/lit/ - Literature

>>16440519
>>16440519
Autism as an extreme disease is real, but our new spectrum thinking is wrong in that it categorizes normal variations of personality as pathological. I.e. there are a lot of people who wrote articles saying "I was autistic for 43 years and didn't know it." Meanwhile they have a good job, a wife and kids. Aka autism, whatever it is, can't be that bad. Essentially these people are a bit idiosyncratic but in no way pathological, and often these idiosyncratic types of people- in myers briggs terminology, IN's, or introverted intuitives (intp, intj, infj, infp) are hugely overrepresented in genius intellects, great writers, great theorists etc. So you're right, the thinking dimension is not as important as introversion/extroversion and intuition/sensing. Essentially, IN's have huge internal landscapes made of theoretical information, meaning they create novel worldviews which make them idiosyncratic / socially a bit weird, often, but they simultaneously have the ability to create useful theories/ have exceptional long term strategic planning skills. (depending on type- inxp's tend to have greater theory building abilities, inxj's tend to have greater long term strategic abilities.)

I worked in summer and after school camps for 4 years, was a Barista, and taught English to 3-17 year olds in China for a year. So lots of interaction with children, parents, and coworkers. It was really hard especially in the beginning but I wouldn't trade it. The drive came from a huge sense of inadequacy, my older brother was a charismatic sports captain in school and my parents liked him much more than me, and he effectively manipulated them with his charm. No hard feelings anymore, but my inadequacy next to him really drove me to succeed socially and become someone other people wanted.

I don't think fulfillment comes only from within for the vast majority. Maybe if you forsake possessions and go meditate for a decade or two. For most people happiness and fulfillment are unlocked by living in accordance with human nature, essentially filling the voids within our nature, which generally are sex, romance, respect, some material possessions, a sense of belonging etc. Which means most of us are best off meeting our needs and learning how to draw the line when they become excessive. Pure asceticism is largely a cope and excuse in most people.
Anyway man my only concern is your happiness, I hope you find it. Its a bitch of a world these days.

>>15098315
I'm not a fan of 'intrinsic value' because it has a lot of cultural baggage and pre-existing interpretations that make it difficult to convey your meaning to others who already have their own rigid definition of what the statement means. That being said, yes, 'intrinsic value' loosely fits 'truth,' if truth is defined as a correspondence between our mental frameworks and some noumenous 'reality-as-it-is.'
In the sense that saying 'fire burns your hand' keeps you from touching fire, or 'he is a liar,' if the statement is true, keeps you from trusting him and consequently better allows you to navigate the world and attain your ends. Truth is in a sense 'power,' and man uses uses 'power' to attain his ends, which can generally be called states of happiness/eudaimonia. In this sense, if we go deeper, it isn't truth and the power that it unlocks that has intrinsic value, because I hold that subjective states are the true intrinsic value which we spontaneously seek- that being said, the only way to achieve subjective states we desire is through knowledge of ourselves and the world so that we can properly navigate through time and transform into potential states of mind which we wish to attain. In this sense, Truth and Happiness/ eudaimonia are fundamentally linked and no different, and so you could again say truth does have intrinsic value. Then you could argue that a baby doesn't know anything and is taken care of by its parents, so its achieving happiness/eudaimonia without knowledge, but that relies on an overly individualistic sense of what constitutes knowledge- the child doesn't 'know truth' and achieve eudaimonia through it, which appears to disconnect truth from subjective states and therefore from intrinsic value, but then again it is attaining eudaimonia through its parent's and their knowledge of what a baby needs, and so the baby is being given eudaimonia through truth, even though it is not the baby's personal truth.

The point is yes, I believe truth is intrinsically good, but this whole digression and need to constantly justify small inconsequential linguistic inconsistencies is my problem with modern philosophy and its hyper-logical focus which keeps us from accepting things we intrinsically know to be true.