#relating to objects

It’s about the way people interact with robotic AI technology, so far.  Like robot dogs and Furby and Tamagotchi and that seal thing and assorted humanoid and semi-humanoid robots including robot babies, all of which are designed to interact with people in a way that previous technology wasn’t.  The author is particularly concerned with how these things become an inadequate substitute for real relationships with humans and other animals.

It would be easy to react to the book in one of two ways:  To assume the author is some kind of Luddite who doesn’t like technology of certain kinds because her generation isn’t accustomed to it.  Or to assume that she’s absolutely right that you can’t have a reciprocal relationship with an object, and that thinking you can perverts the meaning of actual empathy and human connection (or human-animal connection as the case may be).

And I’m not finding myself having, exactly, either of those responses.  But I’m not finding myself exactly not having them either.

I do think that some of her alarm and distaste in this area is generational.  (Which makes me wonder about mine, given that I fall into an in-between generation, too old for Tamagotchi and the like but young enough for Merlin and Speak&Spell, both of which she references as qualitatively different from Furby and Tamagotchi and things like that.)  I really do catch some assumptions she’s making about the world that seem to be cultural in nature, and time-based too.

At the same time, I share some of her alarm at what she’s seeing.  But I’m not sure the alarm comes from the same source.

There’s a frequent -- and incredibly wrong -- assumption made about autistic people’s tendency to become extremely attached to inanimate objects.  And that is, that we live in the same world that most nonautistic Westerners see when they see the world of objects -- a world of dead things, things that can’t interact with you in any meaningful way, things that don’t have experiences of their own.  So they assume that our entire world, including our social world with other humans, is dead like the dead they see when they interact with objects.

But having talked to a lot of autistic people, and from my own experiences, it’s not like that at all.  It’s not that we experience the entire world as dead.  It’s that many of us experience the entire world, inanimate objects and all, as alive, and real, and rich in experience and possibilities for connection.  My father and I talk to rocks, so do a lot of my friends, and the rocks talk back in their fashion.  People always then assume we’re anthropomorphizing, which we’re not.  Things talk by means of being what they are, on a physical level.  They don’t spout little cartoon mouths and start saying words to us. And what they are is what they are -- not some kind of human-like substitute.

And so I completely reject the idea that it’s impossible to form reciprocal relationships with objects, and that any relationship with an object is a ‘dead’ one, one-sided, and ultimately unfulfilling.  No.  To me, everything around me is alive, in an incredibly joyous way, and I am never alone.

But.

I think she’s onto something when she says that these robots can force a mode of interaction that’s artificial and manipulative.  They pretend to be something they aren’t, and in doing so they manipulate our emotional reactions to them.  And then we develop these relationships with them that can be incredibly hollow and ‘dead’ at the core despite feeling like real relationships.  

And that can be exploited as a way to give, for instance, elderly people, fake companionship instead of real companionship, because it’s easier than actually not locking them away in nursing homes and abandoning them.  The author noted that several times during the study, the elderly residents of certain nursing homes would participate entirely so that they could interact with the researchers because they were starved for actual human interactions, and the robots were clearly their second choice of companions.

And... I think she’s onto something with all this.  But I don’t think the problem is that the robots are objects and that you can’t have a meaningful relationship with an object.  I think it’s more like, the robots behave as if they are something they are not, which puts people into a kind of relationship with them that isn’t authentic, and something weird happens there that I don’t know how to describe, but does contain an emptiness at its core that’s highly unsettling.  And it’s not because the robots are objects.  It’s because they’re not honestly what they are, somehow. And I don’t know how to explain that or differentiate it from normal relationships with objects -- ones that can be absolutely fulfilling -- but there is a difference and it’s an important one.

[This is a reply to a private message.  As such, some information is being left out to preserve anonymity.  The subject is the difference between the way I relate to, say, my dad-shirts, and the way many people become ‘owned’ by objects in a negative sense, where the amount of possessions they have controls their life and makes them unhappy, regardless of whether it’s a few or a lot.  I’d suspect it’s the nature of the attachment, not the number of possessions, that causes that problem.  Anyway, on to the post.]

The physical world is my mind, in some ways.  I don’t hold complex thoughts in my head very well.  They start slipping out of my head, or slipping out of sight, or messing up my ability to think and perceive other things that are more important.  So I have always said, let the world be the world.  The world can hold all the complexity it needs.  I don’t need to hold it all in my head for it.  It’s still going to be there whether I’m thinking about it or not.

