As of the earlier chapters, Pride and Prejudice is about people who are terribly alone in a world that does not support their existence.  With rare or no exceptions, they don't communicate their goals to each other or cooperate in achieving them; they live in a world where every aspect of society is configured harmfully and nobody considers alternative structures for fixing them; the only numbers they use are for money; their goals are simple and uniform and tiny, and poorly pursued even so; nobody ever explicitly invokes any mental skill or thinks about how to think; it does not really seem like they are having fun, nor do they have a goal of obtaining fun, nor any notion that fun is something they are missing...

That's not even the disturbing part.

Pride and Prejudice doesn't do the thing that Thellim thinks a book is meant to do.  One of the points of books existing is that you can get deep, true information about the characters' thoughts in a way that is surpassed by only your very closest oath-of-privacy-bound friends in real life.  Thellim is getting less information about these character's minds than she expects, less than she'd get from hearing a real person talk in a movie, and the disturbing thing is the sense that the missing info is not there.  With the exception of occasional flashes for Elizabeth, the author has made zero attempt to even try to depict Earthlings as having reflection, self-observation, sapience; most characters in Pride and Prejudice bear the same relationship to human minds as a stick figure bears to a photograph.  People, among other things, have the property of trying to be people; the characters in Pride and Prejudice have no visible such aspiration.  Real people have concepts of their own minds, and contemplate their prior ideas of themselves in relation to a continually observed flow of their actual thoughts, and try to improve both their self-models and their selves.  It's impossible to imagine any of these people, even Elizabeth, as doing that thing Thellim did a few hours ago, where she noticed she was behaving like Verrez and snapped out of it.  Just like any particular Verrez always learns to notice he is being Verrez and snap out of it, by the end of any of his alts' novels.

There's a paragraph that jumped out at her, at the end of Chapter 1:  "Mr. Bennet was so odd a mixture of quick parts, sarcastic humour, reserve, and caprice, that the experience of three-and-twenty years had been insufficient to make his wife understand his character. Her mind was less difficult to develop. She was a woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper. When she was discontented, she fancied herself nervous. The business of her life was to get her daughters married; its solace was visiting and news."  Thellim is still trying to figure out all the ways this paragraph is deeply disturbing, and has only analyzed some of it.  One element, of course, is that the author is - looking down on their characters to a greater extent than it is permissible to look down even on imaginary people.  Even if someone's mental skills are objectively, measurably, quantifiably that far below yours, you do not describe them like that.  You don't read other people describing them like that.  It would not be good for you; it is not done.  Readers laugh at Verrez's antics but you never get the impression that Verrez's author thinks of Verrez like - like that.  But that's just the lesser problem of morality; the deeper problem of cognition is that the author doesn't think that Mr. Bennet or Mrs. Bennet could notice for themselves what the author knows about them.

There is a half-joking half-serious dath ilani proverb about all infinite recursions really being only three levels deep, where the serious part is that a lot of human cognitive recursion only goes three levels deep.  This book seems to be written as if that number was two, permitting only that the author imagine people, and not that the author imagine people who imagine themselves.

Sorry, but this book is also horrifying!  In an entirely new and different way from all the other ways Earth is horrifying.

Thellim doesn't complain about any of this to Isabella during teatime, because Thellim has started to notice a model of herself as wilding out about every single aspect of Earth, and isn't comfortable with that.  At all, never mind how it probably looks to Isabella.  If Thellim were in a book and somebody else were reading that book, they'd already be complaining about the Thellim character being stereotyped in that way.  Well, this Thellim character at least aspires to be better than that version of the Thellim character, and is not blind to what anybody reading her book would see.

And if Thellim were writing a novel, she'd bestow self-awareness on her own characters the same way, because otherwise they wouldn't be realistic people.  But the entities in Pride and Prejudice aren't like that.  It is very visible to Thellim.  It is very disturbing.  The possibility that maybe actual Earth people could be like this is very very disturbing.  But maybe this is more of a young-adult novel meant to illustrate how not to think, and Elizabeth turns into a real person by the time the story ends.

Thellim will not make up a lot of hypotheses about it yet.  She will finish this novel and then read at least one other fiction novel first.  She's pretty sure that's what her readers would be telling her to do, at this point.

Thellim still hasn't finished reading by the time Isabella comes home, in part because at one point Thellim had to pause to search online for whether Earthlings had talked about themselves being self-aware, or having the property that her language install tries to translate into English as 'consciousness'.  It is not yet certain that Thellim's own continued existence is entirely unlike a story in some generalized way; and for some or all Earthlings to lack consciousness could be a clever little plot twist that could explain why The Video was surprise! a morally neutral event.  Google's answer however was that Earthlings seem very confused about themselves being conscious; they talk about a 'mysterious redness of red', and other phenomena of apparent internal inexplicability that Thellim has grown up as thinking about as having perfectly straightforward explanations in terms of what various cognitive algorithms feel like from inside.  But Earthlings do seem to be conscious... or at least, some Earthling 'philosophers' were conscious at some point, because where else would the confused essays come from originally, even if others are just imitating them now.  That would usually be a wacky thought, but Thellim is worried about all the talk of 'p-zombies' she's come across.  It's an obvious thought that if somebody goes around talking about how consciousness has zero causal effects on behavior, perhaps that is because they are not conscious themselves.  She couldn't find any experiments on whether being submissive correlates with belief in p-zombies.  But if the real premise of this world is that dominants have inner life but not submissives, and that's why submissives can be configured to seek out pain even while they scream from it... well, that's better than the alternative, she supposes.  But Thellim would personally rather not live inside that kind of universe.

It doesn't seem likely, though.  In real life, there ought to be a drastic difference in behavior, after severing the algorithms underlying the reportable experience of qualia.  It's not like Thellim failed to notice that difference for the characters in Pride and Prejudice.  And searching for 'cognitive reflection testing' turned up, well, it's sort of horrifying that this test is being given to adults rather than eight-year-olds, but nonetheless there's no 'statistically significant' difference in average scores between doms and subs.  Though the fact that Thellim is pretty sure every adult in dath ilan maxes out this test, and Earth does not, is rapidly assuming status as her leading alternative hypothesis for the proximal source of everything wrong with Earth that isn't the magic.  Yes, she's trying not to construct theories so quickly, but she can't actually not do that, she can only avoid believing them too much and throwing them at Isabella.

"Thank you," Thellim says to Isabella, and samples some of everything from the Chinese takeout.

As of the earlier chapters, Pride and Prejudice is about people who are terribly alone in a world that does not support their existence.  With rare or no exceptions, they don't communicate their goals to each other or cooperate in achieving them; they live in a world where every aspect of society is configured harmfully and nobody considers alternative structures for fixing them; the only numbers they use are for money; their goals are simple and uniform and tiny, and poorly pursued even so; nobody ever explicitly invokes any mental skill or thinks about how to think; it does not really seem like they are having fun, nor do they have a goal of obtaining fun, nor any notion that fun is something they are missing...

That's not even the disturbing part.

Pride and Prejudice doesn't do the thing that Thellim thinks a book is meant to do.  One of the points of books existing is that you can get deep, true information about the characters' thoughts in a way that is surpassed by only your very closest oath-of-privacy-bound friends in real life.  Thellim is getting less information about these character's minds than she expects, less than she'd get from hearing a real person talk in a movie, and the disturbing thing is the sense that the missing info is not there.  With the exception of occasional flashes for Elizabeth, the author has made zero attempt to even try to depict Earthlings as having reflection, self-observation, sapience; most characters in Pride and Prejudice bear the same relationship to human minds as a stick figure bears to a photograph.  People, among other things, have the property of trying to be people; the characters in Pride and Prejudice have no visible such aspiration.  Real people have concepts of their own minds, and contemplate their prior ideas of themselves in relation to a continually observed flow of their actual thoughts, and try to improve both their self-models and their selves.  It's impossible to imagine any of these people, even Elizabeth, as doing that thing Thellim did a few hours ago, where she noticed she was behaving like Verrez and snapped out of it.  Just like any particular Verrez always learns to notice he is being Verrez and snap out of it, by the end of any of his alts' novels.

There's a paragraph that jumped out at her, at the end of Chapter 1:  "Mr. Bennet was so odd a mixture of quick parts, sarcastic humour, reserve, and caprice, that the experience of three-and-twenty years had been insufficient to make his wife understand his character. Her mind was less difficult to develop. She was a woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper. When she was discontented, she fancied herself nervous. The business of her life was to get her daughters married; its solace was visiting and news."  Thellim is still trying to figure out all the ways this paragraph is deeply disturbing, and has only analyzed some of it.  One element, of course, is that the author is - looking down on their characters to a greater extent than it is permissible to look down even on imaginary people.  Even if someone's mental skills are objectively, measurably, quantifiably that far below yours, you do not describe them like that.  You don't read other people describing them like that.  It would not be good for you; it is not done.  Readers laugh at Verrez's antics but you never get the impression that Verrez's author thinks of Verrez like - like that.  But that's just the lesser problem of morality; the deeper problem of cognition is that the author doesn't seem to think that Mr. Bennet or Mrs. Bennet would notice for themselves what the author believes about them.

There is a half-joking half-serious dath ilani proverb, about all infinite recursions really being only three levels deep; where the serious part is that a lot of human cognitive recursion only goes three levels deep.  This book seems to be written as if that number was two, permitting only that the author imagine people, and not that the author imagine people who imagine themselves.

Sorry, but this book is also horrifying!  In an entirely new and different way from all the other ways Earth is horrifying.

