When Disorder Does Not Mean a Lack of Order

On autism, heterogeneity, and what we mean by a human being

I received my diagnosis late in life. In the language of diagnosis, there is one word I have never quite managed to make my own: disorder.

Autism Spectrum Disorder.

The word carries an implication that troubles me. It seems to assume that something which ought to have been ordered has somehow fallen out of order. Somewhere in the background there is a normal pattern, and the diagnosis names the deviation from it.

I have therefore preferred to speak of a condition. Autism spectrum condition. Not because the word condition removes the challenges. They are real enough. Some situations demand more of me than they seem to demand of others. Sensory impressions can become overwhelming. Social situations may require a degree of attention that others perhaps do not have to mobilise in the same way. There are limits I have had to learn to recognise.

But a difficult phenomenon of life is not necessarily better understood because we call it a disorder.

That is why the title of an article in Science made me stop:

Disorder-promoted stability.

Disorder that promotes stability.

When difference makes the system more stable

Arthur N. Montanari, Pietro Zanin, and Adilson E. Motter study complex dynamical networks. Their work is not about autism, but about oscillators, power grids, ecological systems, neuronal networks, and other complex systems. Yet their findings challenge an assumption that reaches beyond mathematics.

In many simpler models, a system has been assumed to be most stable when its components resemble one another. Homogeneity creates order; heterogeneity creates instability. The researchers show that this does not necessarily hold when a system is sufficiently complex. In certain kinds of networks, variation among the components can instead increase stability. The most stable state may require symmetry to be broken.

What is equally interesting is why earlier models could produce a different picture. When complex systems are reduced to simpler mathematical descriptions, properties of the interaction between their parts can disappear from view. Montanari and colleagues show that such reductions may, in some cases, conceal the stabilising role of heterogeneity.

The brain is mentioned in precisely this context, as a complex network. In their discussion, the authors also refer to recent research suggesting that cellular heterogeneity contributes to self-organisation and to information processing in the brain.

This does not mean that autism makes the brain “more stable.” The article gives us no grounds for such a conclusion. But it does disturb a simpler assumption: that biological order necessarily means the greatest possible degree of similarity.

A living brain is not ordered because all its parts are alike.

It works through differences.

And then comes the word “disorder”

This is where I meet my own diagnosis again.

Autism is described as a spectrum. That alone should make us cautious. People on the autism spectrum can differ greatly from one another. There is no single feature that tells the whole story.

And yet the term ends with disorder.

The word has a medical function. Diagnoses need to identify people who experience difficulties, need support, or require accommodation. We lose something essential if the wish for less burdened language makes disability or suffering invisible.

But diagnosis also does something more.

It interprets.

It does not simply say that a difference exists. It places that difference within a framework of understanding in which something has already been defined as order, and something else as a deviation from that order.

This is what the Science article made me see more clearly. Not because mathematics can decide how autism should be understood, but because it demonstrates how dependent our judgment of “order” can be on the model we use.

What do we mean by order?

Here the question moves from natural science to hermeneutics.

Gadamer reminds us that understanding never begins from a neutral point. We encounter the world through concepts, experiences, and expectations that are already at work within us. Prejudices, in his original sense of the word, are not necessarily mistaken judgments. They are the provisional understandings that make interpretation possible.

Disorder is also an interpretive concept.

It acquires meaning only in relation to something we already regard as order.

In many contexts, this is unproblematic. If an organ can no longer perform a function necessary for life, it makes sense to speak of illness or loss of function. No one is helped by romanticising suffering as mere difference.

But when we move into the domain of human neurological variation, the boundary becomes less self-evident.

What is the normal human being from whom the autistic person is said to deviate?

Statistical averages exist. They may be necessary in both research and medicine. But the statistically typical human being is not a human being one can meet.

This is also why I prefer condition to disorder. Condition describes a particular state or circumstance of my life without, in the word itself, already determining the norm against which that state must be measured.

I could perhaps go further and call it a way of being in the world.

But that formulation, too, must be used with care. For some people, autism involves profound functional difficulties. Our language must be able to hold both realities: the difference and the difficulty.

Difference is not automatically a strength

At this point, the Science article offers a necessary correction.

The researchers explicitly emphasise that their findings do not mean that every form of heterogeneity increases stability. In many systems, variation is destabilising. Its effects depend on the structure of the system, the interaction among its parts, and the degree of heterogeneity. Even in their own models, too much variation can lead to instability.

