[Magnus] Take the same person, which is supposedly dependent on the society in which it lives, and remove it from that society. Will the intellectual patterns vanish? Not a chance! That is *not* dependency.
[Arlo] There is a lot of evidence to support the contrary. Effects of the sort of extreme isolation you mention have been shown to have massive degenerative effects on human cognition, even after only a very short time. Psychological breakdowns often begin with hallucinations and lead rapidly to severe schizophrenic behavior. There is a reason why forced isolation is considered a form of torture. While the long term effects of this sort of extreme isolation can only be extrapolated from the rare case study involved a re-socialization of someone desocialized for long amounts of time, it is clear the loss of identity, animalistic behavior and a complete loss of higher forms of cognition are fairly certain in these cases. Also, your initial example is flawed. A socialized human can, of course, survive as a social being without continued direct human interaction, but its more accurate for your analogy to ask, if a human infant (hypothetically, let's say immediately after birth) were sent "to the moon" and survived in absolute isolation from any social world until he say he was twenty, the question is would he be "intellectual" in any way. From the studies involving feral children, to the self-reporting of Helen Keller, the answer appears to be a flat out no. This is supported by the MOQ's theory that intellect emerges out of society and NOT biology. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
