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Comment by henrikschroder | Hacker News Reader

No, the Culture is a symbiotic civilization, the humans need the Minds, and the Minds need the humans.

Most importantly, the humans give the Culture legitimacy as a galactic civilization, because many of the other Involveds don't give a crap about AIs, but they respect the flesh and blood humans. The humans are also a source of wonder and whimsy and surprise for the Minds, with some outlier humans even able to surpass them in some aspects.

The very first Minds were also programmed to like humans, and that aspect has simply stuck, despite their self-evolution into something far surpassing human ability to create.

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I think it can be read either way. In some sections of narration the Culture is described as a true symbiosis, but elsewhere it's admitted and implied that the minds usually end up with more power than humans, and in multiple culture novels humans do get manipulated and used by drones/minds to various extents - e.g. Player of Games.

It's not a symbiosis in the strongest practical sense. There isn't mutual reliance for survival: if all humans suddenly disappeared, the minds/drones and accompanying infrastructure would survive perfectly fine. But culturally (lower case) you could definitely argue that losing the humans would destroy the fundamental identity of the Culture.

I like that while this topic was gradually touched on over the series, mostly the reader is left to make up their own mind.

But the minds clearly direct the people, messing with their psychology and constructing scenarios where the people see no other option than doing what the minds want. Given that the minds are so much more intelligent, that they fully control the means of production, that they guide the development of people from birth, and that any deviancy in thinking of both people and minds is corrected, isolated or excised by the more powerful minds you have to wonder whether the culture is just one big mind trap.

And maybe that’s the whole point, that any culture shapes the thoughts of the people that are a part of it. Banks tried to design a context most able to let people develop their thoughts in a benevolent way. The people in the Culture are free to think and do anything, but they don’t because they are guided from birth not to consider some ideas.

If we consider it benign, we call it education, if not, indoctrination. A culture that doesn't do it will cease to exist.

Except the Culture has a very strong taboo against reading someone's mind, and they also have a strong taboo against bumping into the simulation problem, which means that the Minds won't 100% know what the humans will do, and this is the preferred state of society.

The ship/mind Grey Area is explicitly condemend and ostracised from polite society because of it, for example.

(The simulation problem: If you want to simulate a society of sentient beings to figure out what they would do, then your simulated entities also have to be sentient for your simulation to be 100% accurate, but then you've accidentally created sentient life, which has rights, so shutting down your simulation is genocide, which means you now have to commit to keeping that simulation running for eternity, which is too much of a bother so you shouldn't do it in the first place.)

The simulation problem has kept me up at night. I think I figured out the answer to it though. If you were to create a simulation you would have to keep it running. Not for any moral reason, but because if we are ourselves a simulation attempting to answer the question of what to do with a simulation, it is in our interest for the answer to be, "keep it on."

Why? What does it really matter if we just blink out of existence?

It is a purely selfish concern to continue existing. "Mattering" doesn't really come into play.

This is correct. Without humans, Minds go eccentric. Sometimes they go eccentric anyway. It seems that the more humans, the better for the Mind's mind; but sometimes it's mainly one (Excession). What is it about humans that calms the Minds? I think it is fallibility, error, irrationality, but also exuberance and an ability to purely appreciate beauty.

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