sense-data impresses itself upon my consciousness, and my mind tries to create a meaningful pattern out of that data. It constructs a friend-function, just like I construct an author-function when I read a literary text. And sometimes (frequently!) my construction of the friend-function proves to be inadequate; a new piece of canon comes along (i.e. she says or does something I don't expect) and I have re-construct the function to fit it.

Life is a text; the processes we implement to interpret it are, on some level, literary analysis.

*nods along happily*

having seen how people react to this idea in class I suspect for some people this idea kicks over one of the things they thought was solid about the world, a bit of a Matrix moment. They do not like it one bit. I, however, felt relieved that someone else noticed.

I have a further theory based on the idea Neurotypicals take some sort of template and tweak it to fit new people and starting with similar templates end up playing the same game and thinking they 'know' each other. But autistic spectrum people start from scratch every time and try and patch together a person from data, which actually takes a lot more data than it seems, especially for people that don't have a pilot episode to tell you all the stuff they consider important. And the resulting pictures can end up very very different from each other. Not playing same game, end up with much confusion. But that theory needs a whole lot more work and, you know, facts to go in it.