If an individual or a community existed in total isolation, without seeing or hearing about outsiders, would they have the ability and/or interest to imagine an outsider's perspective of them?
How much is that kind of imagination contingent upon the plausibility of others actually noticing us?
Before we had a concept of Mars, and life on Mars, could we ever have imagined how life on earth would look to Martians? Obviously, at a certain point we developed a concept of "things fundamentally different from us," so now we can create all sorts of Martian-like beings and imagine how they'd see us. But is the concept of "things fundamentally different from us" innate, or did we develop it as we naturally found such things all around us? If the latter, how would that be different in a totally insular community?
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