Thellim doesn't complain about any of this to Isabella during teatime, because Thellim has started to notice a model of herself as wilding out about every single aspect of Earth, and isn't comfortable with that.  At all, never mind how it probably looks to Isabella.  If Thellim were in a book and somebody else were reading that book, they'd already be complaining about the Thellim character being stereotyped in that way.  Well, this Thellim character at least aspires to be better than that version of the Thellim character, and is not blind to what anybody reading her book would see.

And if Thellim were writing a novel, she'd bestow self-awareness on her own characters the same way, because otherwise they wouldn't be realistic people.  But the entities in Pride and Prejudice aren't like that.  It is very visible to Thellim.  It is very disturbing.  The possibility that maybe actual Earth people could be like this is very very disturbing.  But maybe this is more of a young-adult novel meant to illustrate how not to think, and Elizabeth turns into a real person by the time the story ends.

Thellim will not make up a lot of hypotheses about it yet.  She will finish this novel and then read at least one other fiction novel first.  She's pretty sure that's what her readers would be telling her to do, at this point.

Thellim still hasn't finished reading by the time Isabella comes home, in part because at one point Thellim had to pause to search online for whether Earthlings had talked about themselves being self-aware, or having the property that her language install tries to translate into English as 'consciousness'.  It is not yet certain that Thellim's own continued existence is entirely unlike a story in some generalized way; and for some or all Earthlings to lack consciousness could be a clever little plot twist that could explain why The Video was surprise! a morally neutral event.  Google's answer however was that Earthlings seem very confused about themselves being conscious; they talk about a 'mysterious redness of red', and other phenomena of apparent internal inexplicability that Thellim has grown up as thinking about as having perfectly straightforward explanations in terms of what various cognitive algorithms feel like from inside.  But Earthlings do seem to be conscious... or at least, some Earthling 'philosophers' were conscious at some point, because where else would the confused essays come from originally, even if others are just imitating them now.  That would usually be a wacky thought, but Thellim is worried about all the talk of 'p-zombies' she's come across.  It's an obvious thought that if somebody goes around talking about how consciousness has zero causal effects on behavior, perhaps that is because they are not conscious themselves.  She couldn't find any experiments on whether being submissive correlates with belief in p-zombies.  But if the real premise of this world is that dominants have inner life but not submissives, and that's why submissives can be configured to seek out pain even while they scream from it... well, that's better than the alternative, she supposes.  But Thellim would personally rather not live inside that kind of universe.

It doesn't seem likely, though.  In real life, there ought to be a drastic difference in behavior, after severing the algorithms underlying the reportable experience of qualia.  It's not like Thellim failed to notice that difference for the characters in Pride and Prejudice.  And searching for 'cognitive reflection testing' turned up, well, it's sort of horrifying that this test is being given to adults rather than eight-year-olds, but nonetheless there's no 'statistically significant' difference in average scores between doms and subs.  Though the fact that Thellim is pretty sure every adult in dath ilan maxes out this test, and Earth does not, is rapidly assuming status as her leading alternative hypothesis for the proximal source of everything wrong with Earth that isn't the magic.  Yes, she's trying not to construct theories so quickly, but she can't actually not organize her sense impressions, she can only avoid believing those theories too much and throwing them at Isabella.

"Thank you," Thellim says to Isabella, and samples some of everything from the Chinese takeout.

As of the earlier chapters, Pride and Prejudice is about people who are terribly alone in a world that does not support their existence.  With rare or no exceptions, they don't communicate their goals to each other or cooperate in achieving them; they live in a world where every aspect of society is configured harmfully and nobody considers alternative structures for fixing them; the only numbers they use are for money; their goals are simple and uniform and tiny, and poorly pursued even so; nobody ever explicitly invokes any mental skill or thinks about how to think; it does not really seem like they are having fun, nor do they have a goal of obtaining fun, nor any notion that fun is something they are missing...

That's not even the disturbing part.

Pride and Prejudice doesn't do the thing that Thellim thinks a book is meant to do.  One of the points of books existing is that you can get deep, true information about the characters' thoughts in a way that is surpassed by only your very closest oath-of-privacy-bound friends in real life.  Thellim is getting less information about these character's minds than she expects, less than she'd get from hearing a real person talk in a movie, and the disturbing thing is the sense that the missing info is not there.  With the exception of occasional flashes for Elizabeth, the author has made zero attempt to even try to depict Earthlings as having reflection, self-observation, sapience; most characters in Pride and Prejudice bear the same relationship to human minds as a stick figure bears to a photograph.  People, among other things, have the property of trying to be people; the characters in Pride and Prejudice have no visible such aspiration.  Real people have concepts of their own minds, and contemplate their prior ideas of themselves in relation to a continually observed flow of their actual thoughts, and try to improve both their self-models and their selves.  It's impossible to imagine any of these people, even Elizabeth, as doing that thing Thellim did a few hours ago, where she noticed she was behaving like Verrez and snapped out of it.  Just like any particular Verrez always learns to notice he is being Verrez and snap out of it, by the end of any of his alts' novels.

There's a paragraph that jumped out at her, at the end of Chapter 1:  "Mr. Bennet was so odd a mixture of quick parts, sarcastic humour, reserve, and caprice, that the experience of three-and-twenty years had been insufficient to make his wife understand his character. Her mind was less difficult to develop. She was a woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper. When she was discontented, she fancied herself nervous. The business of her life was to get her daughters married; its solace was visiting and news."  Thellim is still trying to figure out all the ways this paragraph is deeply disturbing, and has only analyzed some of it.  One element, of course, is that the author is - looking down on their characters to a greater extent than it is permissible to look down even on imaginary people.  Even if someone's mental skills are objectively, measurably, quantifiably that far below yours, you do not describe them like that.  You don't read other people describing them like that.  It would not be good for you; it is not done.  Readers laugh at Verrez's antics but you never get the impression that Verrez's author thinks of Verrez like - like that.  But that's just the lesser problem of morality; the deeper problem of cognition is that the author doesn't seem to think that Mr. Bennet or Mrs. Bennet would notice for themselves what the author believes about them.

There is a half-joking half-serious dath ilani proverb, about all infinite recursions really being only three levels deep; where the serious part is that a lot of human cognitive recursion only goes three levels deep.  This book seems to be written as if that number was two, permitting only that the author imagine people, and not that the author imagine people who imagine themselves.

Sorry, but this book is also horrifying!  In an entirely new and different way from all the other ways Earth is horrifying.

Thellim doesn't complain about any of this to Isabella during teatime, because Thellim has started to notice a model of herself as wilding out about every single aspect of Earth, and isn't comfortable with that.  At all, never mind how it probably looks to Isabella.  If Thellim were in a book and somebody else were reading that book, they'd already be complaining about the Thellim character being stereotyped in that way.  Well, this Thellim character at least aspires to be better than that version of the Thellim character, and is not blind to what anybody reading her book would see.

And if Thellim were writing a novel, she'd bestow self-awareness on her own characters the same way, because otherwise they wouldn't be realistic people.  But the entities in Pride and Prejudice aren't like that.  It is very visible to Thellim.  It is very disturbing.  The possibility that maybe actual Earth people could be like this is very very disturbing.  But maybe this is more of a young-adult novel meant to illustrate how not to think, and Elizabeth turns into a real person by the time the story ends.

Thellim will not make up a lot of hypotheses about it yet.  She will finish this novel and then read at least one other fiction novel first.  She's pretty sure that's what her readers would be telling her to do, at this point.

Thellim still hasn't finished reading by the time Isabella comes home, in part because at one point Thellim had to pause to search online for whether Earthlings had talked about themselves being self-aware, or having the property that her language install tries to translate into English as 'consciousness'.  It is not yet certain that Thellim's own continued existence is entirely unlike a story in some generalized way; and for some or all Earthlings to lack consciousness could be a clever little plot twist that could explain why The Video was surprise! a morally neutral event.  Google's answer however was that Earthlings seem very confused about themselves being conscious; they talk about a 'mysterious redness of red', and other phenomena of apparent internal inexplicability that Thellim has grown up as thinking about as having perfectly straightforward explanations in terms of what various cognitive algorithms feel like from inside.  But Earthlings do seem to be conscious... or at least, some Earthling 'philosophers' were conscious at some point, because where else would the confused essays come from originally, even if others are just imitating them now.  That would usually be a wacky thought, but Thellim is worried about all the talk of 'p-zombies' she's come across.  It's an obvious thought that if somebody goes around talking about how consciousness has zero causal effects on behavior, perhaps that is because they are not conscious themselves.  She couldn't find any experiments on whether being submissive correlates with belief in p-zombies.  But if the real premise of this world is that dominants have inner life but not submissives, and that's why submissives can be configured to seek out pain even while they scream from it... well, that's better than the alternative, she supposes.  But Thellim would personally rather not live inside that kind of universe.

It doesn't seem likely, though.  In real life, there ought to be a drastic difference in behavior, after severing the algorithms underlying the reportable experience of qualia.  It's not like Thellim failed to notice that difference for the characters in Pride and Prejudice.  And searching for 'cognitive reflection testing' turned up, well, it's sort of horrifying that this test is being given to adults rather than eight-year-olds, but nonetheless there's no 'statistically significant' difference in average scores between doms and subs.  Though the fact that Thellim is pretty sure every adult in dath ilan maxes out this test, and Earth does not, is rapidly assuming status as her leading alternative hypothesis for the proximal source of everything wrong with Earth that isn't the magic.  Yes, she's trying not to construct theories so quickly, but she can't actually not organize her sense impressions, she can only avoid believing those theories too much and throwing them at Isabella.

"Thank you," Thellim says to Isabella, and samples some of everything from the Chinese takeout.

