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Comment by ethbr1 | Hacker News Reader

Curious question for HN re: Banks/culture -- how do Culture-esque civilizations dominate technologically and economically over civilizations with less Culture-like attributes?^

That respect of Banks always felt a bit handwavey as to the specifics. (I.e. good/freedom triumphs over evil/tyranny, because it's a superior philosophy)

At galactic-scale, across civilization timespans, it's not as apparent why that should hold true.

Would have hoped that Banks, had he lived longer, would have delved into this in detail.

Granted, Vinge takes a similar approach, constructing his big bad from an obviously-not-equivalent antagonist, sidestepping the direct comparison.

The closest I got from either of them was that they posited that civilizations that tolerate and encourage diversity and individual autonomy persist for longer, are thus older, and that older counts for a lot at galactic scale.

^ Note: I'm asking more about the Idiran Empire than an OCP.

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The fact that the Culture was not only willing to use very powerful general AI but allow it to run the entire civilisation, whereas the Idirans banned it, might have been a factor. No matter how smart Idirans might be presumably Minds would have a significant edge

Excession deals with this. It involves the Culture and "The Affront" which is a spacefaring but savage civilization that some people in the Culture dislike. Player of Games is a similar story about a civilization that the Culture dislikes. Those are my two favorite Culture books among my favorite books in general.

The Wikipedia articles about the books goes into spoiler-heavy details about the Culture's interaction with those civilizations.

I think the reason is that the Culture has been around long enough to attain a level of technological development at which most civilizations sublime and simply stop participating in what we call material existence. The Culture could do so but has chosen not to do so (at least not collectively; individual people and minds sublime on a regular basis).

A lot of the civilizations that would be militarily or economically more powerful than the culture aren't a problem because they've already sublimed.

That's a solid answer, if unsatisfactory (for Culture fans) because it empowers them by retarding their civilization-wide transcendence.

I personally read it as there's some weird quirk to the psychology of Culture that lets them have enough fun right now that they're not drawn to transcendence.

The culture triumphs because it is a technological super power. It is a technological super power because the minds (the super AIs running everything) are given free reign (and presumably most of its industrial base is used to create more minds, and develop more industry).

I've always gotten the impression that the resources dedicated to maintaining and serving the humans in the culture empire are dwaft by the resources invested into developing their science and AI.

(I mean basically they have Von Neumann machines controlling whole star systems, obviously this level of industry beats most biological enemies)

It's worth noting though that there are several other cultures/species that are more advanced than the culture though. E.g., the ascended species that stewards the tomb worlds (and is in essence like a god compared to the culture). There are many other examples.

I don't think it was ever claimed that the culture was predestined to be the strongest, or anything like that.

That's a big part of the stories. Special Circumstances nudges other civilizations towards the Culture's leanings (see player of games, surface detail) as they're climbing the technology ladder.

Some day, the ambassador just travels upriver to the bad lands and starts a revolution- and wins. The lessons to learn here- always offer them a chair and kill them if they react badly..

See my comment below, re: Minds though.

"Anything unique to Culture" as a solution begs the question "Why is that unique to the Culture?"

It isn't clear why super-spy-diplomat-warriors would only be produced by the Culture.

As soon as both sides have a thing, it ceases to be a competitive advantage.

So SC as a solution implies that no other civilizations have their version of SC. Why not?

In the first book it seemed like they confronted an enemy that actually got pretty close to beating them. Plus I really liked the epilogue where it briefly put the Culture in it’s proper scale and talked about completely unrelated goings on in the Galaxy that were so far away the Culture would never have anything to do with them. It’s conceivable there are several same level civilizations in the galaxy that would compete with the Culture if they ever met.

>It’s conceivable there are several same level civilizations in the galaxy that would compete with the Culture if they ever met.

More than conceivable, we see them in some of the books.

The galaxy is so old that different civilizations could easily be millions or even billions of years apart in development. And look what happens when human civilizations only a few hundred years apart meet. So it seems unlikely that 2 civilization would be closely matched.

