Asher judges a mind by how big it sees the world. If it pretty much instantly has new data mapped out, so that the person is just pinning things on an existing grid, it’s not a peer. If it can encounter whole new countries and approach them with an open-ended mind, then perhaps. For Asher, it’s really easy: when others first encounter the differences between him and others, if they try to explain them away, or ascribe them to “just needing to be different”, then they view the world as a fairly small map which they can grasp easily. Asher realizes this, because Asher himself is a world.