As of the earlier chapters, Pride and Prejudice is about people who are terribly alone in a world that does not support their existence.  With rare or no exceptions, they don't communicate their goals to each other or cooperate in achieving them; they live in a world where every aspect of society is configured harmfully and nobody considers alternative structures for fixing them; the only numbers they use are for money; their goals are simple and uniform and tiny, and poorly pursued even so; nobody ever explicitly invokes any mental skill or thinks about how to think; it does not really seem like they are having fun, nor do they have a goal of obtaining fun, nor any notion that fun is something they are missing...

That's not even the disturbing part.

Pride and Prejudice doesn't do the thing that Thellim thinks a book is meant to do.  One of the points of books existing is that you can get deep, true information about the characters' thoughts in a way that is surpassed by only your very closest oath-of-privacy-bound friends in real life.  Thellim is getting less information about these character's minds than she expects, less than she'd get from hearing a real person talk in a movie, and the disturbing thing is the sense that the missing info is not there.  With the exception of occasional flashes for Elizabeth, the author has made zero attempt to even try to depict Earthlings as having reflection, self-observation, sapience; most characters in Pride and Prejudice bear the same relationship to human minds as a stick figure bears to a photograph.  People, among other things, have the property of trying to be people; the characters in Pride and Prejudice have no visible such aspiration.  Real people have concepts of their own minds, and contemplate their prior ideas of themselves in relation to a continually observed flow of their actual thoughts, and try to improve both their self-models and their selves.  It's impossible to imagine any of these people, even Elizabeth, as doing that thing Thellim did a few hours ago, where she noticed she was behaving like Verrez and snapped out of it.  Just like any particular Verrez always learns to notice he is being Verrez and snap out of it, by the end of any of his alts' novels.

There's a paragraph that jumped out at her, at the end of Chapter 1:  "Mr. Bennet was so odd a mixture of quick parts, sarcastic humour, reserve, and caprice, that the experience of three-and-twenty years had been insufficient to make his wife understand his character. Her mind was less difficult to develop. She was a woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper. When she was discontented, she fancied herself nervous. The business of her life was to get her daughters married; its solace was visiting and news."  Thellim is still trying to figure out all the ways this paragraph is deeply disturbing, and has only analyzed some of it.  One element, of course, is that the author is - looking down on their characters to a greater extent than it is permissible to look down even on imaginary people.  Even if someone's mental skills are objectively, measurably, quantifiably that far below yours, you do not describe them like that.  You don't read other people describing them like that.  It would not be good for you; it is not done.  Readers laugh at Verrez's antics but you never get the impression that Verrez's author thinks of Verrez like - like that.  But that's just the lesser problem of morality; the deeper problem of cognition is that the author doesn't seem to think that Mr. Bennet or Mrs. Bennet would notice for themselves what the author believes about them.

There is a half-joking half-serious dath ilani proverb, about all infinite recursions really being only three levels deep; where the serious part is that a lot of human cognitive recursion only goes three levels deep.  This book seems to be written as if that number was two, permitting only that the author imagine people, and not that the author imagine people who imagine themselves.

Sorry, but this book is also horrifying!  In an entirely new and different way from all the other ways Earth is horrifying.

Thellim doesn't complain about any of this to Isabella during teatime, because Thellim has started to notice a model of herself as wilding out about every single aspect of Earth, and isn't comfortable with that.  At all, never mind how it probably looks to Isabella.  If Thellim were in a book and somebody else were reading that book, they'd already be complaining about the Thellim character being stereotyped in that way.  Well, this Thellim character at least aspires to be better than that version of the Thellim character, and is not blind to what anybody reading her book would see.

And if Thellim were writing a novel, she'd bestow self-awareness on her own characters the same way, because otherwise they wouldn't be realistic people.  But the entities in Pride and Prejudice aren't like that.  It is very visible to Thellim.  It is very disturbing.  The possibility that maybe actual Earth people could be like this is very very disturbing.  But maybe this is more of a young-adult novel meant to illustrate how not to think, and Elizabeth turns into a real person by the time the story ends.

Thellim will not make up a lot of hypotheses about it yet.  She will finish this novel and then read at least one other fiction novel first.  She's pretty sure that's what her readers would be telling her to do, at this point.

Thellim still hasn't finished reading by the time Isabella comes home, in part because at one point Thellim had to pause to search online for whether Earthlings had talked about themselves being self-aware, or having the property that her language install tries to translate into English as 'consciousness'.  It is not yet certain that Thellim's own continued existence is entirely unlike a story in some generalized way; and for some or all Earthlings to lack consciousness could be a clever little plot twist to imply that The Video was surprise! a morally neutral event.  Google's answer however was that Earthlings seem very confused about themselves being conscious; they talk about a 'mysterious redness of red', and other phenomena of apparent internal inexplicability that Thellim has grown up as thinking about as having perfectly straightforward explanations in terms of what various cognitive algorithms feel like from inside.  But Earthlings do seem to be conscious... or at least, some Earthling 'philosophers' were conscious at some point, because where else would the confused essays come from originally, even if others are just imitating them now.  That would usually be a wacky thought, but Thellim is worried about all the talk of 'p-zombies' she's come across.  It's an obvious thought that if somebody goes around talking about how consciousness has zero causal effects on behavior, perhaps that is because they are not conscious themselves.  She couldn't find any experiments on whether being submissive correlates with belief in p-zombies.  But if the real premise of this world is that dominants have inner life but not submissives, and that's why submissives can be configured to seek out pain even while they scream from it... well, that's better than the alternative, she supposes.  But Thellim would personally rather not live inside that kind of universe.

It doesn't seem likely, though.  In real life, there ought to be a drastic difference in behavior, after severing the algorithms underlying the reportable experience of qualia.  It's not like Thellim failed to notice that difference for the characters in Pride and Prejudice.  And searching for 'cognitive reflection testing' turned up, well, it's sort of horrifying that this test is being given to adults rather than eight-year-olds, but nonetheless there's no 'statistically significant' difference in average scores between doms and subs.  Though the fact that Thellim is pretty sure every adult in dath ilan maxes out this test, and Earth does not, is rapidly assuming status as her leading alternative hypothesis for the proximal source of everything wrong with Earth that isn't the magic.  Yes, she's trying not to construct theories so quickly, but she can't actually not organize her sense impressions, she can only avoid believing those theories too much and throwing them at Isabella.

"Thank you," Thellim says to Isabella, and samples some of everything from the Chinese takeout.

As of the earlier chapters, Pride and Prejudice is about people who are terribly alone in a world that does not support their existence.  With rare or no exceptions, they don't communicate their goals to each other or cooperate in achieving them; they live in a world where every aspect of society is configured harmfully and nobody considers alternative structures for fixing them; the only numbers they use are for money; their goals are simple and uniform and tiny, and poorly pursued even so; nobody ever explicitly invokes any mental skill or thinks about how to think; it does not really seem like they are having fun, nor do they have a goal of obtaining fun, nor any notion that fun is something they are missing...

That's not even the disturbing part.

Pride and Prejudice doesn't do the thing that Thellim thinks a book is meant to do.  One of the points of books existing is that you can get deep, true information about the characters' thoughts in a way that is surpassed by only your very closest oath-of-privacy-bound friends in real life.  Thellim is getting less information about these character's minds than she expects, less than she'd get from hearing a real person talk in a movie, and the disturbing thing is the sense that the missing info is not there.  With the exception of occasional flashes for Elizabeth, the author has made zero attempt to even try to depict Earthlings as having reflection, self-observation, sapience; most characters in Pride and Prejudice bear the same relationship to human minds as a stick figure bears to a photograph.  People, among other things, have the property of trying to be people; the characters in Pride and Prejudice have no visible such aspiration.  Real people have concepts of their own minds, and contemplate their prior ideas of themselves in relation to a continually observed flow of their actual thoughts, and try to improve both their self-models and their selves.  It's impossible to imagine any of these people, even Elizabeth, as doing that thing Thellim did a few hours ago, where she noticed she was behaving like Verrez and snapped out of it.  Just like any particular Verrez always learns to notice he is being Verrez and snap out of it, by the end of any of his alts' novels.

There's a paragraph that jumped out at her, at the end of Chapter 1:  "Mr. Bennet was so odd a mixture of quick parts, sarcastic humour, reserve, and caprice, that the experience of three-and-twenty years had been insufficient to make his wife understand his character. Her mind was less difficult to develop. She was a woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper. When she was discontented, she fancied herself nervous. The business of her life was to get her daughters married; its solace was visiting and news."  Thellim is still trying to figure out all the ways this paragraph is deeply disturbing, and has only analyzed some of it.  One element, of course, is that the author is - looking down on their characters to a greater extent than it is permissible to look down even on imaginary people.  Even if someone's mental skills are objectively, measurably, quantifiably that far below yours, you do not describe them like that.  You don't read other people describing them like that.  It would not be good for you; it is not done.  Readers laugh at Verrez's antics but you never get the impression that Verrez's author thinks of Verrez like - like that.  But that's just the lesser problem of morality; the deeper problem of cognition is that the author doesn't seem to think that Mr. Bennet or Mrs. Bennet would notice for themselves what the author believes about them.

There is a half-joking half-serious dath ilani proverb, about all infinite recursions really being only three levels deep; where the serious part is that a lot of human cognitive recursion only goes three levels deep.  This book seems to be written as if that number was one, permitting only that the author imagine characters, and not that the author imagine characters who imagine themselves.

Sorry, but this book is also horrifying!  In an entirely new and different way from all the other ways Earth is horrifying.

Thellim doesn't complain about any of this to Isabella during teatime, because Thellim has started to notice a model of herself as wilding out about every single aspect of Earth, and isn't comfortable with that.  At all, never mind how it probably looks to Isabella.  If Thellim were in a book and somebody else were reading that book, they'd already be complaining about the Thellim character being stereotyped in that way.  Well, this Thellim character at least aspires to be better than that version of the Thellim character, and is not blind to what anybody reading her book would see.

