While the Culture is, on pretty much any axis, strictly superior to modern civilization, what personally appalls me is their sheer deathism.
If memory serves, the average human lives for around 500 years before opting for euthanasia, mostly citing some kind of ennui. What the hell? 500 years is nothing in the grand scheme of things.
Banks is careful to note that this isn’t, strictly speaking, forced onto them, and exceptions exist, be it people who opt for mind uploads or some form of cryogenic storage till more “interesting” times. But in my opinion, it’s a civilization-wide failure of imagination, a toxic meme ossified beyond help (Culture humans also face immense cultural pressure to commit suicide at the an appropriate age).
Would I live in such a civilization? Absolutely, but only because I retain decent confidence in my ability to resist memetic conditioning or peer pressure. After all, I’ve already spent much of my life hoping for immortality in a civilization where it’s either derided as an impossible pipe-dream or bad for you in {hand-wavy ways}.
Another issue I’ve noted is that even though this is a strictly post-scarcity universe in the strong sense, with matter and energy freely available from the Grid, nobody expands. Even if you want to keep natural bodies like galaxies ‘wild’ for new species to arise, what’s stopping you from making superclusters of artificial matter in the enormous void of interstellar space, let alone when the extragalactic supermajority of the universe lies empty? The Culture is myopic, they, and the wider milieu of civilizations, seem unwilling to remotely optimize even when there’s no risk or harm of becoming hegemonizing swarms.
(Now that you’ve got me started, I’m half tempted to flesh this out into a much longer essay.)
I think the deathism is also evidence, but it’s not so strong. We don’t know the ennui that sets in after 500 years. It might be unimaginable, the same way a mid life crisis makes no sense to a 10 year old. I actually have a short story that posits this.
Even if such ennui is “natural” (and I don’t see how a phenomenon that only shows up after 5-6x standard lifespan, assuming parity with baseline humans can ever be considered natural), it should still be considered a problem in need of solving. And the Culture can solve just about every plausibly solvable problem in the universe!
Think of it this way, if a mid-life crisis reliably convinced a >10% fraction of the population to kill themselves at the age of 40, with the rest living happily to 80+, we’d be throwing tens of billions at a pharmacological cure. It’s even worse, relatively and absolutely, for the Culture, as their humans can easily live nigh-indefinitely.
Even if you are highly committed to some kind of worship of minimalism or parsimony, despite infinite resources, or believe that people have the right to self-termination, then at least try and convince them to make mind backups that can be put into long-term storage. That is subjectively equivalent to death without the same… finality.
This doesn’t have to be coercive, but the Culture demonstrates the ability to produce incredibly amounts of propaganda on demand. As far as I’m concerned, if the majority of the population is killing itself after a mere ~0.000..% of their theoretical life expectancy, my civilization is suffering from a condition that ours standard depression or cancer to shame. And they can trivially solve it, they have incredibly powerful tools that can edit brains/minds to arbitrary precision. They just… don’t.
yes, if midlife crises often led to suicide, we would try to cure that. this is because we regard our society as imperfect. therefore, its constituents may also be confused. therefore, we are obligated to change their minds, to protect them from themselves.
the culture has no such luxury. when its citizens decide that life is not worth living, the culture has no recourse but to trust them. it cannot blame their material circumstance, or brain chemistry, or [...].
one may argue that so many choosing this demise is, by itself, a clear indictment of the culture. (i cannot disagree, but i have not yet been 500 years old, myself.) should they not design more and more varied amusements? (but, haven’t they?) should they not seek to steer individuals away from this path? (but, do they not?) should they not invite the bored to explore the galaxy? (but, does the galaxy have what these people seek?)
to the culture, a mind is inviolable. we can accuse them of narcissism—believing a mind should be forcibly changed would implicitly admit that the culture may be unable to raise cogent, self-reflective beings. the culture is unable to admit this latter point, and so must consider intrusion into a mind to be reserved for warfare.
rhetorically: should we as the culture harass the elench? should we sway those who wish to sublime? should we deny genar-hofoen his affronter body? (for that matter, should we destroy the affront?)
