistemic reliability.
Speech Bias Harms, Undermines Democracy
At first glance, the challenges autistic people face with speech and the misinformation crisis threatening American democracy may seem worlds apart. Yet, both stem from the same deep-rooted cultural bias: an insistence on speech as the only legitimate mode of communication. This bias excludes, silences, and harms those who communicate differently, but it also leaves society vulnerable to manipulation, polarization, and the breakdown of meaningful dialogue.
Muttering, mostly.
Audio only; the intermittent mutterings that flow through my brain. Archival, mostly for me, these are not the droids you seek, move along…
Recovered from the stacks – 2023
This item was located on an old drive and is being inserted into the blog for archival purposes. The Cost of Being “Too Nice”: A Personal Reckoning There’s a harsh trade-off in modern existence—a tax on autonomy charged in the currency of conformity. To get in the door, you yield a piece of your will, and in return, you’re handed the legal minimum: a salary just above drowning, benefits dictated by those who’ve never sweated at your level. Every dollar is stretched across the real cost of staying operational: food, shelter, medicine, sanity. It’s a balancing act demanded by all […]
On the nature of despair and its remedy
In the 14th century we find the first instance of a human crafting a word for the feeling of a certainty there shall be no prosperity, and/or of existing in an environment in which everyone around you expresses this sense OF you, TO you. It is interesting to me that there is no word that opposes despair, no word that can flip or turn it. It has ‘an opposite’ (hope), but theirs is a dichotomous relation. The nature of despair is, at least linguistically, binary. We speak of ‘giving hope’ but it is a sleight of mind; we give not […]
Biting the Hand That Built You: The American Hypocrisy of Immigrant Exclusion
America’s current preoccupation with attacking and deporting legally residing immigrants and naturalized citizens is a grotesque spectacle. The nation is now eating itself, driven by a supremacist and xenophobic mindset that cannot abide the truth of its own heritage. Ethical censure, not celebration, is what the United States has earned in recent years, as it enacts policies and cultivates attitudes betraying not only its founding promises but also the very mechanism of its historical rise.