The Culture Novels as a Dystopia

I think a more reasonable take on the culture is that they try their best to preserve 1 and 2 but they aren't stupid about it. No culture in history has ever had totally inalienable rights of any kind.

I think the key differentiator for true autonomy is open ended psychological flexibility. That is, sufficient deliberative control over our own mental processes and decision making faculties to be able to adapt them to whatever experiences we have, and whatever circumstances we find ourselves in.

We are introspective beings able to inspect our own mental processes, consider our own motivations, priorities and beliefs, and adapt these based on new experiences. On the one hand this means we are very largely shaped by our experiences of the world, on the other hand it means we are not completely locked into the same limited set of behaviours and responses regardless of what experiences we have, and therefore what we learn. I think that our basic biology and psychology do limit this flexibility in important ways, but I do believe that we've just about reached the level where we are in principle capable of open ended mental flexibility.

If the Culture has a similar understanding of mental autonomy, that means that they could consider Culture citizens autonomous while also recognising that the vast majority of them would in fact remain completely satisfied with life in the Culture. In fact, in principle engineering Culture citizens in that way would be an ethical thing to do, because they would in principle still have the ability to adapt in terms of their beliefs and goals in response to changes in circumstances.

Likewise with Minds. A major difference being that the Minds can anticipate most of the experiences average citizens will have within the Culture and how they would behave, whereas Minds have much more varied experiences and much more capable mental resources, and therefore the ability to anticipate their likely resulting opinions, beliefs and behaviours would be much more limited.

Internal sovereignty - The biggest sin one of their AIs can commit is to read people's minds, never mind manipulate their minds directly.

"I am a Culture Mind. We are close to gods, and on the far side. We are quicker; we live faster and more completely than you do, with so many more senses, such a greater store of memories and at such a fine level of detail. We die more slowly, and we die more completely, too."

Of course, in the Culture universe there are things far more powerful than Minds - the transcended entities that still dabble in the base reality - such as the Dra'Azon. Although I seem to remember someone, probably a drone, snarkily referring to it as senile.

That doesn't _really_ seem to be the case, though. Notably, the Gzilt don't have them, but nor did the Idirians.

Honestly, I didn't really enjoy them. Except for that shape-shifter, Banks seemed to tend to write anyone who doesn't subscribe to his utopia as a grotesque cartoon.

Utopias are by definition tedious because a utopia is an end to history and as such an end to meaning or negotiation of how to live. A utopia is always an end to a story or Freedom with a capital f. As Dostoevsky points out in Notes from Underground, on man in utopia:

"[he] would pur­pose­ly do some­thing per­verse out of sim­ple in­grat­i­tude, sim­ply to gain his point. I be­lieve in it, I an­swer for it, for the whole work of man re­al­ly seems to con­sist in noth­ing but prov­ing to him­self ev­ery minute that he is a man and not a pi­ano-key! It may be at the cost of his skin; but he has proved it!"

Another way to phrase it. If you are in a utopia, you cannot be in a democracy that entails the possibility of ending it. Which is to say, you can't govern yourself at all. And that is why Ian M Banks culture is nothing of the sort. It's a society literally controlled by "perfect minds" using a Sapir-Whorf like language to manage the behavior of its people. Even Banks who tried to write a positive utopia and that's not his fault, couldn't imagine a utopia that entails the possibility of rebellion.

The original blueprint - Thomas More's book - made the New England Puritans look like a wild bunch. Phalansteries and communal dining, oh my.

I think adventure necessarily happens at the edges of civilization and order, or when civilization or order breaks down, and to a reader I think there must be some kind of adventure for story to be fun.

So what you'd see in a true utopia might be very fun for the people living in it, but there might not be much conflict that would appeal to a reader. Utopia conflict situations might be things like "Ethics board analyzes the legality of using state funds for man with Down's Syndrome who wants to try an experimental treatment and must analyze whether he understands well enough for informed consent". You can write it, if it were really good I could imagine wanting to read it, but it's much easier to read a story where people are shooting one another.

