Post by Catalaya (Nadihat) on 1 minute ago
No, he did not invent them. They existed before he tapped into this energy. However, he did add a lot of things into their story that simply aren’t true. I see that his idolization of them led him to perceive them as the best potential future for humankind and this affected his judgement in the long run.
He did have past lives with them but I am not shown these lives. I do not feel that they matter at this point. He carried some of his experience over to this life and wrote about it. But, again, because there are things that affected his judgement, he didn’t always write the truth.
I am picking up that there is a connection between him and the Culture but it didn’t go further than him remembering this society. He didn’t connect with them on a spiritual level in this life. He didn’t use them as his guides or even as something to strive for.
Instead, he just accumulated that knowledge.
The knowledge that he accumulated he shared but he didn’t always apply it. I feel that this is something that has gotten in his way over his life. He would often end up feeling like he should have done things differently, contributed to this society differently, not just by sharing his memories.
I also see that had a tendency to avoid some tough questions about this particular species. For example, I see that he didn’t really ever truthfully answer questions about how this species ended up the way it did. Their history seems to be the history of violent people who needed to be put in order.
He may have mentioned this here and there when questioned about it but I do not feel that he ever truly shared the scope of that. He was trying to present this species as benevolent and good and nothing else. He didn’t avoid sharing their flaws completely but overlooked many of them.
All of this is because of his idolization of this species, like I mentioned above. He didn’t want anybody to think that he was connecting with something negative either. I see that he often had thoughts that people would think that he is crazy or that he is being possessed by some negative entity.
On the spiritual level, this species didn’t play a big role in his life. It was just kind of there, if that makes sense. He was aware of it, recognized their story, shared their story, but didn’t follow the spiritual lessons that he learned while living there. He ignored these lessons.
I also see that he started talking about this when he was little but he didn’t know what to name it. It feels like this species was on his mind, or rather the memories of his past lives with it were on his mind, ever since he was a little kid. I see that he encountered some resistance in that regard.
People closest to him thought he was just a very creative and imaginative child. I see that he was hesitant to share the stories he had remembered because of this. He always felt that he would be looked down on because of this. He felt that people just wouldn’t be able to take it seriously or explore it for themselves.
My own Notes: This confirms a super question, that Banks didn't just invent them from his imagination, and people's belief made them reality. They've existed for 10,000 years as he has written.
"not sharing the violence part" is quite true. To my knowledge, he has only mentioned the originary violence in 2 occasions {Edit: in Excession there's a third reference}, and one was not even in a book. The various federations that were the Culture before their unification were an alliance of shared interests, mutual freedom, and trade, some elements fleeing repression themselves, it wasn't fully totally steady as they exist now, and there was conflict. They weren't postscarcity (infinite plenty), nor had god ASIs yet. But this particular tale is 10,000 years old.
Banks implied the Culture likes to manipulate and pull/guide civilizations towards being like them, through the Contact and the Special Circumstances "sections". He writes the latter are for those times the Minds cannot do something themselves, and require human assistance. Tough situations. In State of the Art, when they visit 1970-1980s Earth, they employ people from there.
Banks said the Culture universe is fully nonspiritual, that people who die simply vanish and fade away unless they had a Neural Lace implanted, which can recreate a clone from the very last neural state uploaded, which is the seconds before death, and the dying process itself, but the very end can be skipped (or processed later) to not generate trauma I seem to remember.
Despite this, he said they have access to infinite energy in the form of the Grid, a part of his hyperspace concept. Having infinite energy would imply infinite information and so forth too, to us it sounds as something very obvious, but perhaps to him it wasn't.
This, therefore, was one of the wrong parts. Having infinite energy but no infinite information or spirituality does not fit at all. The reality is that they do have both as AnthroHeart confirmed.
Edit: We have discovered the Culture books are overall ~70% accurate.
Had paid $20 for this reading.
