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Comment by bloopernova | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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).

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.

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