I've observed that quite a bit of the disagreement with the substance of my post is due to people believing that the level of distrust for one's own brain that I advocate is excessive. (See this comment by SarahC, for example.)

It occurs to me that I should explain exactly why I do not trust my own brain.

In the past week I have noted the following instances in which my brain has malfunctioned; each of them is a class of malfunction I had never previously observed in myself:

(It may be relevant to note that I have AS.)

• I needed to open a box of plastic wrap, of the sort with a roll inside a box, a flap that lifts up, and a sharp edge under the flap. The front of the box was designed such that there were two sections separated by some perforation; there's a little set of instructions on the box that tells you to tear one of those sections off, thus giving you a functional box of plastic wrap. I spent approximately five minutes trying to tear the wrong section off, mangling the box and cutting my finger twice in the process. This was an astonishing failure to solve a basic physical task.

• I was making bread dough, a process which necessitates measuring out 4.5 cups of flour into a bowl. My mind was not wandering to any unusual degree, nor was I distracted or interrupted. I lost count of the number of consecutive cups of flour I was pouring into the bowl; I failed to count to four and a half.

• I was playing Puzzle Quest (a turn-based videogame that mostly involves match-3 play of the sort made popular by Bejewled) while reading comments on LessWrong, switching between tasks every few minutes. I find that doing this gives me time to think over things I've just read; it's also fun. At one point, as I switching from looking at a comment I had just finished reading to looking at my TV screen, I suddenly began to believe that matching colored gems was the process by which one constructed sound arguments. In general. This sensation lasted approximately five seconds before reality reasserted itself.

I might not have even really noticed these brain malfunctions if I hadn't spent significant effort recently on becoming more luminous; I'm inclined to believe that there have been plenty of other such events in the past that I have failed to notice.

In any case, I hope this explains why I am so afraid of my own brain.