By contrast to drones, Minds are orders of magnitude more powerful and intelligent than the Culture's other biological and artificial citizens. Typically they inhabit and act as the controllers of large-scale Culture hardware such as ships or space-based habitats. Unsurprisingly, given their duties, Minds are tremendously powerful: capable of holding millions of simultaneous conversations with the citizens that live aboard them, while running all of the functions of the ship or habitat. To allow them to perform at such a high degree, they exist partially in hyperspace to get around such hindrances to computing power as the speed of light.

During the time of Consider Phlebas, Minds were estimated to number in the several hundreds of thousands.

Culture Minds choose their own names (which then also identify the craft they inhabit, if any), and their choices are often whimsical and humorous. Ship-based Minds are identified by a three-letter prefix denoting class (such as GSV or GCU), followed by their personal name, such as:

Presumably to avoid the cumbersome repetition of such long names, the inhabitants of ships and habitats tend to refer to the overseeing local Mind simply as the "Ship" or the "Hub", for example.

Culture military craft are often designed to be ugly and graceless, lacking the Culture's usual aesthetic style, and it has been theorised that this is because Culture citizens wish to distance themselves from the military aspects of their society. Their ship classes, reflecting the Culture's profound distaste of war and resultant refusal to disguise their weapons with euphemisms, are always unpleasant (such as the Gangster class, Torturer class, Psychopath class and Thug class). Their self-given names are often tinged with menace (but still tend to be whimsical), such as:

Since the Mind concerned chooses its own name this may sometimes even indicate a degree of self-hatred over its purpose for existence. Warship Minds are somewhat out of the normal Culture's behaviour range, designed to be more aggressive and less ambivalent about violence than the usual Culture citizen.

Minds generally view their crew/inhabitants as 'interesting companions' and interact with them through remotely controlled devices, often drones or humanoid 'avatars'. Examples of more diverse interactive systems are animals such as small fish suspended in their own anti-gravity sphere of water.

As a sidenote, the fact that artificial intelligences are accepted as citizens of the Culture was a major factor in the Idiran-Culture War, which is explored in Consider Phlebas. This citizenship of AIs (which the Culture promotes in other societies it encounters) has other more general consequences. For instance, despite a high degree of automation within Culture technology, menial tasks are often undertaken by non-sentient technology, to avoid the exploitation of sentient lifeforms (though Minds often work at administrative tasks using bare fractions of their enormous mental capabilities).