Lee :
What if…. the subject gives you permission to look into their thoughts? Reasons… they want you to know something but cannot say it. Or they need help to process some trauma. Or maybe to help undo some of the attempts of tampering.
Just wondering.

Hey – note the wording. “Never /invade/ the mind of another”. If you invite someone in, they’re not invading. Even the description mentions that by breaking in you are inherently causing damage to the structure of the mind – if the person opens the “door” themselves instead of you breaking it down, then one could presume the damage is significantly less if there at all if there’s enough skill involved. It’s possibly even possible that you could use mind magic in a therapeutic sense in this way – repairing damage caused by others, or even natural damage (mental illness?)

Just wondering.

chris :
Monsters are non-human. It seems to make a great deal of sense that a monster would perceive and understand the world far differently from me.

I agree with you to an extent, but certain entities that we might describe as monsters in the Dresdenverse may or may not have humanlike intelligence. For example, while the Denarians can be considered monsters, they are, at the core, human beings. They still possess a soul, and they have human thought, even if they have a fallen angel riding shotgun. Outside of certain exceptions like this, though, I’d say that you’re basically right.

Either way, it’s sort of a moot point, to be honest. As the post says, if a human spellcaster tried to invade the mind of something other than another human, I’d say that it is almost guaranteed that his/her consciousness would be completely devastated. As we’ve read in the books, Harry has come close on several occasions to seriously blowing a gasket simply by looking on supernatural beings with his Sight, which only provides a glimpse of their true essence and power. He’s very nearly done the same by looking at specific humans as well, whether by soulgaze or Sight, so it’s no surprise that tampering with the minds of others, which I would consider far more intense and dangerous, could do what it does.

As far as I can tell, a freaky creature of an entirely different nature than mine, should run on hardware far different than mine. Its kind of like trying to get my NES to play my DVD collection. DVDs are meant for DVD players, their data is formatted to DVD players and only hold things that would be relevant to DVD players. The NES knows nothing of DVDs or their silly data codes.

I mean with enough soldering and some custom software you could make an NES play DVDs, but it wouldn’t be an NES anymore would it?