Comment by GeoAtreides
3 days ago
If I take my parents on trips, buy them nice things, visit often and generally make sure they are happy and fulfilled, are they my pampered pets?
3 days ago
If I take my parents on trips, buy them nice things, visit often and generally make sure they are happy and fulfilled, are they my pampered pets?
Your parents have agency that your gifts do not dilute.
Humanoids in the Culture are controlled at every level, even their thoughts as guided… sorry… “aligned” with the Minds through the adoption of the language Marain.
No humanoid ever overrules a ship Mind in the novels.
Sure, you can just ignore the source text and the author explicit statements that it's a true utopia[1].
They're an anarchistic society, no one has power to overrule any one else.
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheCulture/comments/kbtylt/ysk_the_...
This happens for lots of stuff. Some time back there's a thread where I mentioned San Junipero, the episode of Black Mirror with a happy ending - and I said some people will insist it doesn't have a happy ending and sure enough there are replies insisting that's not a happy ending. The author's opinion does not matter to them.
Just as shippers can successfully take two characters who clearly have no basis for a romantic or sexual relationship and pair them off in their head canon, likewise people can disregard the author's statements about their work and decide it's completely contrary to how they've decided to understand it.
Some people look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_(Duchamp) and they do not see a sculpture.
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It might be Banks utopia but the Culture seems more like Calhoun's rat utopia experiment to me or Douglas Adams' "long dark teatime of the soul". There's nothing to strive for, there's nothing one could do that hasn't been done better by a quadrillion other beings and utterly eclipsed by the Minds. It's so spiritually sterile that a ships crew collectively gives themselves a cold (normally prevented by their medical tech) just for the sake of the experience and breaking the monotony of their existence.
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> Humanoids in the Culture are controlled at every level
Nope, they have considerable freedom, arguably greater than we have today. It's true that they cannot directly challenge the almost onmipotent Minds when it comes to stuff that matters to them, but Minds in Culture are an example of a very well-aligned AI, so it's almost always the case that going against a Mind's intent will just make the situation worse for everyone.