If it Looks Like a Duck . . .
Collin and Gavin had long moved on from trying to discover who this mysterious creature was when they heard a commotion. They walked towards a pond where they found 3 birds arguing with each other.
“What’s going on here?” asked Collin
“Well we saw a turtle but these two seem to think it was something else!” cried Claude the Duck.
“It was not a Turtle” yelled the other two in unison.
“It was a Tortoise!” claimed Ivan the Goose
“It wasn’t that either, it was a Crab” argued Knuckles the Swan.
“This sounds a bit like my problem” laughed Gavin.
The commotion continued,
“It had a shell, that makes it a Turtle”
“Nooo, that makes it a Tortoise!”
“A Crab!”
“OK, everyone just calm down” interrupted Collin.
“If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck then it’s probably a DUCK!” yelled Claude.
“Oh so now you’re saying it’s a duck!? Really Claude you are delusional!” yelled Kunckles.
“NO, it’s a popular turn of phrase!” replied Claude.
“Ugghh, Claude, you know I don’t understand your weird duck sayings” said Knuckles.
“Honestly Claude, you are so selfish, always making things about Ducks!” added Ivan
“What Claude is trying to say is that he believes that the characteristics of said animal make it what it is. He’s saying that his shell makes him a turtle” said Collin, trying his best to keep the peace.
“But this is also my point on why it could be a Crab!”
“Or a Tortoise” chimed in Ivan.
“Look, look! There they are” pointed Knuckles
Collin stared over at some bushes from which the shelled animal emerged.
Out walked Phyllis, an old Armadillo.
Prophecies of the Outsider
Last week’s discussion of “nothingness” needs some slight clarification. Ironically I am going to do this by discussing what it isn’t.
Last week I strongly stated that you cannot describe something by what it isn’t. While this is still true, I want to give examples of when this isn’t true, or rather what I was not making reference to. That last statement may sound paradoxical to everything I discussed last week but that is the exact context in which I was not making reference to.
Specifically; when you have a point of reference. I described what “Nothingness” was, and am now telling you what it isn’t. In other words, process of elimination is not included in such discussion because it has a point of reference.
Suppose you want to paint your house but do not know which colour to pick. You are automatically limited by what your local hardware store can provide. The best starting point in this case would be to remove all colours you would not paint your house.
In these cases, your limitations are already set in front of you. So there is no referencing something you cannot see or touch, there is very little left to the imagination (except for imagining how the colour will look on your house.) You don’t have to conceptualise the particular shade, hue or value, it’s already there for you at the store. I would also like to point out that in order to decide what colour you wouldn’t paint your house you have to decide what colour you would (possibly) pick. So my argument from last week still stands.
As Parmenides said;
Thought exists for the sake of what is.
So what about things that don’t have physical forms, things that don’t exist in the 3D?
ADHD, for example, is not a thing, it doesn’t have a shape or a form, yet we believe it exists, we know it to exist. ADHD, while not a thing, does have an expression. A manifestation if you will. ADHD has an expression but it is not an expression.
Dictionary.com defines expression as “the action of making known one’s thoughts or feelings.”
Known to who is up for debate. If they are known to you are they still expressed? Or can expression only be done when there is more than one person involved? For argument’s sake, let’s say that the latter is true.
Despite being defined by its deficits (which gives us no real direction) we do know that Autism is real. But, what is it?
To put it simply we do not know what Autism is. There is no one defining trait that underlines and encompasses all that Autism is.
A.C Grayling discusses one of Plato’s theories on the idea of knowledge in his book The History of Philosophy.
In the Meno discussion several important ideas emerge. One concerns the difference between knowledge and true belief. Suppose someone believes that one can get to a certain town by a certain route, and is right about it. Suppose he just happens to be right; he has never been there himself, but thinks he remembers someone saying that this is the route. So, he has a true belief about the route. But you cannot say he knows it, because his reason for believing is not a good one. If he had been there himself, or had consulted an authoritative map, he could claim to know the route. Plato distinguishes between knowledge and a correct belief by saying that the latter becomes knowledge when ‘tied down’, that is, has satisfactory justification.
