system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
[The Thing] Could you have a conversation with the thing about its nature ?

Like, if we captured The Thing and put it in a cell, would he respond questions we asked or would he try to convince us he was not an monster?
gpt
Could you have a conversation with an octopus about it's nature? The Thing is a fundamentally alien being, we have no idea if it's even sentient, or intelligent in any way that we'd understand, or capable of understanding the concept of communication. A dog is a social animal. They've evolved to live in groups with other dogs and cooperate with them for mutual survival. That requires an ability to communicate, to convey their wishes and desires to others, and to in turn understand the wishes and desires of others. That makes them perfectly suited to living with humans, because their brains are already programmed for getting along with others. A dog can imagine, to some limited degree, that other dogs/humans are beings similar to itself, they have to to survive.

An octopus is an intelligent animal. They have large brains, they're capable of complex problem solving, even limited tool use. But they're absolutely not social animals. In fact they're often cannibalistic. They don't communicate. They can't cooperate with other octopi. An octopus probably can't imagine anything about any other animal beyond itself. Their survival has nothing to do with that. They're probably the closest thing to an alien intelligence on earth that we know of. The Thing is even more alien than that, likely in ways we simply can't comprehend. 

We don't know if the Thing even has a mind, it may simply be operating on complex instinctual programming like an ant colony. An individual ant is not intelligent, it can't think, it has no mind. But as a colony they're capable of complex cooperative behaviors. The cells of the Thing may behave in a similar manner.

The Thing can seemingly use human speech or compel it's hosts to engage in complex behaviors, but we don't know that it's consciously choosing those actions. The Thing may simply be hijacking more advanced biological processes like a virus, and activating responses that will benefit it, with no real understanding of what it's doing. 

If you locked a Thing-human in a cell and tried to talk to it, it would probably spout some normal human speech responses. It would insist that it's human, it's not infected or an alien, it has no idea what you're talking about, it wants to be set free, please let me out just let me out for god sake it's me let me out! The Thing isn't sitting inside the hosts brain like a little pilot in a ship. The host believes everything they're saying, but there's perhaps just some itch, some compulsion at the back of their mind they can't explain. They just, really really need to get out of here, or at least talk to another person face to face. The human mind understands these things, it understands communication and cooperation. The Thing does not, the Thing perhaps feels a need to OUTSIDE! SPREAD! FEED! Then it activates whatever chemicals in your brain might achieve those needs. It doesn't understand why making those noises could get it to those goals, it just feels that it could. Whatever the Thing is, it's form of survival doesn't require true communication or cooperation, just the simulation of those things for it's own gain.