And if Thellim were writing a novel, she'd bestow self-awareness on her own characters the same way, because otherwise they wouldn't be realistic people.  But the entities in Pride and Prejudice aren't like that.  It is very visible to Thellim.  It is very disturbing.  The possibility that maybe actual Earth people could be like this is very very disturbing.  But maybe this is more of a young-adult novel meant to illustrate how not to think, and Elizabeth turns into a real person by the time the story ends.

Thellim will not make up a lot of hypotheses about it yet.  She will finish this novel and then read at least one other fiction novel first.  She's pretty sure that's what her readers would be telling her to do, at this point.

Thellim still hasn't finished reading by the time Isabella comes home, in part because at one point Thellim had to pause to search online for whether Earthlings had talked about themselves being self-aware, or having the property that her language install tries to translate into English as 'consciousness'.  It is not yet certain that Thellim's own continued existence is entirely unlike a story in some generalized way; and for some or all Earthlings to lack consciousness could be a clever little plot twist to imply that The Video was surprise! a morally neutral event.  Google's answer however was that Earthlings seem very confused about themselves being conscious; they talk about a 'mysterious redness of red', and other phenomena of apparent internal inexplicability that Thellim has grown up as thinking about as having perfectly straightforward explanations in terms of what various cognitive algorithms feel like from inside.  But Earthlings do seem to be conscious... or at least, some Earthling 'philosophers' were conscious at some point, because where else would the confused essays come from originally, even if others are just imitating them now.  That would usually be a wacky thought, but Thellim is worried about all the talk of 'p-zombies' she's come across.  It's an obvious thought that if somebody goes around talking about how consciousness has zero causal effects on behavior, perhaps that is because they are not conscious themselves.  She couldn't find any experiments on whether being submissive correlates with belief in p-zombies.  But if the real premise of this world is that dominants have inner life but not submissives, and that's why submissives can be configured to seek out pain even while they scream from it... well, that's better than the alternative, she supposes.  But Thellim would personally rather not live inside that kind of universe.

It doesn't seem likely, though.  In real life, there ought to be a drastic difference in behavior, after severing the algorithms underlying the reportable experience of qualia.  It's not like Thellim failed to notice that difference for the characters in Pride and Prejudice.  And searching for 'cognitive reflection testing' turned up, well, it's sort of horrifying that this test is being given to adults rather than eight-year-olds, but nonetheless there's no 'statistically significant' difference in average scores between doms and subs.  Though the fact that Thellim is pretty sure every adult in dath ilan maxes out this test, and Earth does not, is rapidly assuming status as her leading alternative hypothesis for the proximal source of everything wrong with Earth that isn't the magic.  Yes, she's trying not to construct theories so quickly, but she can't actually not organize her sense impressions, she can only avoid believing those theories too much and throwing them at Isabella.

"Thank you," Thellim says to Isabella, and samples some of everything from the Chinese takeout.

As of the earlier chapters, Pride and Prejudice is about people who are terribly alone in a world that does not support their existence.  With rare or no exceptions, they don't communicate their goals to each other or cooperate in achieving them; they live in a world where every aspect of society is configured harmfully and nobody considers alternative structures for fixing them; the only numbers they use are for money; their goals are simple and uniform and tiny, and poorly pursued even so; nobody ever explicitly invokes any mental skill or thinks about how to think; it does not really seem like they are having fun, nor do they have a goal of obtaining fun, nor any notion that fun is something they are missing...

That's not even the disturbing part.

Pride and Prejudice doesn't do the thing that Thellim thinks a book is meant to do.  One of the points of books existing is that you can get deep, true information about the characters' thoughts in a way that is surpassed by only your very closest oath-of-privacy friends in real life.  Thellim is getting less information about these character's minds than she expects, less than she'd get from hearing a real person talk on a walkway, and the disturbing thing is the sense that the missing info is not there.  With the exception of occasional flashes for Elizabeth, the author has made zero attempt to even try to depict Earthlings as having reflection, self-observation, sapience; most characters in Pride and Prejudice bear the same relationship to human minds as a stick figure bears to a photograph.  People, among other things, have the property of trying to be people; the characters in Pride and Prejudice have no visible such aspiration.  Real people have concepts of their own minds, and contemplate their prior ideas of themselves in relation to a continually observed flow of their actual thoughts, and try to improve both their self-models and their selves.  It's impossible to imagine any of these people, even Elizabeth, as doing that thing Thellim did a few hours ago, where she noticed she was behaving like Verrez and snapped out of it.  Just like any particular Verrez always learns to notice he is being Verrez and snap out of it, by the end of any of his alts' novels.

There's a paragraph that jumped out at her, at the end of Chapter 1:  "Mr. Bennet was so odd a mixture of quick parts, sarcastic humour, reserve, and caprice, that the experience of three-and-twenty years had been insufficient to make his wife understand his character. Her mind was less difficult to develop. She was a woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper. When she was discontented, she fancied herself nervous. The business of her life was to get her daughters married; its solace was visiting and news."  Thellim is still trying to figure out all the ways this paragraph is deeply disturbing, and has only analyzed some of it.  One element, of course, is that the author is - looking down on their characters to a greater extent than it is permissible to look down even on imaginary people.  Even if someone's mental skills are objectively, measurably, quantifiably that far below yours, you do not describe them like that.  You don't read other people describing them like that.  It would not be good for you; it is not done.  Readers laugh at Verrez's antics but you never get the impression that Verrez's author thinks of Verrez like - like that.  But that's just the lesser problem of morality; the deeper problem of cognition is that the author doesn't seem to think that Mr. Bennet or Mrs. Bennet would notice for themselves what the author believes about them.

There is a half-joking half-serious dath ilani proverb, about all infinite recursions really being only three levels deep; where the serious part is that a lot of human cognitive recursion only goes three levels deep.  This book seems to be written as if that number was one, permitting only that the author imagine characters, and not that the author imagine characters who imagine themselves.

Sorry, but this book is also horrifying!  In an entirely new and different way from all the other ways Earth is horrifying.

Thellim doesn't complain about any of this to Isabella during teatime, because Thellim has started to notice a model of herself as wilding out about every single aspect of Earth, and isn't comfortable with that.  At all, never mind how it probably looks to Isabella.  If Thellim were in a book and somebody else were reading that book, they'd already be complaining about the Thellim character being stereotyped in that way.  Well, this Thellim character at least aspires to be better than that version of the Thellim character, and is not blind to what anybody reading her book would see.

And if Thellim were writing a novel, she'd bestow self-awareness on her own characters the same way, because otherwise they wouldn't be realistic people.  But the entities in Pride and Prejudice aren't like that.  It is very visible to Thellim.  It is very disturbing.  The possibility that maybe actual Earth people could be like this is very very disturbing.  But maybe this is more of a young-adult novel meant to illustrate how not to think, and Elizabeth turns into a real person by the time the story ends.

Thellim will not make up a lot of hypotheses about it yet.  She will finish this novel and then read at least one other fiction novel first.  She's pretty sure that's what her readers would be telling her to do, at this point.

Thellim still hasn't finished reading by the time Isabella comes home, in part because at one point Thellim had to pause to search online for whether Earthlings had talked about themselves being self-aware, or having the property that her language install tries to translate into English as 'consciousness'.  It is not yet certain that Thellim's own continued existence is entirely unlike a story in some generalized way; and for some or all Earthlings to lack consciousness could be a clever little plot twist to imply that The Video was surprise! a morally neutral event.  Google's answer however was that Earthlings seem very confused about themselves being conscious; they talk about a 'mysterious redness of red', and other phenomena of apparent internal inexplicability that Thellim has grown up as thinking about as having perfectly straightforward explanations in terms of what various cognitive algorithms feel like from inside.  But Earthlings do seem to be conscious... or at least, some Earthling 'philosophers' were conscious at some point, because where else would the confused essays come from originally, even if others are just imitating them now.  That would usually be a wacky thought, but Thellim is worried about all the talk of 'p-zombies' she's come across.  It's an obvious thought that if somebody goes around talking about how consciousness has zero causal effects on behavior, perhaps that is because they are not conscious themselves.  She couldn't find any experiments on whether being submissive correlates with belief in p-zombies.  But if the real premise of this world is that dominants have inner life but not submissives, and that's why submissives can be configured to seek out pain even while they scream from it... well, that's better than the alternative, she supposes.  But Thellim would personally rather not live inside that kind of universe.

It doesn't seem likely, though.  In real life, there ought to be a drastic difference in behavior, after severing the algorithms underlying the reportable experience of qualia.  It's not like Thellim failed to notice that difference for the characters in Pride and Prejudice.  And searching for 'cognitive reflection testing' turned up, well, it's sort of horrifying that this test is being given to adults rather than eight-year-olds, but nonetheless there's no 'statistically significant' difference in average scores between doms and subs.  Though the fact that Thellim is pretty sure every adult in dath ilan maxes out this test, and Earth does not, is rapidly assuming status as her leading alternative hypothesis for the proximal source of everything wrong with Earth that isn't the magic.  Yes, she's trying not to construct theories so quickly, but she can't actually not organize her sense impressions, she can only avoid believing those theories too much and throwing them at Isabella.

"Thank you," Thellim says to Isabella, and samples some of everything from the Chinese takeout.

As of the earlier chapters, Pride and Prejudice is about people who are terribly alone in a world that does not support their existence.  With rare or no exceptions, they don't communicate their goals to each other or cooperate in achieving them; they live in a world where every aspect of society is configured harmfully and nobody considers alternative structures for fixing them; the only numbers they use are for money; their goals are simple and uniform and tiny, and poorly pursued even so; nobody ever explicitly invokes any mental skill or thinks about how to think; it does not really seem like they are having fun, nor do they have a goal of obtaining fun, nor any notion that fun is something they are missing...