Unless there is some sort of “maximum diameter” of each civilization, past which it either splits, stagnates, or implodes. In which case you can sidestep the assumption that development monotonically increases and the first-mover must win.

Which is more or less the case in the culture universe. Civilizations within the same "tier" are roughly comparable, and anyone who moves past the culture's tier ascends into irrelevance (excepting plot devices in excession and consider phlebas).

Personally, I think Vinge did a better version of this, explicitly segregating max capability zones and explaining how a civilization might persist over eons in a light-speed-is-a-limit universe.

In the culture series there is sort of a cap on technology. once a civilization reaches a certain point they tend to sublime effectively leaving the current plane of existence. This means most civilizations only last a few 10s of thousands of years at most.

They aren't unique to the culture, the series just focuses almost solely on the culture. The few other perspectives we get to look at (e.g. the Idirans in Consider Phlebas) are bloody fanatics who prefer to conquer their enemies in martial combat, not spies. Even within the Culture, special circumstances exists as a pragmatic necessity at odds with the broader society of the Culture. It's pointed out many times that its existence and methods are controversial and widely distrusted.

I think the only real glimpse we get of other civilizations' versions are in Surface Detail, where it's mentioned (but never directly observed) that the other side of the war has agents influencing events exactly like the culture does.

I think answers in response to your post will differ depending on whether or not you've read many of the Culture books -- to me it kind of sounds like you have, but it also kind of sounds like you haven't.

If you haven't, I would recommend Player of Games, which is one of the few culture novels I have read, but which I think deals with this topic directly as the main idea of the book.

If you have read it, it's possible your criticism is running deeper and you feel the way it's handled in that book is handwavey. I can't really address that criticism, it's perfectly valid! I'm not sure if other books do any better of a job, but it felt on par to Asimov writing political/military intrigue in Foundation: entertaining and a little cute, if somewhat shallow.

It's been a minute since I read Games, but from memory the target civilization there is of a scale far smaller than the Culture.

Which is to say, if they both mobilized for brute force total war, the Culture could steamroll them.

Which makes it a "send the Terminator back time to kill Sarah Connor" solution -- strangle a potential future competitor in the womb.

That makes for an interesting book on the ruthless realpolitik behavior of otherwise moral and ethical superior civilizations, and how they actually maintain their superiority. (Probably Banks' point)

But less-so on the hot tech-vogue generalization of "Isn't the Culture so dreamy? They've evolved beyond our ignorance."

I'd note a couple of points here:

- Yes, the Culture is way more technologically advanced than the Azadians. But the point is that a basic Culture human of standard intelligence (albeit extensive knowledge of strategy games) can - after a relatively small amount of training - defeat an Azadian who has devoted their entire life to Azad. And the reason is that the Culture humans's strategies reflect the values and philosophy of the Culture. The subtext is that the non-heirarchical nature of the Culture leads to a more effective use of resources.

- The Culture-Idiran war is an example of them confronting an enemy that is of comparable technological development. Again, it's implied that the Culture wins because their decentralised and non-hierarchical existence let them move rapidly throughout the galaxy while switching quickly to a full war-footing.

- It sounds like you have the impression that the Culture dominates all other civilisations. This is not true. For example, in Excession they discover that they're being observed by a vastly superior civilization that has some ability to hop between dimensions in a way that they cannot. There are civilisations like the Gzilt or Homomdans who are on a level with the Culture, and ancient Elder species like the Involucra who also give Culture ships a run for their money on combat.

I was speaking less about specific capabilities and more about total economic size. How big is the Azadian civilization in terms of worlds/stations/industry?

> It sounds like you have the impression that the Culture dominates all other civilisations.

There's three places I'm getting this from, more as a pervasive slant than an absolute truth.

