It makes us feel bad

From How Alike Are We, by Bo-young Kim:

“Humans share about 99% of their DNA with insects, and yet humans don’t believe that bugs possess self-consciousness. The crew members on this ship all look different from one another, but you never wonder whether your crewmates possess self-consciousness or not. Still, in the end, it’s just a simple habit for humans to assume everyone around them has self-consciousness. And even so, there were lots of human that were deemed ‘less than human’ in your history. Slaves, colonial subjects, people from other races. The thing is, if self-consciousness is a thing that you can observe, there is still no way to prove whether that it’s real.” Noticing Lee’s renewed silence, I added, “These aren’t my ideas. They’re just the ideas than my human makers programmed into me. It doesn’t mean that everything I said is completely true.”

The silence continued, so I stopped speaking, for fear that I might again become the subject of some renewed outpouring of violence—even if throwing a punch would amount to tapping on one another like balloons while floundering around through the air in this zero-gravity chamber.

With a deep sigh, Lee Jin Seo said, “Alright, HUN, I’m going to teach you how to avoid upsetting the crew. You need to stop talking like that from now on.:

“Talking like what?”

“Sharing knowledge like that.”

“Why?”

“It makes us feels bad.”