This sequence feels a bit weird. Not because she "should" have the ability to turn off undesired sensory input, I think that's making a big assumption about her capabilities. But at least my expectation is that she's experiencing things via Sydney's senses, and that makes this a weird solution in my mind. Like, if I was being body-controlled into forcibly eating something insanely spicy, yeah I'd probably not enjoy it, because my taste buds can only tolerate spice up to a certain level. But here it's not Lapha's taste buds that are experiencing sydney-level spicy, it's sydney's taste buds, and they're up to the task of handling it. It'd be like if you took...idk, the AI from a sentient roomba, and stuck it in a hot-rodding car. Yes, if a roomba was accelerated to 300 mph, that would probably damage it because its hardware isn't really ready for those conditions. Thus, the AI from a roomba being put in a hot-rodding car would be understandably frightened of extremely fast speeds. But it's still in a hot-rodding car, which is built for those speeds. It would be a
scary experience, but not a
painful one.
And the author's note seems to both agree and disagree?
Quote:
Honestly, it seems to me that Lapha would like or dislike whatever the host liked, at least in terms of “if they have that gene that makes cilantro taste lightly lemony and not like if you mixed bitterness incarnate and a bag of fresh lawn clippings up in a transporter, and also maybe some soap.” Lapha would likely have some independent thoughts about texture and wiggling stuff like gagh, but the genetic stuff would be determined by the host.
In the case of spice, I guess I’m implying that heat tolerance is something that can be trained. While Lapha might be enjoying the presumable deluge of endorphins the dish is triggering in Sydney, she can’t get over what feels like Sydney gargling a mouthful of yellow-hot iron filings.
But I feel like arguing about how much this preparation is physiological (the brain has learned that this particular mouth-pain is good instead of bad from repeated exposure) versus mental (the mind knows the spicy is coming and is bracing for it) is getting into philosophical arguments. We can't really have a set answer on this kind of thing, because minds and brains are currently inseparably linked, so we can't know for sure if putting a different mind in someone's brain would be able to tolerate the same spice level or not.
The previous comic seems weirder to me, though. Like yeah, it takes time for thoughts to get into short-term memory, and Lapha only has memory access...but it shouldn't have been a surprise to Lapha, cuz the plan is based around long-term stuff that would definitely be in Sydney's memory. Idk like today's comic can provoke an unanswerable argument about separation of mind and brain, but I think it's really weird that a memory reader who hears that there's a plan involving "the food named after me" could not then check the memory about "food named after me". I'm also not sure why it matters to keep the plan secret from her. What's she even gonna do about it? She's completely physically restrained, we already know she can't turn her senses off, and even under the author's assumptions that you can train your mind to handle spice, that would still take repeated exposure. If they had said out loud "we're going to feed Sydney the food closest in heat to lava", Lapha would not be any better at handling it than she is now - a 13.5 minute peptalk to herself should not matter, and yet the comic acts like it would. It's weird.
