kontextmaschine:

So one take-away from the personality change maybe making me unautistic is that the antonym of “ask culture” isn’t guess culture, they’re not (now I’m not) guessing, there really is some sort of interpersonal signal they’re (we’re) picking up.

But it’s not like an information-carrying signal, or at least one that gets delivered to the consciousness, it’s not like as if where before I’d be like “oh I want to make a romantic move but I don’t know the right moment” I pay attention to the signal and it tells me what the right moment is and so I can decide to do it then.

What it is is that being attuned to this signal, I will make that move at some point that happens to be the ideal moment, without ever having specifically considered and decided on that.

I dunno, maybe this is what instinct is? Whereas previously I had thought of it in terms of information (like “this is the moment”) arriving without any obvious source that would then serve as an input to the same conscious decisionmaking process?

I guess I’d say it’s like driving an automatic transmission – you’re absolutely still the driver, but there’s a bunch of stuff you used to have to do manually – choosing to execute a particular maneuver at a particular time – that the mechanism now takes care of itself.

A difference being that I like stick shifts because direct control lets me shift at useful times the mechanism wouldn’t pick up on – engine braking, downshifting into turns or to pass – but the automatic mechanism here seems to shift me usefully in situations I’d have no clue what to do with myself.