(1) Ian Banks' writings on the Culture (outside of the books themselves) demonstrate a very strong belief that the Culture approach to things is superior (to those used on current Earth, and to many alternatives)

(2) The Culture as zeitgeist moment is very focused on how superior it is to alternatives (civilization evolution wise, if not explicitly). Rarely do people post blog entries about how interesting and aspiration other civilizations from the Culture series are

(3) If Banks had wanted to set up a peer-powered civilization that made alternative choices, he would have. He didn't. At least aside from oddities or deus ex machina

The most convincing point I've heard in this thread is that essentially the Culture is OP not because of inherent superiority of their beliefs, but specifically because their belief system keeps most of them hanging around past the technological stage other civilizations would have transcended.

Points 1-3 show that Banks thought the Culture was morally superior. It's not obvious that they dominated the galaxy/universe on a technological or economic level. I concede that there's an suggestion that the Culture are doing very well and continuing to evolve at a greater rate than their peer civilizations due to several factors including their reluctance to Sublime and their idealistic nature. However on Wikipedia there's a well-sourced paragraph stating (emphasis mine):

> Although the Culture has more advanced technology and a more powerful economy than the vast majority of known civilizations, it is only one of the "Involved" civilizations that take an active part in galactic affairs. The much older Homomda are slightly more advanced at the time of Consider Phlebas (this is, however, set several centuries before the other books, and Culture technology and martial power continue to advance in the interim);[b] the Morthanveld have a much larger population and economy, but are hampered by a more restrictive attitude to the role of AI in their society.[4] The capabilities of all such societies are vastly exceeded by those of the Elder civilisations (semi-retired from Galactic politics but who remain supremely potent) and even more so by those of the Sublimed, entities which have abandoned their material form for existence in the form of non-corporeal, multi-dimensional energy being. The Sublimed generally refrain from intervention in the material world.[5]

> But the point is that a basic Culture human of standard intelligence (albeit extensive knowledge of strategy games) can - after a relatively small amount of training - defeat an Azadian who has devoted their entire life to Azad.

> Again, it's implied that the Culture wins because their decentralised and non-hierarchical existence let them move rapidly throughout the galaxy while switching quickly to a full war-footing.

The Culture didn't win because of their "decentralised and non-hierarchical existence," they won for exactly the same reason stormstroopers couldn't shoot Luke Skywalker: they're the main character in the story and they have Bank's sympathies.

The Culture wiki [0] talks in more detail about how the Culture's decentralised existence worked in their favour, compared to the Idirans' territorial and religious philosophy:

> The initial stages of the war were defined by a hasty withdrawal of the Culture from vast galactic spaces invaded by the Idirans, who tried to inflict as many civilian casualties as possible in the hope of making the Culture sue for peace. However, the Culture was able—often by bodily moving its artificial worlds out of harm's way—to escape into the vastness of space, while it in turn geared up its productive capabilities for war, eventually starting to turn out untold numbers of extremely advanced warships.

> The later stages of the war began with Culture strikes deep within the new Idiran zones of influence. As the Idirans were religiously committed to holding on to all of their conquests, these strikes forced them to divide their attentions.

It also cites the Culture's more liberal attitude to AI as a deciding factor.

[0] https://theculture.fandom.com/wiki/Idiran%E2%80%93Culture_Wa...

My point was to note that Banks's works are fiction, so the usefulness of citing outcomes in his fictional universe is very limited, because they're almost certainly more of an expression of his biases than anything else (and IIRC, his biases could be cartoonish).

The Culture basically had god (Banks) on its side, to ensure its victory, just like Skywalker had god (Lucas) on his side, who made it so the stormtroopers could never shoot straight when he was around. I bet Banks, consciously or unconsciously, played up the Culture's strengths, and played down the strengths of its adversaries (or engineered them with exploitable weaknesses).

I mean, I take it for a given that we're discussing this purely in the context of Banks' imagination. No qualms there. I just interpreted your comment as making out like Banks gives no real justification for why the Culture won the war.

From Player of the Games interesting part was that the Culture would not even attempt to steam roll. But withdraw and consolidate where possible. Doing things over non-human scale in space scale... Which is only possible when you are not time and resource constrained like you would be on planet with human leaders...

The idea that the course of a civilization future history can be mathematically predicted with precision, as it is in Foundation[1] seems a little silly. But those books did predate Chaos theory by some margin. Also I'm not sure Asimov actually believed that 'psychohistory' would be possible.

