Master Oogway Ascends and The Lesson of Perfect Things

Autism, AI animation and the human bridge of beauty

I've watched Kung Fu Panda at least 100 times, probably more. I'm not exaggerating. My 18-year-old autistic son Aidan watches a select few movies on loop, and that one is always in the rotation. Over the years I've had a chance to evaluate, likely on a deeper level than the filmmakers ever intended, the world of late 20th and early 21st century children's cinema.

What's remarkable is that, without grasping cultural cues and with only a partial understanding of the "messages," he still gravitates toward content of higher quality; more precisely, to individual scenes he replays again and again. That tells me something bridges how I see the world and how he sees it, running at a level below intellectual comprehension.

The scene where Master Oogway ascends to the afterlife is close to perfect.

Finding Nemo is nearly perfect end to end. Albert Brooks is flawless in it. So are multiple moments in Wall‑E.

Mandy Patinkin is perfect in The Princess Bride a film that is one of the few live action works that makes it into the rotation, because if any live action story has characters, pacing, and dialogue so precise they feel animated, it's The Princess Bride. Rob Reiner should know his movie can be watched 200 times and the sword‑fighting dialogue never wilts.

Whatever makes a piece of two-dimensional media with sound "perfect" is more than we understand. It isn't just the visuals, the music, or the jokes. There's a pace and texture to the dialogue my son can feel without tracking it at the intended intellectual level.

But, I promise I will not kill you until you reach the top.

That's VERY comforting, but I'm afraid you'll just have to wait.

I hate waiting.

We don't know exactly what shapes Aidan's cognitive profile. He shows tremendous spatial intelligence and can solve many complex tasks. In some ways he follows directions better than a typical teenager; in others he lacks the context to manage basic things. Brain scans show everything structurally sound, but much of his capacity seems rerouted into sensory channels. He has near‑eidetic memory for places and recalls the pitch and rhythm of every scene he loves. He "leaves us" and acts them out, replaying them in his mind.

Yet his selections aren't random.

The moments he can't stop watching are deeply crafted visual and auditory works. Some common ground exists between the artists who designed those scenes and whatever is happening inside his head, and that ground is untouched by his disabilities.

Whoever animated the rose petals that carry Oogway off into eternity created something beautiful in both my world and my son's. In that beauty we meet. I'm trying to live more in that shared space, because it feels like a core part of being human.

Which brings me to the contemporary conversation on AI. Large language models and image generators use mathematical prediction on unimaginable data sets to mimic artistic and intellectual choices. When I watch my son rewind Wall‑E dancing with Eve, I wonder: does an algorithm built on rational data inputs see what he sees? Can it replicate that experience?

LLMs might write poems. But I'm not sure they're traversing the same mental highway that connects us. Their artificial neural network is on the outside of Thomas Nagel's What It's Like to Be a Bat problem. It can mimic what the product of our imagination is. But they don't have the ability to understand what it is like for us…to be us. The math that is them is still downstream of Nagel's key claim, which is that an organism is conscious if there is "something it is like" to be that organism. This "what it is like-ness" (qualia) is tied to the organism's particular sensory point of view: a bat's echolocation, for example, yields a mode of experience humans cannot fully grasp or reconstruct from the outside.

My son does not have the same sensory input that I have. Or at least it's not routed to the same parts of the brain in the same ways as a neurotypical person. And so, like Nagel says, I don't actually know what it's like to be him. Not in a way where I can't empathize with other people with wide personal experience differentials from me. In a way so profound that he can't actually exist productively in a world that is built for a differently shaped consciousness.

Even if we build a system whose information processing and behavior are functionally indistinguishable from ours, Nagel says we still have no guarantee that there is anything it is like to be that system. Functional descriptions, source code, or objective read‑outs may replicate what brains do but do not capture what experiences feel like. Thus the mere fact that a large language model (or a future robot) passes behavioral tests such as the Turing test cannot settle the question of sentience.Nagel's challenge is "the explanatory gap": a gulf between objective accounts of physical processes and the emergence of first‑person experience.

Aidan’s experience with cinematic art, though, actually gives me some hope to believe.There are still bridges between us humans AI may never actually truly realize at a conscious level, but still may traverse in a way that connects us. What I see in the explanatory gap between my version of consciousness and my son's represents a hard block to artificial sentience. But not for utility. In the sort of Wall Facer problem that blocks out the bot's ability to predict what it's like to be him because he has no ability to share his internal reality with the mediums that create the data required to predict. The machine can only use what is outside of our heads. It can be from us, but not of us. But it can connect us.

Aidan’s a bat. And I can't create a common consciousness between a bat and I. But I suspect AI will one day. We've come a long way creating a shared world with people we once thought hopelessly impaired when we decided not to throw them away. And maybe in my lifetime, or his, we can do it with people like my son. For me the AI discussion isn’t about whether we can create consciousness where there is none yet. But instead connect ones divided by the abyss of perspective.