That's not even the disturbing part.

Pride and Prejudice doesn't do the thing that Thellim thinks a book is meant to do.  One of the points of books existing is that you can get deep, true information about the characters' thoughts in a way that is surpassed by only your very closest oath-of-privacy friends in real life.  Thellim is getting less information about these character's minds than she expects, less than she'd get from hearing a real person talk on a walkway, and the disturbing thing is the sense that the missing info is not there.  With the exception of occasional flashes for Elizabeth, the author has made zero attempt to even try to depict Earthlings as having reflection, self-observation, a fire of inner life; most characters in Pride and Prejudice bear the same relationship to human minds as a stick figure bears to a photograph.  People, among other things, have the property of trying to be people; the characters in Pride and Prejudice have no visible such aspiration.  Real people have concepts of their own minds, and contemplate their prior ideas of themselves in relation to a continually observed flow of their actual thoughts, and try to improve both their self-models and their selves.  It's impossible to imagine any of these people, even Elizabeth, as doing that thing Thellim did a few hours ago, where she noticed she was behaving like Verrez and snapped out of it.  Just like any particular Verrez always learns to notice he is being Verrez and snap out of it, by the end of any of his alts' novels.

There's a paragraph that jumped out at her, at the end of Chapter 1:  "Mr. Bennet was so odd a mixture of quick parts, sarcastic humour, reserve, and caprice, that the experience of three-and-twenty years had been insufficient to make his wife understand his character. Her mind was less difficult to develop. She was a woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper. When she was discontented, she fancied herself nervous. The business of her life was to get her daughters married; its solace was visiting and news."  Thellim is still trying to figure out all the ways this paragraph is deeply disturbing, and has only analyzed some of it.  One element, of course, is that the author is - looking down on their characters to a greater extent than it is permissible to look down even on imaginary people.  Even if someone's mental skills are objectively, measurably, quantifiably that far below yours, you do not describe them like that.  You don't read other people describing them like that.  It would not be good for you; it is not done.  Readers laugh at Verrez's antics but you never get the impression that Verrez's author thinks of Verrez like - like that.  But that's just the lesser problem of morality; the deeper problem of cognition is that the author doesn't seem to think that Mr. Bennet or Mrs. Bennet would notice for themselves what the author believes about them.

There is a half-joking half-serious dath ilani proverb, about all infinite recursions really being only three levels deep; where the serious part is that a lot of human cognitive recursion only goes three levels deep.  This book seems to be written as if that number was one, permitting only that the author imagine characters, and not that the author imagine characters who imagine themselves.

Sorry, but this book is also horrifying!  In an entirely new and different way from all the other ways Earth is horrifying.

Thellim doesn't complain about any of this to Isabella during teatime, because Thellim has started to notice a model of herself as wilding out about every single aspect of Earth, and isn't comfortable with that.  At all, never mind how it probably looks to Isabella.  If Thellim were in a book and somebody else were reading that book, they'd already be complaining about the Thellim character being stereotyped in that way.  Well, this Thellim character at least aspires to be better than that version of the Thellim character, and is not blind to what anybody reading her book would see.

And if Thellim were writing a novel, she'd bestow self-awareness on her own characters the same way, because otherwise they wouldn't be realistic people.  But the entities in Pride and Prejudice aren't like that.  It is very visible to Thellim.  It is very disturbing.  The possibility that maybe actual Earth people could be like this is very very disturbing.  But maybe this is more of a young-adult novel meant to illustrate how not to think, and Elizabeth turns into a real person by the time the story ends.

Thellim will not make up a lot of hypotheses about it yet.  She will finish this novel and then read at least one other fiction novel first.  She's pretty sure that's what her readers would be telling her to do, at this point.

Thellim still hasn't finished reading by the time Isabella comes home, in part because at one point Thellim had to pause to search online for whether Earthlings had talked about themselves being self-aware, or having the property that her language install tries to translate into English as 'consciousness'.  It is not yet certain that Thellim's own continued existence is entirely unlike a story in some generalized way; and for some or all Earthlings to lack consciousness could be a clever little plot twist to imply that The Video was surprise! a morally neutral event.  Google's answer however was that Earthlings seem very confused about themselves being conscious; they talk about a 'mysterious redness of red', and other phenomena of apparent internal inexplicability that Thellim has grown up as thinking about as having perfectly straightforward explanations in terms of what various cognitive algorithms feel like from inside.  But Earthlings do seem to be conscious... or at least, some Earthling 'philosophers' were conscious at some point, because where else would the confused essays come from originally, even if others are just imitating them now.  That would usually be a wacky thought, but Thellim is worried about all the talk of 'p-zombies' she's come across.  It's an obvious thought that if somebody goes around talking about how consciousness has zero causal effects on behavior, perhaps that is because they are not conscious themselves.  She couldn't find any experiments on whether being submissive correlates with belief in p-zombies.  But if the real premise of this world is that dominants have inner life but not submissives, and that's why submissives can be configured to seek out pain even while they scream from it... well, that's better than the alternative, she supposes.  But Thellim would personally rather not live inside that kind of universe.

It doesn't seem likely, though.  In real life, there ought to be a drastic difference in behavior, after severing the algorithms underlying the reportable experience of qualia.  It's not like Thellim failed to notice that difference for the characters in Pride and Prejudice.  And searching for 'cognitive reflection testing' turned up, well, it's sort of horrifying that this test is being given to adults rather than eight-year-olds, but nonetheless there's no 'statistically significant' difference in average scores between doms and subs.  Though the fact that Thellim is pretty sure every adult in dath ilan maxes out this test, and Earth does not, is rapidly assuming status as her leading alternative hypothesis for the proximal source of everything wrong with Earth that isn't the magic.  Yes, she's trying not to construct theories so quickly, but she can't actually not organize her sense impressions, she can only avoid believing those theories too much and throwing them at Isabella.

"Thank you," Thellim says to Isabella, and samples some of everything from the Chinese takeout.

As of the earlier chapters, Pride and Prejudice is about people who are terribly alone in a world that does not support their existence.  With rare or no exceptions, they don't communicate their goals to each other or cooperate in achieving them; they live in a world where every aspect of society is configured harmfully and nobody considers alternative structures for fixing them; the only numbers they use are for money; their goals are simple and uniform and tiny, and poorly pursued even so; nobody ever explicitly invokes any mental skill or thinks about how to think; it does not really seem like they are having fun, nor do they have a goal of obtaining fun, nor any notion that fun is something they are missing...

That's not even the disturbing part.

Pride and Prejudice doesn't do the thing that Thellim thinks a book is meant to do.  One of the points of books existing is that you can get deep, true information about the characters' thoughts in a way that is surpassed by only your very closest oath-of-privacy friends in real life.  Thellim is getting less information about these character's minds than she expects, less than she'd get from hearing a real person talk on a walkway, and the disturbing thing is the sense that the missing info is not there.  With the exception of occasional flashes for Elizabeth, the author has made zero attempt to even try to depict Earthlings as having reflection, self-observation, a fire of inner life; most characters in Pride and Prejudice bear the same relationship to human minds as a stick figure bears to a photograph.  People, among other things, have the property of trying to be people; the characters in Pride and Prejudice have no visible such aspiration.  Real people have concepts of their own minds, and contemplate their prior ideas of themselves in relation to a continually observed flow of their actual thoughts, and try to improve both their self-models and their selves.  It's impossible to imagine any of these people, even Elizabeth, as doing that thing Thellim did a few hours ago, where she noticed she was behaving like Verrez and snapped out of it.  Just like any particular Verrez always learns to notice he is being Verrez and snap out of it, by the end of any of his alts' novels.

There's a paragraph that jumped out at her, at the end of Chapter 1:  "Mr. Bennet was so odd a mixture of quick parts, sarcastic humour, reserve, and caprice, that the experience of three-and-twenty years had been insufficient to make his wife understand his character. Her mind was less difficult to develop. She was a woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper. When she was discontented, she fancied herself nervous. The business of her life was to get her daughters married; its solace was visiting and news."  Thellim is still trying to figure out all the ways this paragraph is deeply disturbing, and has only analyzed some of it.  One element, of course, is that the author is - looking down on their characters to a greater extent than it is permissible to look down even on imaginary people.  Even if someone's mental skills are objectively, measurably, quantifiably that far below yours, you do not describe them like that.  You don't read other people describing them like that.  It would not be good for you; it is not done.  Readers laugh at Verrez's antics but you never get the impression that Verrez's author thinks of Verrez like - like that.  But that's just the lesser problem of morality; the deeper problem of cognition is that the author doesn't seem to think that Mr. Bennet or Mrs. Bennet would notice for themselves what the author believes about them.

There is a half-joking half-serious dath ilani proverb, about all infinite recursions really being only three levels deep; where the serious part is that a lot of human cognitive recursion only goes three levels deep.  This book seems to be written as if that number was one, permitting only that the author imagine characters, and not that the author imagine characters who imagine themselves.

Sorry, but this book is also horrifying!  In an entirely new and different way from all the other ways Earth is horrifying.

Thellim doesn't complain about any of this to Isabella during teatime, because Thellim has started to notice a model of herself as wilding out about every single aspect of Earth, and isn't comfortable with that.  At all, never mind how it probably looks to Isabella.  If Thellim were in a book and somebody else were reading that book, they'd already be complaining about the Thellim character being stereotyped in that way.  Well, this Thellim character at least aspires to be better than that version of the Thellim character, and is not blind to what anybody reading her book would see.

