[ExI] Iain M Banks' Culture Novels [WAS Re: Usages of the term libertarianism]

[Richard Loosemore]

Damien Sullivan wrote:
> On Sat, May 21, 2011 at 05:05:02PM -0400, Richard Loosemore wrote:
> 
>>> (Controlled, enslaved) technology
>> ... which actually makes me think you may not have read the novels,
>> because the Minds are *anything* but controlled and enslaved!  They
>> keep each other in line, but within extremely broad limits.  In
>> fact, I can hardly imagine a less controlled and enslaved
>> technology.
> 
> To play devil's advocate: the whole notion of enslavement gets murky
> when you can control personality and desire.

This is a very important point, and a distinction that I really wish 
were emphasized more often.

My own position is that this question -- whether someone would be a 
slave if they were genuinely and completely designed to want to do 
something that happened to benefit the designer -- is one of the easier 
philosphical questions to answer.  And the answer is "no".  Only if 
there were some sense in which the creature "really" wanted to do 
something else, so that they exzperienced any measure of frustration and 
unfulfillment, would there be a slavery situation.

The example I have often used is the dung beetle.  By no stretch of the 
imagination would be a "liberation" of the dung beetle if we genetically 
altered it so that it enjoyed gourmet human food, rather than shit.  It 
would be meaningless to say that it was a slave.

And if we designed a type of creature that liked eating something that 
we find repulsive (say, a creature that liked to browse on human garbage 
dumps all the time, slowly digesting their contents and turning it into 
something useful), it would be as meaningless to say that the creature 
was a slave because we had made it that way.

What we are designed to want, is what we want.

So I would conclude that, with a few minor exceptions, the Culture Minds 
are not slaves.



Richard Loosemore