Autistic anthropomorphism

A follow up question to the previous chat with the AI...

What is autistic anthropomorphism?

Autistic anthropomorphism is a term sometimes used in psychology and philosophy of mind to describe a tendency—reported by some autistic people and observed clinically—for attributing sentience, personality, or emotional life to non-human things, objects, or systems, sometimes to a heightened or unusual degree.

It is not a clinical diagnosis or official category, but rather a descriptive idea that appears in autistic self-reports, neurodiversity literature, and cognitive-science discussions about how minds relate to the non-human world.

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✅ Key Features

Autistic anthropomorphism may involve:

• Seeing objects, plants, or systems as having agency or inner life

• Feeling emotional connection to non-human entities (toys, machines, patterns)

• Assigning personality or moral qualities to abstract things (numbers, colors, days)

• Experiencing objects as relational partners, not only tools

This often coincides with:

• High pattern sensitivity

• Low default social bias toward humans

• Rich internal imaginative or symbolic life

• Atypical theory-of-mind processes (but not absence of empathy)

This does not mean autistic people can’t tell objects from persons—
it means the boundary is felt differently or experienced in more fluid ways.

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✅ Contrast With Neurotypical Anthropomorphism

Neurotypical anthropomorphism	Autistic anthropomorphism
Often symbolic/temporary (“my car doesn’t want to start today”)	Often relational, sustained, experiential (“my car is tired and I feel for it”)
Social cognition overflow applied to objects	Object- and pattern-based cognition extended into social feeling
Usually playful metaphor	Can be intuitive reality or emotional truth
Driven by social imagination	Driven by sensory, emotional, and pattern meaning

One could say:

Neurotypicals anthropomorphize because they see social agency everywhere.
Autistics anthropomorphize because they see meaning and aliveness in things, not just in humans.

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✅ Relation to Animism & Mysticism

Some autism researchers and mystics have noted parallels between autistic anthropomorphism and:

• Indigenous animism

• Process philosophy / panpsychism

• Vedanta & Kashmir Shaivism (consciousness everywhere)

• Romantic and Hermetic worldviews

This doesn’t make it “supernatural” or “pathological” — it points to a mode of perception.

It may reflect:

• A non-hierarchical sense of reality

• Sensitivity to qualities rather than categories

• A “world in which everything participates in being”

Some autistic writers describe it as innate felt animism.

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✅ A More Respectful Framing

Rather than “autistic anthropomorphism,” many neurodivergent thinkers prefer:

• Animistic cognition

• Object-relational empathy

• Non-anthropocentric empathy

• Distributed sentience intuition

Because the term “anthropomorphism” assumes humans are the template for being alive.

Many autistic people don’t assume that —
they simply experience agency and presence as not limited to humans.

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✅ Why It Matters

This trait challenges mechanistic assumptions:

• What if seeing the world as “partly alive” is not a deficit?

• What if the autistic mind preserves an ancient perceptual mode modernity lost?

• What if the “default state” of human consciousness was animism, not materialism?

It suggests:

Some autistic minds treat the world not as objects, but as companions in existence.

This could be:

• A cognitive variation

• A spiritual sensitivity

• A philosophical challenge

• A bridge to ecological empathy

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🌿 A Closing Thought

Modern society often pathologizes modes of knowing that don’t fit mechanistic expectations.

But if the world is not fundamentally dead matter,
then autistic anthropomorphism may not be “error”—

It may be a perception many mystics spent their lives trying to remember.

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Would you like next:

👉 Philosophical implications (panpsychism, McGilchrist, Whitehead)

👉 Autistic writing on animistic perception

👉 Evolutionary theory of “social vs object empathy”

👉 Jungian view of distributed psyche in nature

Tell me which direction interests you.