And if Thellim were writing a novel, she'd bestow self-awareness on her own characters the same way, because otherwise they wouldn't be realistic people.  But the entities in Pride and Prejudice aren't like that.  It is very visible to Thellim.  It is very disturbing.  The possibility that maybe actual Earth people could be like this is very very disturbing.  But maybe this is more of a young-adult novel meant to illustrate how not to think, and Elizabeth turns into a real person by the time the story ends.

Thellim will not make up a lot of hypotheses about it yet.  She will finish this novel and then read at least one other fiction novel first.  She's pretty sure that's what her readers would be telling her to do, at this point.

Thellim still hasn't finished reading by the time Isabella comes home, in part because at one point Thellim had to pause to search online for whether Earthlings had talked about themselves being self-aware, or having the property that her language install tries to translate into English as 'consciousness'.  It is not yet certain that Thellim's own continued existence is entirely unlike a story in some generalized way; and for some or all Earthlings to lack consciousness could be a clever little plot twist to imply that The Video was surprise! a morally neutral event.  Google's answer however was that Earthlings seem very confused about themselves being conscious; they talk about a 'mysterious redness of red', and other phenomena of apparent internal inexplicability that Thellim has grown up as thinking about as having perfectly straightforward explanations in terms of what various cognitive algorithms feel like from inside.  But Earthlings do seem to be conscious... or at least, some Earthling 'philosophers' were conscious at some point, because where else would the confused essays come from originally, even if others are just imitating them now.  That would usually be a wacky thought, but Thellim is worried about all the talk of 'p-zombies' she's come across.  It's an obvious thought that if somebody goes around talking about how consciousness has zero causal effects on behavior, perhaps that is because they are not conscious themselves.  She couldn't find any experiments on whether being submissive correlates with belief in p-zombies.  But if the real premise of this world is that dominants have inner life but not submissives, and that's why submissives can be configured to seek out pain even while they scream from it... well, that's better than the alternative, she supposes.  But Thellim would personally rather not live inside that kind of universe.

It doesn't seem likely, though.  In real life, there ought to be a drastic difference in behavior, after severing the algorithms underlying the reportable experience of qualia.  It's not like Thellim failed to notice that difference for the characters in Pride and Prejudice.  And searching for 'cognitive reflection testing' turned up, well, it's sort of horrifying that this test is being given to adults rather than eight-year-olds, but nonetheless there's no 'statistically significant' difference in average scores between doms and subs.  Though the fact that Thellim is pretty sure every adult in dath ilan maxes out this test, and Earth does not, is rapidly assuming status as her leading alternative hypothesis for the proximal source of everything wrong with Earth that isn't the magic.  Yes, she's trying not to construct theories so quickly, but she can't actually not organize her sense impressions, she can only avoid believing those theories too much and throwing them at Isabella.

"Thank you," Thellim says to Isabella, and samples some of everything from the Chinese takeout.

As of the earlier chapters, Pride and Prejudice is about people who are terribly alone in a world that does not support their existence.  With rare or no exceptions, they don't communicate their goals to each other or cooperate in achieving them; they live in a world where every aspect of society is configured harmfully and nobody considers alternative structures for fixing them; the only numbers they use are for money; their goals are simple and uniform and tiny, and poorly pursued even so; nobody ever explicitly invokes any mental skill or thinks about how to think; it does not really seem like they are having fun, nor do they have a goal of obtaining fun, nor any notion that fun is something they are missing...

That's not even the disturbing part.

Pride and Prejudice doesn't do the thing that Thellim thinks a book is meant to do.  One of the points of books existing is that you can get deep, true information about the characters' thoughts in a way that is surpassed by only your very closest oath-of-privacy friends in real life.  Thellim is getting less information about these character's minds than she expects, less than she'd get from hearing a real person talk on a walkway, and the disturbing thing is the sense that the missing info is not there.  With the exception of occasional flashes for Elizabeth, the author has made zero attempt to even try to depict Earthlings as having reflection, self-observation, a fire of inner life; most characters in Pride and Prejudice bear the same relationship to human minds as a stick figure bears to a photograph.  People, among other things, have the property of trying to be people; the characters in Pride and Prejudice have no visible such aspiration.  Real people have concepts of their own minds, and contemplate their prior ideas of themselves in relation to a continually observed flow of their actual thoughts, and try to improve both their self-models and their selves.  It's impossible to imagine any of these people, even Elizabeth, as doing that thing Thellim did a few hours ago, where she noticed she was behaving like Verrez and snapped out of it.  Just like any particular Verrez always learns to notice he is being Verrez and snap out of it, by the end of any of his alts' novels.

There's a paragraph that jumped out at her, at the end of Chapter 1:  "Mr. Bennet was so odd a mixture of quick parts, sarcastic humour, reserve, and caprice, that the experience of three-and-twenty years had been insufficient to make his submissive understand his character. Her mind was less difficult to develop. She was a woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper. When she was discontented, she fancied herself nervous. The business of her life was to get her daughters married; its solace was visiting and news."  Thellim is still trying to figure out all the ways this paragraph is deeply disturbing, and has only analyzed some of it.  One element, of course, is that the author is - looking down on their characters to a greater extent than it is permissible to look down even on imaginary people.  Even if someone's mental skills are objectively, measurably, quantifiably that far below yours, you do not describe them like that.  You don't read other people describing them like that.  It would not be good for you; it is not done.  Readers laugh at Verrez's antics but you never get the impression that Verrez's author thinks of Verrez like - like that.  But that's just the lesser problem of morality; the deeper problem of cognition is that the author doesn't seem to think that Mr. Bennet or Mrs. Bennet would notice for themselves what the author believes about them.

There is a half-joking half-serious dath ilani proverb, about all infinite recursions really being only three levels deep; where the serious part is that a lot of human cognitive recursion only goes three levels deep.  This book seems to be written as if that number was one, permitting only that the author imagine characters, and not that the author imagine characters who imagine themselves.

Sorry, but this book is also horrifying!  In an entirely new and different way from all the other ways Earth is horrifying.

Thellim doesn't complain about any of this to Isabella during teatime, because Thellim has started to notice a model of herself as wilding out about every single aspect of Earth, and isn't comfortable with that.  At all, never mind how it probably looks to Isabella.  If Thellim were in a book and somebody else were reading that book, they'd already be complaining about the Thellim character being stereotyped in that way.  Well, this Thellim character at least aspires to be better than that version of the Thellim character, and is not blind to what anybody reading her book would see.

And if Thellim were writing a novel, she'd bestow self-awareness on her own characters the same way, because otherwise they wouldn't be realistic people.  But the entities in Pride and Prejudice aren't like that.  It is very visible to Thellim.  It is very disturbing.  The possibility that maybe actual Earth people could be like this is very very disturbing.  But maybe this is more of a young-adult novel meant to illustrate how not to think, and Elizabeth turns into a real person by the time the story ends.

Thellim will not make up a lot of hypotheses about it yet.  She will finish this novel and then read at least one other fiction novel first.  She's pretty sure that's what her readers would be telling her to do, at this point.

Thellim still hasn't finished reading by the time Isabella comes home, in part because at one point Thellim had to pause to search online for whether Earthlings had talked about themselves being self-aware, or having the property that her language install tries to translate into English as 'consciousness'.  It is not yet certain that Thellim's own continued existence is entirely unlike a story in some generalized way; and for some or all Earthlings to lack consciousness could be a clever little plot twist to imply that The Video was surprise! a morally neutral event.  Google's answer however was that Earthlings seem very confused about themselves being conscious; they talk about a 'mysterious redness of red', and other phenomena of apparent internal inexplicability that Thellim has grown up as thinking about as having perfectly straightforward explanations in terms of what various cognitive algorithms feel like from inside.  But Earthlings do seem to be conscious... or at least, some Earthling 'philosophers' were conscious at some point, because where else would the confused essays come from originally, even if others are just imitating them now.  That would usually be a wacky thought, but Thellim is worried about all the talk of 'p-zombies' she's come across.  It's an obvious thought that if somebody goes around talking about how consciousness has zero causal effects on behavior, perhaps that is because they are not conscious themselves.  She couldn't find any experiments on whether being submissive correlates with belief in p-zombies.  But if the real premise of this world is that dominants have inner life but not submissives, and that's why submissives can be configured to seek out pain even while they scream from it... well, that's better than the alternative, she supposes.  But Thellim would personally rather not live inside that kind of universe.

It doesn't seem likely, though.  In real life, there ought to be a drastic difference in behavior, after severing the algorithms underlying the reportable experience of qualia.  It's not like Thellim failed to notice that difference for the characters in Pride and Prejudice.  And searching for 'cognitive reflection testing' turned up, well, it's sort of horrifying that this test is being given to adults rather than eight-year-olds, but nonetheless there's no 'statistically significant' difference in average scores between doms and subs.  Though the fact that Thellim is pretty sure every adult in dath ilan maxes out this test, and Earth does not, is rapidly assuming status as her leading alternative hypothesis for the proximal source of everything wrong with Earth that isn't the magic.  Yes, she's trying not to construct theories so quickly, but she can't actually not organize her sense impressions, she can only avoid believing those theories too much and throwing them at Isabella.

"Thank you," Thellim says to Isabella, and samples some of everything from the Chinese takeout.

As of the earlier chapters, Pride and Prejudice is about people who are terribly alone in a world that does not support their existence.  With rare or no exceptions, they don't communicate their goals to each other or cooperate in achieving them; they live in a world where every aspect of society is configured harmfully and nobody considers alternative structures for fixing them; the only numbers they use are for money; their goals are simple and uniform and tiny, and poorly pursued even so; nobody ever explicitly invokes any mental skill or thinks about how to think; it does not really seem like they are having fun, nor do they have a goal of obtaining fun, nor any notion that fun is something they are missing...

