feral children never develop what I would call the higher thinking. They still have mobility, spatial, etc. But "consciousness" is probably not something they really put together.
This is just my opinion. I think it took most of your brain to formulate that rebuttal, not concurrently, but as a deep and rich model of how readers might respond to a given argument, and weighing in a narrative sense your remembered experience vs what you "heard" me say in your head when you looked at these squiggly lines. Probably you even had a nascent image of me that was an amalgamation of your past experiences with internet idiots (fairly!) etc.
That's a lot, lot more than what a bug does when it finds its way past a complex maze, and probably something feral children lack.
I think all our higher level "reasoning" is a cooption of these systems.
There's a point in infant development where speech and social skills are developed, after which they cannot be. I'd go so far as to argue you'll never make a mathematician or physicist out of a feral child. Something critical to our higher level thinking is formed then. If missed, it cannot be recovered.
The flip side is I deeply believe if you can hold this conversation with me, then we both can be the best mathematicians there are, if only we took time to develop that language.
This is just my opinion. I think it took most of your brain to formulate that rebuttal, not concurrently, but as a deep and rich model of how readers might respond to a given argument, and weighing in a narrative sense your remembered experience vs what you "heard" me say in your head when you looked at these squiggly lines. Probably you even had a nascent image of me that was an amalgamation of your past experiences with internet idiots (fairly!) etc.
That's a lot, lot more than what a bug does when it finds its way past a complex maze, and probably something feral children lack.
I think all our higher level "reasoning" is a cooption of these systems.
There's a point in infant development where speech and social skills are developed, after which they cannot be. I'd go so far as to argue you'll never make a mathematician or physicist out of a feral child. Something critical to our higher level thinking is formed then. If missed, it cannot be recovered.
The flip side is I deeply believe if you can hold this conversation with me, then we both can be the best mathematicians there are, if only we took time to develop that language.