[1] If I recall correctly. It is ~40 years since I read Foundation.

It also helps that all of Asimov's characters are flat, static automatons, instead of deep, changing beings. ;)

Yes, character development not exactly his strong point. Women especially, IIRC.

> Vinge takes a similar approach, constructing his big bad from an obviously-not-equivalent antagonist, sidestepping the direct comparison.

I'd argue A Fire Upon the Deep clearly has the antagonist winning, and the life we recognize is only saved by basically staying within a safe area of the galaxy. You haven't conquered the monster just because you're safe under your blanket.

the mechanics of cooperation probably scale better than those of defection, by their nature. Defectors need to pay higher costs guarding themselves against the other defectors, and always trying to figure out how they are going to pick the right defections for themselves to win.

That's not known for sure. The game theory simulations go one way or the other depending on what assumptions you use. I'm not sure you can say "probably" there.

Highly recommend Statistical Physics of Human Cooperation.

I'm thinking of slightly more esoteric concerns, in recent simulations I've seen some evidence that something like the All Defector from The Fractal Prince, a book in a series recommended in this thread, might be possible.

I don't think Culture's philosophy has been the driving factor behind its dominance and military advantage. I think the anarchy utopia is the side effect of the Culture minds being at the developmental peak over other civilizations.

It's explicitly said in the novels (or by Banks, I can't remember exactly) that while civilizations sublime when they reach a certain point of development, the Culture seems hellbent on staying there venturing around the universe.

I always assumed that Infinite Fun Space was used by the Minds to pre-emptively model any potential conflict.

He's explicit about that in Excession, and other books.

How does he deal with the trillions of people tortured in infinite fun space? Wars don't tend to be suffering free, especially when they are the really nasty worst-case scenario ones you want to simulate. Did he reject the substrate invariance argument? It sounds like that, but if you want the culture to be our future (as in the future of actual humans), you can't do that, because... It's not true.

But the Minds are something of a turtles-all-the-way-down solution.

If the Culture has Minds, why wouldn't other civilizations?

And why would Culture-esque Minds be superior to less-Culture-y Minds?

Other civilizations do have minds, constructed differently. The Gzilt in Hydrogen Sonata have minds constructed by humans after they've passed, with personalities from those people.

1) Not humans, Banks just calls them that in the text of the books, and 2) Any mind derived from a "human like" (even to a very small degree, really human like civilization and evolved) is at a massive disadvantage to a very highly optimized result of recursive self improvement.

Actual earth humans are in the books and noted to be of the same general body plan. Close enough.

The Gzilt minds are specifically compared to culture minds and deemed to be comparable in capabilities.

> The Gzilt minds are specifically compared to culture minds and deemed to be comparable in capabilities.

Well, that's not really realistic. Maybe they are only pretending to be based on organics, but really aren't, and just put up a facade.

They're not based on organics, but that's missing the larger point that realism isn't the point of sci fi like the culture series. It's an imaginary setting the author is using to look at society.

Because if other civilizations develop minds- the minds take over- and derive from all worlds the one best outcome- and then join the culture who is already riding the golden path.

Or all Minds in the Culture are already this sort of Mind.

See underlying textual creepiness about "what exactly are the humans for?"

I.e. an inverted Matrix, with the humans kept in the physical

But there is the layers in between Ian M.Banks wrote about. GroupMinds, people who upload themselves and become more AI like and on and on..

The thing hidden in plane sight is the has and has nots of the culture though. Some have processing power- and some must beg those with processing power to run all the things.

I figured that it was simply a flavor of fun that only Minds can appreciate (tho it could have practical uses too of course).

I'm not sure that Infinite Fun Space is used to simulate the real. I got the impression that IFS is where Minds go to unwind and play in synthetic universes with rules of their own imagining. And that humans cannot really even properly conceive them.

The Culture is also very cautious about running high fidelity simulations for ethical reasons. Useful simulations approach the real in fidelity which makes them problematic to delete -- But they still do it.

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