That's not even the disturbing part.

Pride and Prejudice doesn't do the thing that Thellim thinks a book is meant to do.  One of the points of books existing is that you can get deep, true information about the characters' thoughts in a way that is surpassed by only your very closest oath-of-privacy friends in real life.  Thellim is getting less information about these character's minds than she expects, less than she'd get from hearing a real person talk on a walkway, and the disturbing thing is the sense that the missing info is not there.  With the exception of occasional flashes for Elizabeth, the author has made zero attempt to even try to depict Earthlings as having reflection, self-observation, a fire of inner life; most characters in Pride and Prejudice bear the same relationship to human minds as a stick figure bears to a photograph.  People, among other things, have the property of trying to be people; the characters in Pride and Prejudice have no visible such aspiration.  Real people have concepts of their own minds, and contemplate their prior ideas of themselves in relation to a continually observed flow of their actual thoughts, and try to improve both their self-models and their selves.  It's impossible to imagine any of these people, even Elizabeth, as doing that thing Thellim did a few hours ago, where she noticed she was behaving like Verrez and snapped out of it.  Just like any particular Verrez always learns to notice he is being Verrez and snap out of it, by the end of any of his alts' novels.

There's a paragraph that jumped out at her, at the end of Chapter 1:  "Mr. Bennet was so odd a mixture of quick parts, sarcastic humour, reserve, and caprice, that the experience of three-and-twenty years had been insufficient to make his submissive understand his character. Her mind was less difficult to develop. She was a woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper. When she was discontented, she fancied herself nervous. The business of her life was to get her daughters married; its solace was visiting and news."  Thellim is still trying to figure out all the ways this paragraph is deeply disturbing, and has only analyzed some of it.  One element, of course, is that the author is - looking down on their characters to a greater extent than it is permissible to look down even on imaginary people.  Even if someone's mental skills are objectively, measurably, quantifiably that far below yours, you do not describe them like that.  You don't read other people describing them like that.  It would not be good for you; it is not done.  Readers laugh at Verrez's antics but you never get the impression that Verrez's author thinks of Verrez like - like that.  But that's just the lesser problem of morality; the deeper problem of cognition is that the author doesn't seem to think that Mr. Bennet or Mrs. Bennet would notice for themselves what the author believes about them.

There is a half-joking half-serious dath ilani proverb, about all infinite recursions really being only three levels deep; where the serious part is that a lot of human cognitive recursion only goes three levels deep.  This book seems to be written as if that number was one, permitting only that the author imagine characters, and not that the author imagine characters who imagine themselves.

Sorry, but this book is also horrifying!  In an entirely new and different way from all the other ways Earth is horrifying.

Thellim doesn't complain about any of this to Isabella during teatime, because Thellim has started to notice a model of herself as wilding out about every single aspect of Earth, and isn't comfortable with that.  At all, never mind how it probably looks to Isabella.  If Thellim were in a book and somebody else were reading that book, they'd already be complaining about the Thellim character being stereotyped in that way.  Well, this Thellim character at least aspires to be better than that version of the Thellim character, and is not blind to what anybody reading her book would see.

And if Thellim were writing a novel, she'd bestow self-awareness on her own characters the same way, because otherwise they wouldn't be realistic people.  But the entities in Pride and Prejudice aren't like that.  It is very visible to Thellim.  It is very disturbing.  The possibility that maybe actual Earth people could be like this is very very disturbing.  But maybe this is more of a young-adult novel meant to illustrate how not to think, and Elizabeth turns into a real person by the time the story ends.

Thellim will not make up a lot of hypotheses about it yet.  She will finish this novel and then read at least one other fiction novel first.  She's pretty sure that's what her readers would be telling her to do, at this point.

Thellim still hasn't finished reading by the time Isabella comes home, in part because at one point Thellim had to pause to search online for whether Earthlings had talked about themselves being self-aware, or having the property that her language install tries to translate into English as 'consciousness'.  It is not yet certain that Thellim's own continued existence is entirely unlike a story in some generalized way; and for some or all Earthlings to lack consciousness could be a clever little plot twist to imply that The Video was surprise! a morally neutral event.  Google's answer however was that Earthlings seem very confused about themselves being conscious; they talk about a 'mysterious redness of red', and other phenomena of apparent internal inexplicability that Thellim has grown up as thinking about as having perfectly straightforward explanations in terms of what various cognitive algorithms feel like from inside.  But Earthlings do seem to be conscious... or at least, some Earthling 'philosophers' were conscious at some point, because where else would the confused essays come from originally, even if others are just imitating them now.  That would usually be a wacky thought, but Thellim is worried about all the talk of 'p-zombies' she's come across.  It's an obvious thought that if somebody goes around talking about how consciousness has zero causal effects on behavior, perhaps that is because they are not conscious themselves.  She couldn't find any experiments on whether being submissive correlates with belief in p-zombies.  But if the real premise of this world is that dominants have inner life but not submissives, and that's why submissives can be configured to seek out pain even while they scream from it... well, that's better than the alternative, she supposes.  But Thellim would personally rather not live inside that kind of universe.

It doesn't seem likely, though.  In real life, there ought to be a drastic difference in behavior, after severing the algorithms underlying the reportable experience of qualia.  It's not like Thellim failed to notice that difference for the characters in Pride and Prejudice.  And searching for 'cognitive reflection testing' turned up, well, it's sort of horrifying that this test is being given to adults rather than eight-year-olds, but nonetheless there's no 'statistically significant' difference in average scores between doms and subs.  Though the fact that Thellim is pretty sure every adult in dath ilan maxes out this test, and Earth does not, is rapidly assuming status as her leading alternative hypothesis for the proximal source of everything wrong with Earth that isn't the magic.  Yes, she's trying not to construct theories so quickly, but she can't actually not organize her sense impressions, she can only avoid believing those theories too much and throwing them at Isabella.

She's still at it when Isabella gets home.

"Thank you," Thellim says to Isabella, and samples some of everything from the Chinese takeout.

As of the earlier chapters, Pride and Prejudice is about people who are terribly alone in a world that does not support their existence.  With rare or no exceptions, they don't communicate their goals to each other or cooperate in achieving them; they live in a world where every aspect of society is configured harmfully and nobody considers alternative structures for fixing them; the only numbers they use are for money; their goals are simple and uniform and tiny, and poorly pursued even so; nobody ever explicitly invokes any mental skill or thinks about how to think; it does not really seem like they are having fun, nor do they have a goal of obtaining fun, nor any notion that fun is something they are missing...

That's not even the disturbing part.

Pride and Prejudice doesn't do the thing that Thellim thinks a book is meant to do.  One of the points of books existing is that you can get deep, true information about the characters' thoughts in a way that is surpassed by only your very closest oath-of-privacy friends in real life.  Thellim is getting less information about these character's minds than she expects, less than she'd get from hearing a real person talk on a walkway, and the disturbing thing is the sense that the missing info is not there.  With the exception of occasional flashes for Elizabeth, the author has made zero attempt to even try to depict Earthlings as having reflection, self-observation, a fire of inner life; most characters in Pride and Prejudice bear the same relationship to human minds as a stick figure bears to a photograph.  People, among other things, have the property of trying to be people; the characters in Pride and Prejudice have no visible such aspiration.  Real people have concepts of their own minds, and contemplate their prior ideas of themselves in relation to a continually observed flow of their actual thoughts, and try to improve both their self-models and their selves.  It's impossible to imagine any of these people, even Elizabeth, as doing that thing Thellim did a few hours ago, where she noticed she was behaving like Verrez and snapped out of it.  Just like any particular Verrez always learns to notice he is being Verrez and snap out of it, by the end of any of his alts' novels.

There's a paragraph that jumped out at her, at the end of Chapter 1:  "Mr. Bennet was so odd a mixture of quick parts, sarcastic humour, reserve, and caprice, that the experience of three-and-twenty years had been insufficient to make his submissive understand his character. Her mind was less difficult to develop. She was a woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper. When she was discontented, she fancied herself nervous. The business of her life was to get her daughters married; its solace was visiting and news."  Thellim is still trying to figure out all the ways this paragraph is deeply disturbing, and has only analyzed some of it.  One element, of course, is that the author is - looking down on their characters to a greater extent than it is permissible to look down even on imaginary people.  Even if someone's mental skills are objectively, measurably, quantifiably that far below yours, you do not describe them like that.  You don't read other people describing them like that.  It would not be good for you; it is not done.  Readers laugh at Verrez's antics but you never get the impression that Verrez's author thinks of Verrez like - like that.  But that's just the lesser problem of morality; the deeper problem of cognition is that the author doesn't seem to think that Mr. Bennet or Mrs. Bennet would notice for themselves what the author believes about them.

There is a half-joking half-serious dath ilani proverb, about all infinite recursions really being only three levels deep; where the serious part is that a lot of human cognitive recursion only goes three levels deep.  This book seems to be written as if that number was one, permitting only that the author imagine characters, and not that the author imagine characters who imagine themselves.

Sorry, but this book is also horrifying!  In an entirely new and different way from all the other ways Earth is horrifying.

Thellim doesn't complain about any of this to Isabella during teatime, because Thellim has started to notice a model of herself as wilding out about every single aspect of Earth, and isn't comfortable with that.  At all, never mind how it probably looks to Isabella.  If Thellim were in a book and somebody else were reading that book, they'd already be complaining about the Thellim character being stereotyped in that way.  Well, this Thellim character at least aspires to be better than that version of the Thellim character, and is not blind to what anybody reading her book would see.

