Autism and Understanding Others
Re-blogged from Autism and Understanding Others « Neuroanthropology
Amanda Baggs presents her own life and thoughts in her YouTube video, In My Language, her translation of how she is in a constant conversation with the world around her. She is autistic and does not speak. But she can type, and after three minutes showing her interacting with her environment, she uses computer technology to explain herself to us.
This is interesting to me because it provides a high contrast example of the difficulty of communication between cultures. It is difficult for many people, even academics, to grasp the idea that culture has a significant impact on what we perceive as real and existential. People from different cultures don’t see the same things, even when looking at the same entity. When walking through the Australian Outback, I come across a rock formation and I see it as a rock formation. When one of the indigenous persons of the area come across that same rock formation, they see it as Krantjirinja, their Kangaroo Ancestor. It’s not a “different interpretation” or differing “social constructions” that apply different words to the same entity. They are not the same entities.
Such is the case with Amanda Baggs. She perceives a completely different world, understands and communicates with and within it in completely different ways than non-autistic persons. Not understanding what she experiences during the first three minutes of the video–having no reference system with which to understand it–makes it frustrating for those of us who are used to a particular form of cultural interaction. If we give in to our frustration, we dismiss Amanda and pass up an opportunity to expand our cognitive horizons and understanding of the world (and the autistic persons in it). Amanda’s video is an extreme example, but we often don’t invest enough time to understand before dismissing people from other cultures or simply assuming that they see what we see.
The problem is the same for computational systems, especially across domains. Creating a “specification of a conceptualization” will never be able to address the issue of seeing completely different things, even if it is machine-readable. It’s difficult enough to construct an ontology for a single domain, but trying to do it across domains requires a completely different approach. Machine-readable specifications just wont’ cut it. It’s like trying to give a dictionary or a glossary to someone and telling them to learn to speak another language.
This is why I advocate for the introduction of culture into the study of ontologies in computational systems. Ontology is, after all, a philosophia prima that examines the notion of Being, explores the nature of existence and tries to describe what exists. But there are many ways to understand the nature of existence, and culture is the primary force in shaping our understanding of it. So if we are to be successful in developing ontologies for our information systems, we will have to incorporate an understanding of the culture that uses the technology and the information within the system. Only then will we be able to see what members of other cultures see and be able to translate information meaningfully.
Tags:cultural schemas, culture, ontology, perception, semantics understanding
