[OOC] On Chula and classifications of consciousness

[eelseason]

So, since probably the beginning of recorded time in human civilization, or possible since the beginning of humanity, there's been an implicit understanding that humans are fundamentally different – set off in a class of their own – from animals. No mater how far along the timeline you go, in most human cultures this is upheld. Unlike concepts of fixed sex/gender correlations and divides and most of the controversies of neurodiversity, it doesn't really get subverted or eliminated. Oh, it gets dressed up in different forms – souls, intelligence, sentience – but it sticks around.

The Chula, on the other hand, recognize no such distinction between themselves and nonsentients other than a matter of degree. Chula, humans, k'kta, the entire ranks of thinking species, are only very intelligent animals to the Chula mindset, with no more meaningful distinction than that. A human is smarter than a cat is smarter than a lemming. That's it.

You can imagine that does some interesting things to the people who have to live in Chula-built social infrastructures.