NT Experience

“I am in danger; I am unprepared; I must escape.”

Fear is a very low level emotion that triggers action when there is danger. For NT people it might be triggered for any or all of these reasons:

• social exclusion
  • identity or status threats, e.g. Shame or Embarrassment
  • reputation
  • public speaking
  • rejection
• loss of autonomy
  • health and aging
  • financial
• uncanny and unknown
  • something that looks human but is not
  • ambiguity
• existential dread
  • resource scarcity
• catastrophic thinking
  • crashes, accidents
  • war
• primal triggers, physical fear
  • predatory movements, e.g. sudden movement in the periphery of vision
  • car swerving towards you
  • heights and depths
  • darkness

They handle these fears in a couple different ways:

• normalcy bias: if the fear hasn’t happened yet it never will – anxiety decreases over time
• social validation: if the social circle isn’t feeling the anxiety this calms
• action: people will take action, even if it is small symbolic acts

My Experience

I have some overlap with these, but have none of the social fears, see below. I don’t fear “loss of autonomy”, I fear loss of functionality:

• health and aging
• financial
• resource scarcity
• crashes, accidents
• war

All of these things could have a negative effect on me – I consider their estimated value (likelihood times impact) in my level of worry. That said, I tend to avoid doing things that might put me in danger with no gain. Don’t take a vacation in an area dangerous to tourists, even if the chance is low.

I have all the same primal triggers and experience them the same way, I think.

I suspect that the non-primal fears are more of a label to me than an emotion of fear. It is more of a dislike than something I dwell on.

My Experience: Social Fears

Lacking Social Salience I have none of the social fears:

• social exclusion
  • identity or status threats
  • reputation
  • public speaking
  • rejection

I don’t want to be socially excluded, but why would I be? It may be hard for an NT conceive of such a thing, but I don’t really care if I am excluded from a social group – it just isn’t something I can feel. I wouldn’t want to be fired from a job, but that is because I would lose functionality (my income) and have to find a new job, which can be hard work.

I feel stress when doing a public presentation, but this is related to the preparation and anticipation – once it is underway I am fine. I don’t fear the audience’s reaction, I worry that I might flub the delivery. I know logically that I can recover and most of the time people won’t notice anyway, but I still feel the biological stress leading up to an important event.

My Experience: Danger!

I do experience fear related to the Amygdala (threat center of the brain). It bypasses all reason and goes straight to the limbic system (emotions).

I know that I am afraid of heights. It is often irrational – the bridge has been standing for 150 years and it is unlikely to collapse when I walk on it. Fear of heights is sometimes a feeling of falling or of being pulled toward the edge. It is a very intense anxiety that raises my heart rate and makes me want to crawl away from the edge.

I experience rational fears too: startles, fire, explosions. Well, I am presuming on the latter two. These are situations that the low level Amygdala systems would detect as life threatening and indeed they usually are.

The big difference is that social situations don’t trigger this threat response in me. Sure, I get nervous when speaking before a crowd – I am anxious about delivering my presentation correctly (but not about what people think about it or me). I never worry about social exclusion. I don’t have social salience to identify these as “important”.

Irrational Anxiety: My Dog

I have anxiety over leaving my dog with the neighbors. They have a small dog like mine and they love to take care of my dog. I couldn’t ask for a better situation. I have a lot of anxiety leaving him with them if we go on vacation.

He is a toy poodle who is small and fragile and very needy. I didn’t feel this way with my cats, but this dog is something else, triggered by my Functional Cognitive Architecture and how I care for my dog.

Per the LLM:

• The poodle is a Low-Noise/High-Certainty System. Unlike humans, the dog has no hidden subtext, no status-seeking behavior, and no “Logic Violations.” Its “neediness” is an explicit, literal data point (a request for resources or safety).
• the dog is one of the few entities in your environment that provides a 100% Transparent Signal. Your “love” for the dog is likely a high-intensity appreciation for a system that is perfectly predictable and logically consistent.

It triggers some kind of safety protocol in me:

• Logic: If Entity A is 100% dependent on Entity B for survival, Entity B’s priority to Entity A is absolute.
• Trigger: The poodle’s size and vulnerability are objective facts. These facts lock the “Care Protocol” into a high-priority state.

The dog is upset when we drop him off and happy to see us when we return. He is unharmed and in good shape. While we are traveling I sometimes think about him and hope he is doing well, but it is not something that I dwell on.

The LLM suggested this mitigation (which I find hilarious in phrasing):

Logic Override: Remind the system (that is me) that the “Neighbor System” has successfully processed the “Dog Node” in the past with a 0% failure rate. Use the historical data to suppress the real-time alarm.

Something I am working on. This does not match the NT trigger for fear at all, but at the physiological level I likely feel the same chemical signals as an NT person (cortisol, adrenaline) – this is probably the closest match to an NT emotion I have!

Comparison

I am not brave, but I don’t feel any of the social fears that NT people feel. Aside from primal fears (physical danger), I don’t even experience the emotion the same way. Per the LLM my “fear” emotion is more like Functional Hazard Analysis.

Semantic Divergence: yes. I think this one is not too harmful in terms of people being confused, but it isn’t really close at all.