If memory serves, the average human lives for around 500 years before opting for euthanasia, mostly citing some kind of ennui. What the hell? 500 years is nothing in the grand scheme of things.
As far as we go, no single human has ever experienced 500 years of life. I do agree realistically it doesn’t seem enough to run out of things to do, but we can’t exclude that as a factual unknown detail of human psychology, it would be a limit. Maybe even if we don’t run out of specific things to do, we simply wear down our emotional range and ability to feel much about any of it? It could even be framed as such a thing as, maybe there’s some kind of desensitisation going on with your dopamine receptors that they’re not good enough at rebalancing yet.
Basically I think you could just take that as a simple part of the premise of the setting, a speculative guess about how precisely human psychology could interact with immortality, and move on.
I find it very hard to believe that a civilization with as much utter dominion over physics, chemistry and biology as the Culture would find this a particularly difficult challenge.
The crudest option would be something like wiping memories, or synthesizing drugs that re-induce a sense of wonder or curiosity about the world (similar to MDMA). The Culture is practically obsessed with psychoactive substances, most citizens have internal drug glands.
At the very least, people should be strongly encouraged to have a mind upload put into cold storage, pending ascendance to the Sublime. That has no downsides I can see, since a brain emulation that isn’t actively running is no subjectively different from death. It should be standard practice, not a rarity.
Even if treated purely as a speculation about the “human” psyche, the Culture almost certainly has all the tools required to address the issue, if they even consider it an issue. That is the crux of my dissatisfaction, it’s as insane as a post-scarcity civilization deciding not to treat heart disease or cancer.
A mind upload without strong guarantees potentially carries huge S-risks. You’re placing your own future self in the hands of whoever or whatever happens to have that data in the future. If one thousands year from now for whatever reason someone decides to use that data to run a billion simulations of you forever in atrocious pain, there is nothing you can do about it. And if you think your upload is “yourself” in a meaningful way enough for you to care about having one done, you must think that is also a very horrible fate.
While the Culture is, on pretty much any axis, strictly superior to modern civilization, what personally appalls me is their sheer deathism.
If memory serves, the average human lives for around 500 years before opting for euthanasia, mostly citing some kind of ennui. What the hell? 500 years is nothing in the grand scheme of things.
Banks is careful to note that this isn’t, strictly speaking, forced onto them, and exceptions exist, be it people who opt for mind uploads or some form of cryogenic storage till more “interesting” times. But in my opinion, it’s a civilization-wide failure of imagination, a toxic meme ossified beyond help (Culture humans also face immense cultural pressure to commit suicide at the an appropriate age).
Would I live in such a civilization? Absolutely, but only because I retain decent confidence in my ability to resist memetic conditioning or peer pressure. After all, I’ve already spent much of my life hoping for immortality in a civilization where it’s either derided as an impossible pipe-dream or bad for you in {hand-wavy ways}.
Another issue I’ve noted is that even though this is a strictly post-scarcity universe in the strong sense, with matter and energy freely available from the Grid, nobody expands. Even if you want to keep natural bodies like galaxies ‘wild’ for new species to arise, what’s stopping you from making superclusters of artificial matter in the enormous void of interstellar space, let alone when the extragalactic supermajority of the universe lies empty? The Culture is myopic, they, and the wider milieu of civilizations, seem unwilling to remotely optimize even when there’s no risk or harm of becoming hegemonizing swarms.
(Now that you’ve got me started, I’m half tempted to flesh this out into a much longer essay.)
I think the deathism is also evidence, but it’s not so strong. We don’t know the ennui that sets in after 500 years. It might be unimaginable, the same way a mid life crisis makes no sense to a 10 year old. I actually have a short story that posits this.
And yes, the Culture is strangely non optimal.
Even if such ennui is “natural” (and I don’t see how a phenomenon that only shows up after 5-6x standard lifespan, assuming parity with baseline humans can ever be considered natural), it should still be considered a problem in need of solving. And the Culture can solve just about every plausibly solvable problem in the universe!
