Blacks have long been using nigger amongst themselves, and like retard, it has a beneign meaning which is merely loaded with negative connotations by the public. Value subtractions. I wonder if they use it for the same reason I wouldn’t care if I’m retarded. I’ve been called “slow” by officials and teachers etc etc a bunch of times. My current boss is torturing me with hint-jokes like “you’re not invited…just kidding”. It’s not that someone’s calling them word X but it’s what word X is understood by them to mean. It’s partially revealed in tone and gesture, surrounded by laughter, anger, sadness or delight and other emotionally unnecessary loading. I guess it’s true that “words are not things”.

Oh, I also liked you taking on Peter Singer. It should go without saying that I’m very opposed to his school of thought. I’m dealing with a few acquaintences right now who are arguing for eugencistic ideas. I’m going to be sharing this video…I want people to understand. I wish I could make a video too. I might. I’m of course different as an individual …but all the same, autistic. I’m still trying to learn how to use my camera (lol) but I am “slow” there. ;) I need to find a good AVI to MPG converter in particular for Youtube submitting in the size, rate, compression they want it in.

Nice to finally “meet” you (in a sense). :) I hope you can soon meet me. *g*

What I’d consider concrete, are the direct sensory experiences of whatever the thing is, like sound, texture, color, etc, but without conceptualizing what that sound, texture, color, etc are.

As far as remembering things… just because you’re not contemplating what’s going around you in the usual sense of contemplation, does not mean you’re not encoding memory. And, just because you’re not contemplating in an abstract way, does not mean you’re not thinking, even though it can seem like that if you take the definition wrong. (Sue Rubin also experienced time periods like that, but she refers to it as “not thinking” and herself at the time as a “non-person”, whereas I only use “non-person” when describing dehumanized portrayals and such.)

Like, for instance, a good example everything becomes patterns of light and shadow and sound and texture, and my body gets caught up in the patterns and chases them around, and I am reacting to my surroundings but the way I am thinking of them is so foreign from abstract thought as to not really be an abstraction, it’s more an immediate reaction, and things like emotions and movements and so forth come and go without much if any sense of time or continuity. Things appear and disappear and rearrange and anything I’m not directly perceiving is not there as far as I’m concerned and was never there, things have always been as they are right then. This of course does not translate well into a language that embeds time and continuity into description. Most of it does, however, encode into long-term memory. And I can assure you my personhood is quite intact at those times, just because I don’t think about myself or time or really abstract about anything (even enough to identify objects, colors, etc) doesn’t mean I’m not there. I’m not — never am, not even right now — the sum total of my conscious rational thought processes, I am many things that are not deliberate or conscious and those are very real and important parts of me, always. And of anyone. People who spend all their time thinking abstractly (and I mean abstract as in, even knowing what “pencil” and “yellow” are are abstract) tend to be very attached to it, and very unaware of how much of their thought processes goes on beneath that all the time, and very afraid of losing it, and very identified with it to the point where they feel like it is their very basis for personhood.

WRT animals, I think all living things (not just animals) are persons in the sense I view personhood, including living things with no brains. Just because they are alien to humans doesn’t mean they don’t have their own structure and way of doing things and innate desire to survive and so forth. Human-centric and non-disabled-human-centric definitions of personhood are of no interest to me, but Singerian definitions of personhood are also of no interest to me.