In Player of Games we see a corner of a gaming culture which partly meets this criterion but it does not have meaningful consequences outside the gaming participants (unless you count the ways the Minds use it to manipulate Gurgeh).

Maybe by this criterion utopias are impossible, since the disruption caused by exciting activities with consequences conflict too much with the optimality of the society. But I don't think anyone now can prove this would be the case.

Side note, my homelabs Kube cluster's naming scheme is AI from fiction. Rhadamanthus is one of the computers from Golden Oecumene, a powerful manor computer. Also in the cluster: Jarvis (Iron Man), Cohen (Spin State), Epicac (eponymous Vonnegut short story).

I wanted to - and still do - side-step spoilers, so I'll concede an error, and bump it back up my TB(r)R list.

As for the diversity you speak of, I think it can be plausibly argued that many utopian conceptions of life really reduce to utilitarianism or hedonism. Diversity manifests in having different options for pleasure or utility. For a lot of people, that's inadequate.

I happen to be a philosophical liberal, and do not wish to live under a theocracy. Nonetheless, I think the fact that many of the highest aspirations of liberal philosophy amount to "having a good time" is a great risk that must be reckoned with, for it can undo the entire liberal project.

Hah, fair enough. Thanks for getting the Culture back on the front page of HN :)

> I don't remember the details of Excession very well as I didn't actually like it

If you were actually referring to the Sleeper Service - I think you still remembered something like the opposite idea of what happened in the story. The twist was - (Spoiler!) - the Sleeper Service was actually not Eccentric at all, and had not built up a small army as a Mind that had gone rogue, but had actually done this as a planned failsafe in conjunction with a number of other Minds. Hence the multi-level pun of its name.

> I don't remember that at all, perhaps you could tell me which book to look at.

I'm afraid I can't remember exactly which books this was explored in, though Inversions, State of the Art and Player of Games are books where the Culture is explicitly compared to other civilisations and so more likely to have mentioned it.

Also Banks' essay /A Few Notes on the Culture/ covers it quite well if you haven't come across that yet. Very short but I think very readable and interesting.

http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm

I read Vavatch as anarcho-capitalist in contrast to the Culture's anarchism.

Vavatch had a lot of stuff going on that wouldn't have been allowed in the Culture. Certainly the Culture wouldn't have allowed them to non-consensually eat other people. The other stuff probably wouldn't have been prevented by force, but they would vigorously try to convince you not to do it and to prevent you from convincing other people.

Why should they? They're sentient beings living in The Culture too?

In fact they do. Humans can call a vote on anything in The Culture - I would have to re-read some books to provide sources, but it was mentioned that sometimes it was about very trivial things, and sometimes more important. Mostly though, the humans were content to let the Minds do all the maintenance.

And yes, I do think I recall reading that some Minds are in fact made of previously-humanoid beings. Sometimes entire crews of them, if I recall correctly!

the grey area/meat fucker was a small, uncrewed, and demilitarized(?) ship/Mind that, while morally repugnant to the culture's sensibilities (or at least most other Minds'), no one considered significant/dangerous enough to give the same treatment

Idk, post-scarcity immortal FTL-wielding techno-democracy with benevolent artificial superintelligence doesn’t strike me as some hell.

And the Culture isn’t a galactic monolith. If you want a more traditional existence, there are other societies you can fuck off to.

Sci-Fi is full of 'Utopias' that can also be viewed as 'Dystopia', depending on the view point. And in a lot of movies, that shifting view point is the story.

Read another book of his and you'd think he was a communist, another an anarchist, et cetera.

He liked to explore ideas. If there's one thing that's reasonably consistent across his work, it's his belief in individual agency.

If a Culture mind were faced with human behavior equivalent to pissing on everything but the litterbox and bolting for the door at every opportunity, I imagine they'd eventually get tired of playing jailer and let their pets go, too.