The Psychology of Ponies · 1:52am Apr 3rd, 2014
So, I came across this lengthy-but-very-interesting article about various sciences slowly starting to realize and accept just how much our individual cultures shape our minds. The culture and environment we are raised in can shape almost everything, from how we perceive time and the world, to spatial and locational logic, to what we think of as 'fair'. Of course, it turns out that Westerners--and specifically Americans--are outliers in a lot of ways compared to the rest of the world, which means a lot of psychological research that assumed the genetic similarity of our brains would equate to psychological similarity is probably a bit weaker than we thought.
When I read about how many differences humans can have between each other, even differences in aspects that one might think of as 'fundamental' if you don't know better, that brings me back to just how vastly different an alien race (like sapient, magical pastel ponies) could be. There have been fics that have tried to touch on this idea, but I don't know that anybody has ever really taken it to an extreme--fics like Xenophilia or Celestia Sleeps In have barely scratched the surface. Heck, even going outside the 'ponysphere', I think a lot of Sci Fi/Fantasy literature glosses over the same kinds of issues.
Of course, it's only (fan)fiction, and the easy fallback is to just to take as axiomatic that our similarities outweigh our differences, as we do in most ponyfic, and see in shows like Star Trek and the like. I think Schroeder's Virga novels are one case I've seen where the author at least skimmed the surface of these ideas, when it turns out that baseline humanity, merely by being biological creatures, have more in common with augmented-yet-still-nonsentient (but perhaps sapient) oak trees than we do with the fully self-aware AI we end up creating. You could also look at stuff like Lovecraft's work as the darker side of this. A lot of the harm and madness that befalls his protagonists is enacted by beings that may not even be aware of us, but are just too different to coexist with us. Brings it full-circle when you realize that Lovecraft was kind of a racist and cultural imperialist...
Anyway, I don't know that I have a point, just some rambling thoughts that came from reading that article... 
