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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ColonelHardisson" data-source="post: 952060" data-attributes="member: 363">No, it doesn't restrict my mind. Perhaps it restricts yours, but not mine - no offense. Just as we are unable to know how an alien would think or act, it's tough for one human to conclusively state what or how another human thinks (let alone an alien), or what is or isn't an effective method of clarifying one's thoughts. If you say that assigning percentages restricts your thinking, that I can accept; saying it restricts mine I can't accept. There is no way for you to conclusively know that, just as there is no way for any of us to conclusively know what an alien would think.The fact that it is utterly and entirely impossible for us to even conceive how anything truly alien would think or act is what restricts us across the board (unless someone really is in contact with aliens <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> ). The only recourse is to arbitrarily choose what we consider to be "typically human" and work from there. Attempting to do otherwise is akin to contemplating the "tree falling in the forest" question in its unanswerability. Personally, such discussions and contemplations grow tiresome for me fairly quickly.Let me tackle some of what you point out. You picked the most obvious "Vulcan" traits, but in my analysis of them, and the assigning of a percentage value of how human they are, is based on more than that - they go into heat every 7 years, they have mind powers beyond those of humans, they have organs that restrict their emotions, they have copper-based blood...none of which any human has. The same goes with other aliens I mentioned - Narn are clearly not physically like humans except in the basic humanoid body structure (the males carry the young in a pouch, they have greater strength, thay are not what we would call mammals, for examples); Centauri have a few phsyical differences, including the equivalent of DNA that is totally non-human; and etc.The point being that my assigning of such percentage values is based on more than how they act or think, by necessity - since it's impossible, literally, for us to ever "get in the head" of an alien, some consideration has to be given to the physical differences. Stemming from those physical differences would be cultural and, possibly, psychological differences that would, indeed, make them "less than human." Also, any human that possessed one or more of the physical differences mentioned above would likely be classified as "less than human," or perhaps it is better to say "other than human," to be more precise and less potentially offensive. In such a case, percentage values would likely be used as a good shorthand method of keeping the discussion clear.</blockquote>

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