[MD] How far do you go to preserve individual life?

[Magnus Berg]

Arlo

On 2010-09-17 20:50, ARLO J BENSINGER JR wrote:
> [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.

Didn't you read my complete post? I compared that dependency which you 
defend, with other, much more direct dependencies. If this was a direct 
dependency, then the person would lose all capabilities to think and 
forget all memories at the exact moment it was removed from society. 
It's a pretty easy experiment and the answer is no, no, no.

The long term, or even short term effects is not what I call dependency, 
but much closer to the other word I mentioned in my last post, catalyst. 
(only in your example above it's rather the opposite

> 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.

I'm sorry but you're simply stuck in old ways of thinking. It's *not* 
more accurate to my analogy. My thought experiments with the different 
levels started with a functional object built of different dependent 
patterns. Then I removed lower level patterns and could see that all 
higher level patterns vanished *immediately*! Your description is 
something completely different, not analogous at all. So all these 
studies of tragic cases simply doesn't apply.

	Magnus