It’s him. He’s the joke.

Would “incognizant” fit the bill? Or, perhaps, the XY Problem?

Yes, so don’t be lookin’ at its quack

If it makes you feel better, it seems like you’re not the only one who missed the thread indent 🤷‍♂️

snekerpimp was responding to FlyingSquid, not baldingpudenda.

Lots of great suggestions involving story craft and the like, so I’ll target the “religious hangups” bit with a couple non-fiction books:

• Sentience by Nicholas Humphrey (great to get a perspective on consciousness and sentience that isn’t marred with religious doctrine)

• Determined by Robert Sapolsky (a primatologist with a knack for getting you comfortable with the notion that we don’t have as free a will as religion tells us)

And just to include a bit of fiction:

• Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky (about life as we know it, or maybe as we don’t)

• Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros (deals with overwritten cultures. Also dragons.)

I think it’s not quite the case that people get more conservative as they age. It’s that policies and goals throughout society tend to get more progressive with time – as we learn more about our needs and those of others – while personal ideologies tend to crystallize with age. When one generation solves a problem, the next generation starts looking for new problems to tackle. The trouble is that we have to do that while dragging the previous generations, kicking and screaming, towards something more broadly beneficial to society because they think they’ve already got it all figured out. The evolution of our understanding of the world doesn’t end with our generation, no matter how much effort we put in. 🤷