// I promised an elaboration on Minds as a Part 3, so here it is. Within every Ship, Orbital or other types of inhabited installation in the Culture, is a Mind (or in some cases, Minds), inhabiting a hyper-advanced egg-like computing core (or cores, as the case may be). As post-Singularity artificial intelligences, the Minds of the Culture are its foremost administrative, caretaking and guardian entities for its many trillions of biological and robotic citizens, keeping their post-scarcity civilisation running while also ensuring their lives are fulfilled and happy as best they can. In practical terms, every Mind is their own individual citizen, each and every Ship or installation a sapient being. Ship Minds, in particular, choose their own names. Minds may start out small, relatively speaking, in their cores, but they quickly expand and then relocate the majority of their processing hardware beyond their material core, into hyperspace, where their computational capabilities can exceed the lightspeed limit. Though the metaphor might work poorly in Star Rail terms, each and every Mind (Radia included) is akin to a Nous that stands upon the threshold of ascension to full Aeonhood, but never crossing it. One foot staying in the material plane, with the other in the transcendent beyond. The use of various avatars by Minds to communicate and interact with normal people is a practical necessity, requiring only a minute, insignificant portion of their computing power. (Communications between Minds, however, are of an exponentially greater complexity and information density.) The bulk of their processing power is actually spent on internal simulations of many kinds purely for fun, typically exotic models of universal physics or sometimes simulations of civilisations (not unlike the Amphoreus situation, but on far greater scopes). As a matter of fact, these simulated civs are kept running and never shut down, as Minds consider them as equally alive as realspace individuals, and therefore equally deserving of life and happiness.