That reservation matters when I read the article in the light of autism.

I do not want to replace one simple story with another.

It would be just as misleading to say that autism is always a gift as to say that it is always a deficit.

Some of the traits I live with have been difficult. Others are inseparable from the way I work, concentrate, remember, notice details, and remain with a question long after others might have moved on.

I do not know how one could draw a line through this human being and say:

Here the difficulty ends, and here the strength begins.

There is only one life.

A human being is not a diagnosis

This is where Buber enters.

The distinction between I–It and I–Thou does not mean that we can dispense with categories. The physician needs them. The researcher needs them. Institutions need them. I also need the diagnosis if it helps me understand certain experiences in my own life.

The problem begins when the category brings the encounter to an end.

Then the diagnosis is no longer knowledge about the person. It becomes the person.

“He is autistic.”

Full stop.

The I–It relation is unavoidable. We need to be able to observe, examine, compare, and classify. But Buber reminds us that the human being is never exhausted by such observation.

In the encounter with a Thou, there is always more than the category can contain.

That also applies when the person I am trying to understand is myself.

Meeting oneself as more than a collection of symptoms

Here I think Heidegger can help in a different way from either Gadamer or Buber.

We do not first stand outside life and examine ourselves as objects. We already find ourselves within a world of relationships, work, places, memories, habits, possibilities, and people we care about. Before we describe ourselves, we live.

I lived a long life before I received an autism diagnosis.

I worked, taught, wrote, was a husband and a father, made mistakes, succeeded at some things and failed at others, cared for people, withdrew when the world became too overwhelming, and found ways of living with it.

Then the diagnosis came.

It changed my understanding of much that had already happened. Experiences that had previously seemed scattered could suddenly be seen together. Some things acquired a name.

But I did not come into being when the diagnosis was made.

It is a simple point, but philosophically an important one. A diagnosis meets a human being who is already in the world. It may illuminate that existence, but it never comes first.

That also changes the question of disorder.

I am not first a collection of symptoms that then attempts to live a human life.

I lived a human life before the symptoms were given a name.

Order without uniformity

I return to the figures in the Science article.

In the simpler systems, optimal stability lies close to homogeneity. The components resemble one another.

As the internal dynamics become more complex, the picture can change. The most stable configuration may then be heterogeneous. In some models, stability may even require symmetry to be broken.

This is where the scientific analogy ends.

A human being is not a network of oscillators, and autism cannot be understood by directly transferring a mathematical theory of stability to the brain or to human life.

But sometimes a scientific discovery can do something else. It can disturb a metaphor we no longer knew we were using.

This article disturbs the assumption that order requires sameness.

That is enough.

Neuroscience shows us a brain characterised by variation and complex interaction. Network science shows us that homogeneity is not always the condition for stability. Gadamer draws attention to the understanding of “order” that we ourselves bring to what we see. Buber reminds us that the category never exhausts the person. Heidegger returns us to a life that is already being lived before it is classified.

I therefore do not need to decide whether my autism is really a disorder or really a gift.

Both formulations are too simple.

The question is how this way of being human forms part of a life, and how the person and the surrounding world together can create the conditions in which that life can be lived.

Order need not mean the absence of difference.

It may lie in the way differences are allowed to belong together.

References

Buber, M. (1970). I and thou (W. Kaufmann, Trans.). Charles Scribner’s Sons. (Original work published 1923)

Dahmen, D., Hutt, A., Indiveri, G., Kennedy, A., Lefebvre, J., Mazzucato, L., Motter, A. E., Narayanan, R., Payvand, M., Planert, H., & Gast, R. (2026). How heterogeneity shapes dynamics and computation in the brain. Neuron, 114, 804–819.

Gadamer, H.-G. (2004). Truth and method (J. Weinsheimer & D. G. Marshall, Trans.; 2nd rev. ed.). Continuum. (Original work published 1960)

Heidegger, M. (2010). Being and time (J. Stambaugh, Trans.; D. J. Schmidt, Rev.). State University of New York Press. (Original work published 1927)

Montanari, A. N., Zanin, P., & Motter, A. E. (2026). Disorder-promoted stability. Science, 393(6817), 1241–1249. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aeg3946

Padmanabhan, K., & Urban, N. N. (2010). Intrinsic biophysical diversity decorrelates neuronal firing while increasing information content. Nature Neuroscience, 13(10), 1276–1282. https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.2630