Stealing this from another post

Persona 3 protag be like

Still reading Pillars of Reality

Nice to see someone else point out how hypocritical the Prime Directive is. The Earthers don’t want to hand over their tech to the “primitives,” but they’re happy to steal any superior tech the “primitives” have.

(no subject)

More thinking about The Pillars of Reality. I previously speculated that in this setting, all minds are scattered fragments of the original mind. I have an addendum from the later books: the way old-style mages are trained makes them psychologically incapable of coming up with this idea on their own.

Basically, mages trained in the old style lose the ability to divide an object into functional parts. For instance, they can’t learn to pull the trigger on a gun, because they only conceive of the gun as a whole and can’t conceive of the trigger as an individual part of it. This doesn’t make a lot of sense and contradicts earlier books (e.g. mages in earlier books can conceive of a lock as a specific part of a door), but it’s canon now, so I’ll roll with it.

That’s why old-style mages ended up as solipsists. They recognized the existence of the one true mind, but couldn’t conceive of it being broken into parts, because they couldn’t conceive of parts in the first place. The only conclusion each individual mage could come to was that they, themselves, were the one true mind, and other mages were just hallucinations that helped the mind understand the delusional state it was trapped in.