Quote Originally Posted by Forum Explorer View Post
But basically there are two things that I view as too essential to who I am (Memories and emotions) and the unwilling modification of those two things are what I feel are some of the greatest crimes any being could do.
Also, this is sort of why I get away from reading the Culture books feeling slightly baffled that the Culture isn't all that much different from the present day world. Seriously, you could take any one of us and plonk us down into the Culture and, while we might not fit into their society well, we would at least be able to operate reasonably ok.

Post-Singularity to the Culture's extent erases the entire meaning of identity, personality, emotions and all the other things we take to mean 'people' in every day life.

The Culture as a civilization, if they did all of what they were capable of, is something we can barely comprehend and that nothing in 40k has a chance of understanding except the Old Ones and maybe Chaos gods.
It is simply too far removed, what might normally be considered the fundamental bedrock of reality like what it means to be 'someone' is not just a simplification but utterly meaningless at the Culture's level of technology.

What we mean when we say intelligence and what the Culture means should and would be so different that we may as well use completely different words.


The only way to square this circle would be to say that all the Culture books involving meat-space humans give us only an infinitely tiny slice of the actual Culture that has opted to have a 'human' experience. (which isn't anything at all like 'human', what with their drug glands)

Unfortunately, the Word of God has explicitly stated that this is not the case and that meat-space humans are the majority of the 1:1 intelligences. =(