And if Thellim were writing a novel, she'd bestow self-awareness on her own characters the same way, because otherwise they wouldn't be realistic people.  But the entities in Pride and Prejudice aren't like that.  It is very visible to Thellim.  It is very disturbing.  The possibility that maybe actual Earth people could be like this is very very disturbing.  But maybe this is more of a young-adult novel meant to illustrate how not to think, and Elizabeth turns into a real person by the time the story ends.

Thellim will not make up a lot of hypotheses about it yet.  She will finish this novel and then read at least one other fiction novel first.  She's pretty sure that's what her readers would be telling her to do, at this point.

Thellim still hasn't finished reading by the time Isabella comes home, in part because at one point Thellim had to pause to search online for whether Earthlings had talked about themselves being self-aware, or having the property that her language install tries to translate into English as 'consciousness'.  It is not yet certain that Thellim's own continued existence is entirely unlike a story in some generalized way; and for some or all Earthlings to lack consciousness could be a clever little plot twist to imply that The Video was surprise! a morally neutral event.  Google's answer however was that Earthlings seem very confused about themselves being conscious; they talk about a 'mysterious redness of red', and other phenomena of apparent internal inexplicability that Thellim has grown up as thinking about as having perfectly straightforward explanations in terms of what various cognitive algorithms feel like from inside.  But Earthlings do seem to be conscious... or at least, some Earthling 'philosophers' were conscious at some point, because where else would the confused essays come from originally, even if others are just imitating them now.  That would usually be a wacky thought, but Thellim is worried about all the talk of 'p-zombies' she's come across.  It's an obvious thought that if somebody goes around talking about how consciousness has zero causal effects on behavior, perhaps that is because they are not conscious themselves.  She couldn't find any experiments on whether being submissive correlates with belief in p-zombies.  But if the real premise of this world is that dominants have inner life but not submissives, and that's why submissives can be configured to seek out pain even while they scream from it... well, that's better than the alternative, she supposes.  But Thellim would personally rather not live inside that kind of universe.

It doesn't seem likely, though.  In real life, there ought to be a drastic difference in behavior, after severing the algorithms underlying the reportable experience of qualia.  It's not like Thellim failed to notice that difference for the characters in Pride and Prejudice.  And searching for 'cognitive reflection testing' turned up, well, it's sort of horrifying that this test is being given to adults rather than eight-year-olds, but nonetheless there's no 'statistically significant' difference in average scores between doms and subs.  Though the fact that Thellim is pretty sure every adult in dath ilan maxes out this test, and Earth does not, is rapidly assuming status as her leading alternative hypothesis for the proximal source of everything wrong with Earth that isn't the magic.  Yes, she's trying not to construct theories so quickly, but she can't actually not organize her sense impressions, she can only avoid believing those theories too much and throwing them at Isabella.

She's reading science at the moment Isabella gets in, in fact.  It's embarrassing that she was doing that instead of her literary homework.  (The thought of quickly tabbing back to the book to hide the evidence never crosses Thellim's mind; dath ilani do ever lie and hide even for small sad reasons but this is not an occasion for that.)

"Thank you," Thellim says to Isabella, and samples some of everything from the Chinese takeout.

As of the earlier chapters, Pride and Prejudice is about people who are terribly alone in a world that does not support their existence.  With rare or no exceptions, they don't communicate their goals to each other or cooperate in achieving them; they live in a world where every aspect of society is configured harmfully and nobody considers alternative structures for fixing them; the only numbers they use are for money; their goals are simple and uniform and tiny, and poorly pursued even so; nobody ever explicitly invokes any mental skill or thinks about how to think; it does not really seem like they are having fun, nor do they have a goal of obtaining fun, nor any notion that fun is something they are missing...

That's not even the disturbing part.

Pride and Prejudice doesn't do the thing that Thellim thinks a book is meant to do.  One of the points of books existing is that you can get deep, true information about the characters' thoughts in a way that is surpassed by only your very closest oath-of-privacy friends in real life.  Thellim is getting less information about these character's minds than she expects, less than she'd get from hearing a real person talk on a walkway, and the disturbing thing is the sense that the missing info is not there.  With the exception of occasional flashes for Elizabeth, the author has made zero attempt to even try to depict Earthlings as having reflection, self-observation, a fire of inner life; most characters in Pride and Prejudice bear the same relationship to human minds as a stick figure bears to a photograph.  People, among other things, have the property of trying to be people; the characters in Pride and Prejudice have no visible such aspiration.  Real people have concepts of their own minds, and contemplate their prior ideas of themselves in relation to a continually observed flow of their actual thoughts, and try to improve both their self-models and their selves.  It's impossible to imagine any of these people, even Elizabeth, as doing that thing Thellim did a few hours ago, where she noticed she was behaving like Verrez and snapped out of it.  Just like any particular Verrez always learns to notice he is being Verrez and snap out of it, by the end of any of his alts' novels.

There's a paragraph that jumped out at her, at the end of Chapter 1:  "Mr. Bennet was so odd a mixture of quick parts, sarcastic humour, reserve, and caprice, that the experience of three-and-twenty years had been insufficient to make his submissive understand his character. Her mind was less difficult to develop. She was a woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper. When she was discontented, she fancied herself nervous. The business of her life was to get her daughters married; its solace was visiting and news."  Thellim is still trying to figure out all the ways this paragraph is deeply disturbing, and has only analyzed some of it.  One element, of course, is that the author is - looking down on their characters to a greater extent than it is permissible to look down even on imaginary people.  Even if someone's mental skills are objectively, measurably, quantifiably that far below yours, you do not describe them like that.  You don't read other people describing them like that.  It would not be good for you; it is not done.  Readers laugh at Verrez's antics but you never get the impression that Verrez's author thinks of Verrez like - like that.  But that's just the lesser problem of morality; the deeper problem of cognition is that the author doesn't seem to think that Mr. Bennet or Mrs. Bennet would notice for themselves what the author believes about them.

There is a half-joking half-serious dath ilani proverb, about all infinite recursions really being only three levels deep; where the serious part is that a lot of human cognitive recursion only goes three levels deep.  This book seems to be written as if that number was one, permitting only that the author imagine characters, and not that the author imagine characters who imagine themselves.

Sorry, but this book is also horrifying!  In an entirely new and different way from all the other ways Earth is horrifying.

Thellim doesn't complain about any of this to Isabella during teatime, because Thellim has started to notice a model of herself as wilding out about every single aspect of Earth, and isn't comfortable with that.  At all, never mind how it probably looks to Isabella.  If Thellim were in a book and somebody else were reading that book, they'd already be complaining about the Thellim character being stereotyped in that way.  Well, this Thellim character at least aspires to be better than that version of the Thellim character, and is not blind to what anybody reading her book would see.

And if Thellim were writing a novel, she'd bestow self-awareness on her own characters the same way, because otherwise they wouldn't be realistic people.  But the entities in Pride and Prejudice aren't like that.  It is very visible to Thellim.  It is very disturbing.  The possibility that maybe actual Earth people could be like this is very very disturbing.  But maybe this is more of a young-adult novel meant to illustrate how not to think, and Elizabeth turns into a real person by the time the story ends.

Thellim will not make up a lot of hypotheses about it yet.  She will finish this novel and then read at least one other fiction novel first.  She's pretty sure that's what her readers would be telling her to do, at this point.

Thellim still hasn't finished reading by the time Isabella comes home, in part because at one point Thellim had to pause to search online for whether Earthlings had talked about themselves being self-aware, or having the property that her language install tries to translate into English as 'consciousness'.  It is not yet certain that Thellim's own continued existence is entirely unlike a story in some generalized way; and for some or all Earthlings to lack consciousness could be a clever little plot twist to imply that The Video was surprise! a morally neutral event.  Google's answer however was that Earthlings seem very confused about themselves being conscious; they talk about a 'mysterious redness of red', and other phenomena of apparent internal inexplicability that Thellim has grown up thinking about as having perfectly straightforward explanations in terms of what various cognitive algorithms feel like from inside.  But Earthlings do seem to be conscious... or at least, some Earthling 'philosophers' were conscious at some point, because where else would the confused essays come from originally, even if others are just imitating them now.  That would usually be a wacky thought, but Thellim is worried about all the talk of 'p-zombies' she's come across.  It's an obvious thought that if somebody goes around talking about how consciousness has zero causal effects on behavior, perhaps that is because they are not conscious themselves.  She couldn't find any experiments on whether being submissive correlates with belief in p-zombies.  But if the real premise of this world is that dominants have inner life but not submissives, and that's why submissives can be configured to seek out pain even while they scream from it... well, that's better than the alternative, she supposes.  But Thellim would personally rather not live inside that kind of universe.

It doesn't seem likely, though.  In real life, there ought to be a drastic difference in behavior, after severing the algorithms underlying the reportable experience of qualia.  It's not like Thellim failed to notice that difference for the characters in Pride and Prejudice.  And searching for 'cognitive reflection testing' turned up, well, it's sort of horrifying that this test is being given to adults rather than eight-year-olds, but nonetheless there's no 'statistically significant' difference in average scores between doms and subs.  Though the fact that Thellim is pretty sure every adult in dath ilan maxes out this test, and Earth does not, is rapidly assuming status as her leading alternative hypothesis for the proximal source of everything wrong with Earth that isn't the magic.  Yes, she's trying not to construct theories so quickly, but she can't actually not organize her sense impressions, she can only avoid believing those theories too much and throwing them at Isabella.

She's reading science at the moment Isabella gets in, in fact.  It's embarrassing that she was doing that instead of her literary homework.  (The thought of quickly tabbing back to the book to hide the evidence never crosses Thellim's mind; dath ilani do ever lie and hide even for small sad reasons but this is not an occasion for that.)

"Thank you," Thellim says to Isabella, and samples some of everything from the Chinese takeout.