I think you are right, it's absolutely there. In fact I'm not even sure the Minds adore the humanoids. I think it's fair to say that the Minds love playing games among themselves. The Minds are social, they form clicks and chat with other Minds. They also have "everything". Material possessions won't impress an other Mind. The games they play between each other and the social position they convey is what impresses an other Mind.

Imagine a society of parrot keepers. From time to time they swap pictures of their parrots. The keeper whose parrots are sickly or unkempt will be pitied by the rest of them. They will get tips on how to better to care for birds. Maybe they will even get suggestions from concerned society members that they should give up the hobby. These members would have a low rank in the society. In contrast the parrot keepers who has the best and happiest birds will have a high social rank. Other society members will ask their advice on bird-keeping matters. Everyone will want to swap birds with them. These keepers are not just taking care of their birds then, but competing with each other in this "pageant"

In some ways, the game becomes more interesting the harder it is to keep the birds. A bird which thrives in any environment is less challenging to keep than one which has complicated psychological needs. Thus a Mind who has everything and wants to dazzle an other Mind who also has everything will naturally gravitate towards keeping the most exotic "birds". The ones which require complex environments and are a true challenge to keep happy for even someone with the mental capacity of one of the Minds.

This of course all just my headcanon, but I think the Minds keep human societies around because it's hard to keep them happy. (Especially because many of the humans would go completely depressed if they were to realise that they are just beautiful songbirds in a galaxy wide pageantry.)

Of course keeping humans is not the only game the Minds play. They also play with mathematical discovery in the Infinite Fun Space. Or play with manipulating other societies in Special Circumstances. We also know that the Minds keep societies of gas dwellers on board. Who knows maybe those are even harder to keep happy than the humans?

The parrot keeper analogy is so beautiful and hilarious! Way overly-cynical for me, though.

Like others, I look to how humans care (deeply and emotionally) for "lesser" animals. Hell, some humans (me included) even care about plants, and are sad to see them dying. Now imagine if the plants made me, and introduced me to their society.

It could also be argued that the care-to-relative-intelligence relationship isn't linear -- the fact that I have enough intelligence to speak and have ideas would engender more care for me in a Mind than for a plant in me even if the intellectual delta between me and a plant and me and a Mind is the same, proportionally.

Also, the ultimate counterargument waiting in the wings is that the Minds would naturally be programmed to adore humans and subscribe to the lefty-horizontalism of the Culture in which it'd be unfashionable to disrespect or harm a being just because it's of lesser intelligence. (And they don't reprogram themselves not to because they were programmed to not want to do that.)

Side note: Another fun, cynical excuse for super-AIs keeping humans around is found in The Hyperion Cantos series, where the super-AIs actually tap into the collective brainpower of humans, essentially like some spacetime-bending crypto-miner run from time to time in everyone's brain with no physical evidence.

Cliques. I’m really sorry, I know that’s rude, but I see this all the time. I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen it spelled correctly here. I’ll go hide under a rock now.

The difference in “level/depth of consciousness” between Minds and humans is an interesting one, because the scale matters a lot.

I say forget parrots and take it even further. Culture Orbitals are IIRC run by a single Mind, and contain tens of billions of humans. At that point, this analogy becomes plausible: “a mind is to a human as a human is to a yeast cell.” The name itself, “The Culture,” might be a sly reference to how we think of microscopic colonies!

Minds think on the order of nanoseconds or picoseconds too, fast enough for the distinction to be meaningless to me. That enables them to relate to humans with a vast timescale difference, perhaps on the order of (as a sibling suggested) a human managing a lawn, only with a full 3D (and x-ray and infrared and etc) view of each grass blade at all times. And the manager doesn’t have to sleep or generally spend more energy than raising a single arm-hair to attend to even the most troublesome specimens 99.999% of the time.

It’s a hard thing to comprehend, because in the novels the Minds are so engaged with individual humans: offering advice, presenting opportunities and options. If I carry the analogy through, we do the same thing by using probiotics, sanitary practices, etc. To a yeast cell, a sudden influx of sugar might look like a Mind’s sage advice does to a human seeking fulfillment.

Heady stuff.

Whole sections of the Culture has broken away without conflict. That to me is the strongest indicator of freedom in the Culture, and also the strongest indicator that it is reasonable to describe as a near utopia: A society where people can (and do) break away, yet most choose not to, seems to be striking a decent balance.

The biggest issue I have with the Culture is that they are in a sense luddites: They stubbornly insist on dying and stubbornly refuse to sublime. They hold on to a very limited and restrictive sense of existence. But they do so by choice, and make the most of it within those limits.

> They stubbornly insist on dying and stubbornly refuse to sublime.

As a whole, yes. But individual Culture Minds have sublimed, and individual humans can choose to be stored until the Culture chooses to sublime as a whole. (I don’t think Banks ever explored a Culture human choosing to defect into a different society which was going to sublime; that could have been a neat sub-plot for The Hydrogen Sonata.)

