"Well that's good. I'd say 'ask for a faster speed of light and for it to be possible to decrease entropy' but that would probably kill everyone by some mechanism I don't know enough math to predict, so actually I won't say that."

"I think if the logos could arrange things in a way that would be better for us it would?" Logic says uncertainly.

"Yeah I wouldn't be at all surprised if only a very narrow set of possible configurations of physics could support humanoid life. How did you find out your physics was a person anyway? Did it evolve or are you in a simulation or what?"

(Obviously if Logic is in a simulation then so is Jana but that's arguably a nicer possibility than 'Jana is going insane', at least for Jana if not necessarily for the rest of Firstplanet.)

"The Teacher found out how to listen to the logos two thousand years ago and he taught us how to do what the logos wanted! Why would we be a simulation?"

"If you're a simulation it would explain where the Logos' brain was. Can the Logos tell people information they don't already know? Can you pass a message from one continent to another by telling the Logos to tell someone else something?"

"I bet it could," Logic says, "but it doesn't do things like that because miracles are blasphemous. Physics is beautiful and it would be less beautiful if there were random exceptions to get people things they wanted."

Jana looks absolutely baffled!

"But--you just said the Logos talks to people! Talking to one person is fine but passing messages is ugly? That's random!"

"Well, there isn't any rule against it talking to one person," Logic says, concerned that this conversation is involving more theological knowledge than she possesses.

"Look, maybe this is a stupid question but I'm basically an alien and aliens asking stupid questions is fine, so: if the Logos never talks to someone about a conversation with someone else, how do you know you're hearing physics and not just your own second thoughtvoice?"

"What's a second thoughtvoice?"

"So you know how you hear your own thoughts in your brain? And then sometimes you have a conversation between your thoughts and also-your-thoughts? Those are thoughtvoices and the side of the conversation that feels less like you is the second one."

"Oh. I think maybe the logos put a logos-thoughtvoice into our head so we can talk to it without breaking the laws of physics?"

"How do you empirically distinguish that hypothesis from the hypothesis where physics isn't a person and the thoughtvoice is your model of it?"

"I don't know, I'm not a theologian, I'm twelve," Logic says.

"This seems important enough to teach it before age twelve! But I don't know what the prerequisites are I guess; maybe it's a complicated neuroscience thing."

"Anyway, if you can hear it it feels obvious. Like knowing how many toes you have."

"Lots of stuff is obvious but not true. Optical illusions and whether a string of numbers is random and what grade an essay is going to get, but also lots of people in my universe think their second thoughtvoice might be another person but it never is."

"How do they know that?" Logic wondered. "My aunt hears voices but we're not sure if they're people or not."

"If one introspects carefully one can hear oneself deciding what they should say, and they never provide any information one doesn't already know even if one hears them claiming that they can, and if one writes fictional characters enough some of one's thoughtvoices will start talking like the fictional characters. On my planet, I mean; I don't know anything about your aunt other than priors."

"Why would people originally being fictional characters mean they're not people?"

"Well sometimes thoughtvoices(A) start as fictional characters and end up as people, but A come from the person whose brain A're in, A aren't a separate thing showing up from somewhere else. If people(B) imagine the Logos as a character so hard the character becomes a person that's different from there having been a Logos-person(C) that existed before humans evolved and would go on existing if all the humans stopped thinking about C."

"The logos sometimes provides information we don't have already! Like if you don't know what to do about a problem sometimes the logos will tell you."

"In a way that's the same as your brain having a good idea or in a way that's like getting information about external reality that you didn't have--actually can I just get some examples of impressive known cases, that'll be easier than trying to define what I mean exactly."

"Well, the Teacher, obviously-- and there were a bunch of people whom the logos told that slavery was wrong or that animals are people or that you shouldn't discriminate against people based on their ethnicity. And people develop new techniques, or art projects."

"That's all stuff one can figure out just by thinking about it though. Except the which animals are people thing but one can figure that out by seeing animals and reading about animals and then thinking. So that's weak evidence. Strong evidence would be 'there's ore under this mountain' or 'there's going to be a big earthquake next year' or the exact speed of light or something. What are the new techniques, if it's stuff like steelmaking techniques or surgical techniques where there would otherwise be a lot of trial and error that would be an in-between amount of evidence."