How Autism is Made 7: The Ladder of Purpose

Which layer--or layers!--of thinking does autism disrupt?

This is how he grows: getting defeated by ever greater things. 
   .Rainier Maria Rilke, The Beholder

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As you peruse these articles, there’s a question you may ask. If scientists and psychiatrists were so terribly wrong about autism all these years, endlessly barking up the wrong tree—why? Why did they get so lost? Why did physicists quickly understand atoms and biologists made fast work of photosynthesis, while autism research remains pokey and stagnant?

Because academics weren’t barking up the wrong tree. They were barking up the wrong forest.

There are many features common to all biological thinking. Fundamental qualities of mind, the way relativity and the uncertainty principle are fundamental qualities of matter. If you get these basic concepts wrong—if you believe Newton’s theory of gravitation instead of Einstein’s, if you learn classical mechanics rather than quantum mechanics, you’ll never develop firm knowledge or useful intuitions concerning the full scope of physical matter, such as black holes or superconductors.

Perhaps the single most important truth to know about minds is found in Lesson Two: The Dynamic Mind: minds are activity, not stuff. The reason this notion is so crucial for autism is because of the mathematics that falls out of it. If you believe that thinking, and autism, are generated by stuff—by physical things—you’ll adopt a mathematics of things to study minds and autism.

Namely, statistics or digital math.

If you instead take as your foundation the conviction that thinking (and autism) is activity, you’ll adopt the mathematics of activity to study autism. Namely, dynamic systems.

In this article, we address the second most important truth about minds: thinking is hierarchical. Ignorance of this fundamental mental structure is a prime reason autism flummoxes academics. If you aren’t aware of the ladder of purpose, you’ll never fully grasp the mechanics of consciousness, self-consciousness, language, meaning—or autism. (Or the ultimate nature of physical reality, but let’s hold off cosmic questions for now.)

This article is an introduction to the ladder of purpose and its role in our experience of the dark gift.

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To build a human mind capable of experiencing autism, the evolution of thinking ascended four rungs on the ladder of purpose. Let’s retrace the rise of autism.

In the beginning was aimlessness. Physics. Activity without purpose. From out of aimless action arose a new sort of dynamics: glorious purpose. Activity directed toward a goal. Thinking. The very first minds on Earth began thinking about a billion years back. We might call these first-rung thinkers the bacteria minds, as bacteria are a typical specimen of this sort of single-layer mind. Thinking in bacteria minds consists of interacting molecules.

Hundreds of millions of years after the advent of the first purposeful minds on Earth,  second-rung minds emerged that added a second layer of thinking activity on top of the existing layer of molecular thinking. These second-rung thinkers are the bumblebee minds. Bumblebee minds are all invertebrates: jellyfish, worms, insects, crabs, spiders. Thinking in the second layer consists of interacting neurons.

Eventually a third-rung mind arose: monkey minds. All vertebrates are monkey minds because they all possess three layers of thinking, including fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and all but one mammal. The third layer of thinking activity, which operates on top of molecular thinking and neural thinking, consists of interacting modules. A module is a network of neurons devoted to a particular purpose, like recognizing objects or navigating to a destination.

Consciousness manifests on the third rung of the ladder of purpose. Future articles will explain how consciousness works (or you can check out my book Consciousness: How It’s Made) but what matters for us is that consciousness requires three distinctive yet interdependent layers of thinking activity to produce a subjective experience. The physical source of autism—the activity of autism—is found in the third rung. Autism is a disruption of the natural operation of consciousness activity in our brains.

Only third-rung minds are capable of consciousness. But third-rung minds are not capable of autism. To make autism, you need a fourth-rung mind. No Earthborn beast can become autistic. Even if a turtle or tiger is afflicted with the same physiological quirks that generate autism in humans, these quirks will not manifest as autism in third-rung minds because their minds will not produce autistic dynamics.

The source of autism is a physical disruption of the third layer of thinking activity within a conscious brain. But the personal impact of autism—the lived experience of our dark gift—involves disruptions of the fourth layer of thinking.

Only one species on Earth boasts a fourth-rung mind. Us. Homo sapiens. We possess the only brains in the solar system to nurture four simultaneous layers of thinking. We’re the only species to possess a supermind. A sapiens supermind.

In a sapiens supermind, the top-most layer of thinking consists of interacting brains. You and me. Every individual human functions as a “neuron” in the supermind. A supermind is a community of monkey minds bound together primarily through language, but also conjoined through many other forms of shared attention such as gestures, wardrobes, music, myths, social media, and neighborhoods.

As we will learn later in detail, it takes a supermind to create a Self. An individual human Self. A me. It also takes a supermind to create self-awareness, a special fourth-rung form of thinking, as opposed to ordinary consciousness which is third-rung thinking. Homo sapiens share consciousness with all the other beasts of the field and forest. We share self-awareness with no one[1].

If you want an easy way to understand the relationship between the third and fourth layers of thinking in your autistic brain—between the operation of consciousness and self-consciousness, picture this: Your third rung embodies (wordless) feelings, perceptions, urges, and experiences. Your fourth layer puts words to those feelings, perceptions, urges, and experiences thereby giving rise to ideas. (This explains why artists and engineers sometimes feel or intuit their way to a fresh new creation, and only put words to their creative decisions later. Though an artist might say their “unconscious figured it out,” we can now see that in truth it is the fully conscious third-rung monkey mind portion of our brain that figured it out, while the fourth-rung self-conscious supermind portion of our brain was unable to verbalize what our conscious monkey mind was doing.)

The only way to acquire words and language and self-awareness and a Self is by interacting with other fourth-rung minds within a supermind.

But if your own third layer of thinking (modular thinking, such as the activity of your Why module) operates different than third-rung thinking in other human brains, then the sapiens supermind (that is, human society) will instruct you on meanings, values, and perspectives that fundamentally do not match your own experiences. The language we are taught to speak and the way we are taught to make sense of the world derives from the third-rung experiences of non-autistic folk.

By radically altering the operation of third-rung conscious activity in our brains, autism interferes with the natural operation of fourth-rung supermind activity in our brain. It is this combination of altered third-rung thinking activity and disrupted fourth-rung thinking activity that produces the unique and overwhelming experience of living with the dark gift.

Previous Autism Lesson: 6: Tagging Your Deficits: Getting to Know Your Own Brain

Next Autism Lesson: 8: The Attention Dilemma

Read FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS about Dr. Ogas and the Dark Gift

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[1] Well, technically, there are minds higher up the ladder of purpose that are also self-conscious, including certain human cities and nation-states, but that’s beyond the scope of this book. If you’re interested on learning more, you can read my books Journey of the Mind or Consciousness: How It’s Made.