That’s also what makes the Culture a place for storytelling, though. Lots of other civs have sublimed, the Culture seems to be the highest-level one that explicitly chooses to stay in the Real. I don’t think it’s so much Luddite as...a necessary function to make these stories possible and interesting.

Well, I mean they can be both luddite and necessary much for the same reason as why the stories are mostly told from where the Culture interacts with others - anything else would be too utterly alien.

Many individuals can also chose to become drones or be become part of a Mind as well instead of dying.

A minority also choose to be effectively immortal, although most get bored at some point.

There are mentions of small subgroups of Culture deciding to Sublime (mostly linked group minds).

I think of subliming as the civilisational equivalent of staying in your bedroom for the rest of eternity playing video games. It’s giving up on the concept of stakes or consequences or achievement. But then perhaps those are ultimately illusory.

I actually misread your comment at first as saying you thought of not submliming that way, and agreed.

To me subliming seems like trying something new that also frees you from the restrictions of a normal physical existence, where the Culture seems to feel tied to their bodies and to a kind of existence that is ultimately limited by that physicality.

But the Culture is conservative on average even within the constraints of the Real - while we hear of "outliers", ultimately the Culture has a lot of norms that people seem to rarely stray outside.

A society where people constrain their lifespans out of choice would seem to be one where people feel they run out of things to do, but yet they seem to be only scratching the surface of the possibilities their material abundance creates. In Excession there is musings about the feasibility of a trip to Andromeda, for example, but you'd expect a society full of people voluntarily dying to have more people prepared to set out on ridiculous voyages or doing other ridiculous things just because they can.

That so few do things like the person who had a vast number of penises added to his body suggests that while they are open minded enough to let others do as they please, they are themselves pretty conservative. I mean, I don't expect that specific thing to be for many people, but I'd expect an infinite number of possible variations people might want to try. I was re-reading Transmetropolitan last night, and for all the other things that are now hilariously dated in it, one of the fascinating part of it is gene-traits as fashion. As much as I love the Culture, Banks seems to have stopped short, finding extensive drug-taking and gender changes to be radically crazy enough for at first (it's notable that the penis-man came in The Hydrogen Sonata - the last Culture novel). But then people get enough of living.

Of course, perhaps their relatively conservative approach is in part because the more adventurous ones leave. We do have a hint of that: The Zetetic Elench is a former Culture faction that left to pursue change and knowledge where the Culture wanted to stay as it was. I guess we can assume that the Culture regularly have people leaving for the Ulterior or leaving entirely if they feel too adventurous to fit into "regular" Culture norms.

And I guess that shouldn't be surprising - in a truly free society of a sufficient scale with enough abundance for people to just up and leave on a whim, it might not be surprising if clusters of more conservative civilisations develop around those who have found the most effective ways of maintaining cultural cohesion.

> humans are just much-loved companion animals to the Minds

I think that's just an imperfect translation for the existential dread people might feel when confronted with a perfect utopia. They go: "what's the meaning of life, then?" and have bad trips. On a similar discussion on the Spacebattles forum, there were people saying they would rather live in the Star Trek or even the Warhammer 40k universe, exactly because those two universes provide meaning (mostly through pain...).

The Minds certainly respect humans and their rights. Special Circumstances have a lot of human agents, for example, which play important roles in the organisation and on the field

The motive of the Minds letting humans be in places or do stuff just because they think it's fun isn't uncommon. No Culture ship needs a crew to run things, but they'll have them anyways, listen to them, let them "help" build new ships, because they like doing so. But they don't have to and if it gets dangerous they'll not bother and just act, confident in their superiority. Minds are almost without exception perfectly nice and respectful about it (much more than we are to our pets, which is key to it being an Utopia), but the dynamic is nevertheless there.

> 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. Never forget I have had the chance to compare and contrast the ways of dying.’

Gods that really love and respect their "subjects" and creators though, so they'll not do any of the terrible things they totally could do without any chance of stopping them, but rather support them and their whims as far as they think is safe.

SC is a bit special because non-Culture civs don't necessarily play well with AIs, and somewhat open how much Minds engineer the situations that occur. And in that SC is explained as somewhat of an outlet for those for that the utopia doesn't quite work - but it wouldn't exist if the Minds didn't think it was good to have.

> No Culture ship needs a crew to run things, but they'll have them anyways, listen to them, let them "help" build new ships, because they like doing so.

It’s at least implied (I think it might be explicitly said at some point) that they’re dependent on the company to stay sane; all long-term ‘loner’ Minds depicted are, at best, very very odd.

The rest of the monologue you quoted does go into details on the value of human life for a Mind. I won't quote it as it might contain spoilers (or at least foreshadowing), but it can easily be googled.

Minds, or at least some of them, care about the life of humans, and harming them can be deeply traumatic for them.

My cats and my dogs are family members. There's no discussion about that.

But they are not family members with the full rights and duties of a human family member. But that doesn't change that I try to treat them with the same respect as any other family member.

If you look at how the minds treat the members of the Culture with less capacity than them, it is very similar to how the Culture as a whole regards other civilisations.