At that point of time, they had no real idea how morphing worked. Without Ax there to make it somewhat understandable to them what happened (if he ever really could), morphing probably had more of a mystical quality rather than a scientific quality to them, and to Cassie in particular. It is reasonable to assume that she could be worried that they would be stealing the animal's essence more than their DNA, and their temporary inability to control the morph in the beginning would probably reinforce that thought. They are essentially creating animals to just bend them to their will, basically be their slaves.
Yeah, I can definitely see Cassie thinking that way. And it is true that they didn't really 'get' the idea behind morphing at first, given how confused Jake was by Tobias being able to morph a healthy hawk from DNA from an injured one, or how long it took them in book 4 to realize that morphing would heal Marco's dolphin tail. If they had really been thinking about morphing from a purely 'scientific' standpoint, both of those realizations ought to have been instantaneous.
- On the other hand, if the host body and brain was exponentially intelligent, it would reach self-awareness and argue for control of the body. This is to say that all morphed bodies have the potential for individuality but because of the 2h limit this is never an issue.
The latter would definitely support the idea of killing a creature when you demorph. Really though it is completely arguable either way because it's fiction. It is more convenient for everyone to just think that morphs are yours to do what you want because it suits you but I don't think Cassie is wrong in her observation. It takes a very perceptive mind to notice this.
You could say that Tobias (as a nothlit) never has a problem with the hawk wanting to assert it's own will or he never notices the hawk's individuality. This is probably because he literally becomes the hawk living exactly how his hawk would live. Not to mention every remorph "resets" the morphs' minds. If the host was more intelligent (loosely described) sentient then it could be more significant, making the issue with morphing sentient beings more of an issue.
Interesting idea. Actually, it occurs to me that the idea of exponential intelligence of morphs would actually explain a lot about Tobias. As the series progressed, he became more and more hawklike, and less and less human, right? What if that wasn't simply his human brain 'adjusting' to life as a hawk? What if the hawk itself was learning how to be a hawk, and as it gained more awareness of its own condition, it was able to assume more and more control, so subtly that Tobias never even fully noticed what was going on? It would make sense that the morph's developing mind would be pretty intricately linked to the human mind, so much so that even Tobias might not have fully known where one ended and the other began.
When someone morphs into an ant or something, its brain can't possibly be supporting their mind, so the mind is probably somewhere else and connected to the brain and controlling movement.
On this premise, if they morph something more intelligent, they'll still be controlling movement and so on. But since their mind isn't in the brain, what's all that brain doing?
Of course, all of the above will be void if morphing is designed to use as much of the brain as available for your thoughts and only put the leftovers somewhere else. Or if the premise is rubbish.
That is a really good question. Wow, I can't believe that never occurred to me before, but you're right, the biological brain of the creature should in theory be a fully-functional mind of its own. After all, what would be stopping it? Unless whoever developed the morphing technology thought of that and built in some kind of mechanism specifically to repress the morph's intelligence. Possible, but given the number of things they didn't think of (like why not make the technology only work on Andalites?), I'd be inclined to doubt it.
As for the idea of putting certain thoughts in the biological brain and leaving the 'extras' in z-space, I find that unlikely. It seems like it would be much easier to put all of the morpher's mind into one place, since splitting it up could get complicated. How would the morphing technology decide what parts of the mind should go where?
On the other hand, though . . . there was book #32, where Rachel morphs a starfish and gets her mind split in half when her physical brain is split. How would that happen if the entire mind was in z-space? Unless maybe there isn't just one link between the morph-mind and the z-space mind, but rather the entire brain is mapped out and each neuron of the morph is connected to a neuron in z-space. Come to think of it, that would make some amount of sense anyway. For example, when somebody in morph thinks about, say, lifting their arm, the specific region of the morphed brain for arm movement would have to light up, presumably when the same region of the morpher's brain in z-space gave the command. So it makes sense that each region of the brain would have to be linked across z-space.
For another thing, think for a moment about how information in the brain is stored. At least, in earth brains, I don't know if maybe alien brains work differently, but in any case for humans it's the physical links between the neurons that actually store the information. You think about something, and that activates a specific neuron path within the brain, and that path gets reinforced so that it's more likely to be triggered again later. Given this fact, it might almost be impossible to store any of a morpher's mind within the morph's brain at all. An animal's brain would be physically different enough, that those neuron paths would be off, perhaps not by much in the case of great apes, but it still could be impossible to set up those connections exactly the same within the morphed brain as in the morpher's original brain. And those slight changes would be enough to pretty drastically alter the informational content of a mind, with disastrous effects.