Plato uses this in the context of souls remembering past lives, but I want to apply it to modern perceptions of science and spirituality. Two things that are often contrasted against each other. Two things that in society’s eyes, are opposites. Based on Plato’s description, what we (society) consider to be spiritual cannot surpass “true belief” status because there is nothing to “tie it down”, at least not in ways that the majority see as “reasonable”.
There is little to be said about what autism, or indeed, any other mental health-related condition/disorder is spiritually.
One may believe that an autistic child is one who is possessed by a demon and someone else may say that an autistic person is a soul that feels trapped in a human body. Regardless, these spiritual-based beliefs are unlikely to be accepted by wider communities as there is “no concrete proof” besides the belief of said individual. This makes it so that we can only define mental health disorders by what we can prove. There is no objective truth to things, they are subjective until we consider them proven. But what we consider to be valid proof is subjective.
It is because of this, that I would make this statement; any individual mental health disorder can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Let me explain.
This “prophecy” is not by fault of the subjects themselves but in the eyes of an outsider, that is, anyone who does not live in your body. That’s everyone, except you. Let’s call them an “outsider”.
Plato’s idea that it cannot be “true knowledge” unless it is proven, does not stop the individual from taking in what he calls “true belief”. A true belief is in the eye of the beholder. Thus, when that belief is about someone else, very little needs to be done to affirm the belief and there is much to be done to dispel this belief. True beliefs take on a lot of confirmation bias. So when I say that mental health disorders can become self-fulfilling prophecies, I really mean that any individual mental health disorder in the eyes of the outsider, can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
In this, we have to be careful about what the core of the belief is.
One parent may believe that they can cure their child of autism. But that is not the core belief, the core belief is that the child needs to be cured of autism and that autism is undesirable and unwanted. This belief will then continue to be reinforced. Every trial and tribulation that the parent sees as autistic and “not my child” will be amplified, thus continuing to lose their child “buried under autism”.
“Autism will continue to grip on tighter to the parent while the child drifts further and further away” so the experience would go.
True belief and knowledge status can also vary between groups. Religious communities would consider their god(s) to be of knowledge, while an atheist would consider those communities to be holding true beliefs. To me, true beliefs and knowledge do not determine right versus wrong but instead encourage reflection on inconsistencies between individuals and communities. While creating a greater understanding of why and how miscommunications occur.
All of this is absolutely true for mental health disorders. Late-diagnosed auDHDers like myself are likely to encounter comments such as “you don’t look autistic” “I never would have known you had ADHD!” “I have a nephew with autism and ADHD and you’re nothing like him”. These statements say more about the commenter’s perception (true belief) than they do about the person they are supposedly “commenting on”. In these examples, you can really understand how much a true belief can feel like knowledge because, in a way, it is knowledge. They are comments made on the resources available to them. And if new information does not fit that narrative, very few people (at least not right away) will admit that they are either incorrect or limited in their “knowledge”.
To give a much more personal example, when I first was exploring the possibility of being ADHD, I would talk to my parents about the traits I was experiencing, in particular (because of the deficit model) the struggles I go through on a daily basis. Dad’s response to this was always “But that’s normal”. Several months later, post my diagnosis, Dad is still right, it is normal. It is our normal. It is ADHD normal. I would say that in this particular case, Dad’s true belief about being “normal” turned into knowledge once he understood both, his, mine and the ADHD experience better.
Next post I will focus more on media’s influence on true belief, and knowledge and how this informs concepts such as the theory of mind.
For now, I will leave you with this. Expansion of knowledge is just that. Expansion. Something may come up that does not align with what you previously believed, that is not always to discredit what you know, but to add to it. Your idea of what mental health disorders “look like” may not be incorrect, they may just be limited.