> What if, one day, people look back on ASD/autism/Asperger's/etc just as we now look back on hysteria, phlogiston, the luminiferous aether, the Ptolemaic model, the steady-state universe, etc, etc, etc?
None of that makes sense, in that new ideas about how the world works can't change the results of old experiments. That means I'll always be me, I'll always have been me, and part of that involves dealing with things that are, apparently, significantly different from what other people deal with. I am different from other people, regardless of what name is eventually hung on that, and just saying that name can't be "Autism" for some reason or another isn't changing the important part.
Here's a paper I really like – https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6880188/ – they looked at the brains of four groups of children – those with a primary diagnosis of ASD, ADHD, OCD and the "typically developing" ("normal" children with no diagnosis at all). They used machine learning to assign the children to clusters, based purely on brain imaging and test results (IQ and behavioural scales) – without any reference to the diagnostic labels. The 10 clusters they got had poor overlap with the diagnostic labels – see especially figure 3 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6880188/figure/...
I don't think their research is at all the "final answer" to what is "really going on" – it needs replication, and you might get different clusters if you added more diagnoses – but let's just pretend for the moment it is. People with an ASD diagnosis were in all 10 clusters, so who knows which one you would be in. Now, given your emphasis on "I am different", maybe you are in one of the clusters which is "further from normal", such as 8 or 9 or 10. But, whatever "you have", it would be clear that (1) plenty of people who "have ASD" don't "have what you have", (2) unless you happen to be in cluster 10, the sole ASD-only cluster (which only had 10-15% of ASD), some people who "don't have ASD" do "have what you have". Doesn't it therefore follow, that whatever it is, "autism" or "ASD" or "Aspeger's" isn't a good label for it?
OK, I think I agree with you: We don't know if ASD or any of our current diagnoses are a particularly good model, but it is possible to cluster people and some people are farther from whatever group of clusters collectively contains the majority or strong plurality.
None of that makes sense, in that new ideas about how the world works can't change the results of old experiments. That means I'll always be me, I'll always have been me, and part of that involves dealing with things that are, apparently, significantly different from what other people deal with. I am different from other people, regardless of what name is eventually hung on that, and just saying that name can't be "Autism" for some reason or another isn't changing the important part.