Think of it this way, if a mid-life crisis reliably convinced a >10% fraction of the population to kill themselves at the age of 40, with the rest living happily to 80+, we’d be throwing tens of billions at a pharmacological cure. It’s even worse, relatively and absolutely, for the Culture, as their humans can easily live nigh-indefinitely.
Even if you are highly committed to some kind of worship of minimalism or parsimony, despite infinite resources, or believe that people have the right to self-termination, then at least try and convince them to make mind backups that can be put into long-term storage. That is subjectively equivalent to death without the same… finality.
This doesn’t have to be coercive, but the Culture demonstrates the ability to produce incredibly amounts of propaganda on demand. As far as I’m concerned, if the majority of the population is killing itself after a mere ~0.000..% of their theoretical life expectancy, my civilization is suffering from a condition that ours standard depression or cancer to shame. And they can trivially solve it, they have incredibly powerful tools that can edit brains/minds to arbitrary precision. They just… don’t.
this argument begs the question.
yes, if midlife crises often led to suicide, we would try to cure that. this is because we regard our society as imperfect. therefore, its constituents may also be confused. therefore, we are obligated to change their minds, to protect them from themselves.
the culture has no such luxury. when its citizens decide that life is not worth living, the culture has no recourse but to trust them. it cannot blame their material circumstance, or brain chemistry, or [...].
one may argue that so many choosing this demise is, by itself, a clear indictment of the culture. (i cannot disagree, but i have not yet been 500 years old, myself.) should they not design more and more varied amusements? (but, haven’t they?) should they not seek to steer individuals away from this path? (but, do they not?) should they not invite the bored to explore the galaxy? (but, does the galaxy have what these people seek?)
to the culture, a mind is inviolable. we can accuse them of narcissism—believing a mind should be forcibly changed would implicitly admit that the culture may be unable to raise cogent, self-reflective beings. the culture is unable to admit this latter point, and so must consider intrusion into a mind to be reserved for warfare.
rhetorically: should we as the culture harass the elench? should we sway those who wish to sublime? should we deny genar-hofoen his affronter body? (for that matter, should we destroy the affront?)
should we be so grabby?
As far as we go, no single human has ever experienced 500 years of life. I do agree realistically it doesn’t seem enough to run out of things to do, but we can’t exclude that as a factual unknown detail of human psychology, it would be a limit. Maybe even if we don’t run out of specific things to do, we simply wear down our emotional range and ability to feel much about any of it? It could even be framed as such a thing as, maybe there’s some kind of desensitisation going on with your dopamine receptors that they’re not good enough at rebalancing yet.
Basically I think you could just take that as a simple part of the premise of the setting, a speculative guess about how precisely human psychology could interact with immortality, and move on.
I find it very hard to believe that a civilization with as much utter dominion over physics, chemistry and biology as the Culture would find this a particularly difficult challenge.
The crudest option would be something like wiping memories, or synthesizing drugs that re-induce a sense of wonder or curiosity about the world (similar to MDMA). The Culture is practically obsessed with psychoactive substances, most citizens have internal drug glands.
At the very least, people should be strongly encouraged to have a mind upload put into cold storage, pending ascendance to the Sublime. That has no downsides I can see, since a brain emulation that isn’t actively running is no subjectively different from death. It should be standard practice, not a rarity.
Even if treated purely as a speculation about the “human” psyche, the Culture almost certainly has all the tools required to address the issue, if they even consider it an issue. That is the crux of my dissatisfaction, it’s as insane as a post-scarcity civilization deciding not to treat heart disease or cancer.
A mind upload without strong guarantees potentially carries huge S-risks. You’re placing your own future self in the hands of whoever or whatever happens to have that data in the future. If one thousands year from now for whatever reason someone decides to use that data to run a billion simulations of you forever in atrocious pain, there is nothing you can do about it. And if you think your upload is “yourself” in a meaningful way enough for you to care about having one done, you must think that is also a very horrible fate.