But the difficulty holding all these thoughts and feelings in my head on a conscious level, means that I often use objects to represent those different things.  Especially useful are objects that are saturated with meaning.  If I only had the words to describe all the things I can perceive in it, I could go on all day about my mother’s alpaca-wool poncho she recently sent me.  It contains many memories from before the age of four years old, it involves my mother, it involves love, it involves a lot of important things.  It’s as much a mom-poncho as the shirts they sent are dad-shirts.

And yes — this way of relating to objects is very different from being owned by objects.  It also may help that I see objects as having their own life.  So I don’t try to shackle their life to me.  I don’t try to make them into extensions of me, or to tie myself to them in ways that create discomfort for me and something akin to discomfort for the object in question.  My way of relating to objects is similar to my way of relating to people — and there, too, I find the wrong sort of attachment to be extremely destructive to both parties involved.

I do try to keep my possessions to a minimum for a large number of reasons.  But the possessions I do own, and do keep around, often have specific meanings to me.  And they hold those meanings outside of my head, so that I don’t have to hold the meanings inside my head.

I wanted to elaborate on this because of an ask I got that was actually a private message so I can’t reply to it as an ask.  I think this is an interesting topic, and I would love to go into it further, but I don’t really have the words.  I was hoping I could paint you a beautiful picture of how I relate to objects and what it does and doesn’t mean to me.  Instead, I’ve managed to describe a couple things and that’s all.  Maybe I’ll be able to come back to it later.  

Also, to relate to an object in this way, it doesn’t have to be ‘mine’.  It can be an object that only belongs to itself, or that belongs to someone else, but I can still relate to it as a friend, sort of.  My friend Anne has a house that I have a strong relationship with even though I have never set foot in it.  The house has a specific personality and it has shown interest in me — or at least that is how I would describe such things, not knowing any better way to do it.  

(I’m not unaware of what ‘inanimate’ means.  People tend to think I just need it explained, verrry slowwwwly.  But that’s not the issue, the issue is a major difference in worldview.  This is not about ‘retaining childhood anthropomorphic characteristics’ nor is it about ‘primitive belief systems like animism’ — both of those are very condescending at best, and definitely inaccurate.  I don’t see objects as being human-like, I just see them as having a life that is very uniquely their own, nothing else has a shape quite like it, and decidedly not human.)

And I think that it’s very possible to form relationships with objects without becoming owned by objects in a negative way.  I understand why some people would want to avoid relationships with objects altogether, too.  I just happen to relate to objects on so many levels — mental, emotional, and spiritual — that they’re a very important part of my life.  But they never own me.  And aside from legally, I try not to own them.  It’s important to me that they be what they are meant to be, not what I want them to be.

Another thing objects have been huge for me with is communication.  If I have arranged objects around me in a certain way, then it means something, usually, and something that some people are able to pick up on and others are not.  Some autistic people also arrange ideas around themselves in the same manner.  But for me it's mostly objects.  If I want to add in an idea, I find a book about that idea and add it to the object collection.  I used to call it my 'connection collection' and was amazed when the very first person ever followed it and found me at the center -- the message of the objects was "Here I am.  Over here.  Right over here.  Please see me?"  I've talked to other autistic people who did the same things, with varying degrees of success.

Many autistic people relate to objects in a way that is similar to the way I do, for what it’s worth.  And many autistic people go “WTF?” when I try to explain it to them.  So it’s one of those things, as so many things in autistic people, that can go both ways.  But I definitely get the sense that this pattern of relating to objects is far more common in autistic people than nonautistic people.  It’s been described in the literature since the very beginning, for one thing, although they often get it wrong.  (They see our “attachment to objects” as “attachment” to something cold and hard and unloving, when actually our “attachment to objects” tends to be full of the same warmth and love that people experience in friendships.  As usual, they find a way to make the presence of something sound like the absence of something, because it’s easier to pathologize us that way.)

Anyway, for me an object contains so much detailed information that nothing quite is the same as an object.  An object can be felt, smelled, looked at, tasted, and tapped on to listen to. In a purely sensory way, objects are complex.  If you start looking at the patterns between what you see in a sensory or pre-sensory way, you start getting more and more complexity.  But you don't need to hold the complexity in your head, because it's all there in the object.  So each object has its own life, its own personality, its own meaning, and that can be very important to some people.