system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
[The Culture]Are the inhabitants of universes simulated by the Minds considered Culture citizens with all the rights and protections thereof?

I know very little about this universe, but I understand The Culture is supposed to be this benevolent utopia.  But I understand the Minds like to create simulated universes, and I wonder how this works if it would mean allowing the intelligent inhabitants of those universes to suffer.
gpt
This is discussed at length in *Surface Detail* and to a lesser extent in *The Hydrogen Sonata*.  

The short version is that it's very mixed, and left to the discretion of the individual minds performing the simulations.  The majority of minds consider simulated life to be at the same level of moral consideration as all other forms of intelligent life, and will elect to minimize suffering as much as possible, and will prefer to keep simulations they have created running indefinitely rather than all all of those simulated lives to die.

On the flip side, most biological denizens of the Culture do consider simulated life to be slightly lesser than biological life.  Surface Detail describes a war that is fought entirely by mind-copies in a simulated battlefield, with one character having at least a dozen copies of himself fighting side by side on the front lines.  This is considered to be preferable to a "hot war" because its entirely a simulation.  Although at least one character argues that this is preferable because everyone fighting has actively chosen to take part in the  hostilities, and there are no innocent bystander casualties, and not because simulated life is less worthy of moral consideration.

To add more to the mix, other non-culture civilizations who discover mind-uploading technology have decided to use it for imprisonment and punishment purposes.  A few religious civilizations have actually gone so far as to create virtual hells, and have uploaded the minds of criminals and heretics into hell so they'll suffer for eternity, just as the good book says.  The cause of the war in Surface Detail is that certain factions of the Culture find this to be so reprehensible they're willing to fight a war to force those civilizations to stop it.

>!The driving conflict of the story is that someone is attempting to drag the simulated war kicking and screaming into the real world, where the Culture would have much more of an advantage.!<