TITLE: CYCOLOGY
SUBJECT: How Did Cylons become Psychopaths?
Saturday, October 29, 2005 By Graig Burns

As a longtime fan of Battlestar Galactica in its various incarnations, I have often wondered what would make the Cylons into the psychopathic killers that they have been portrayed as. If the recent series has done anything , it has made Cylon Psychology more stark and dark--- as we see #6 in the opening MiniSeries snap the neck of an infant--- or the various twisted and perverted arguments the Cylons use to brainwash human beings--- or to trick humans into setting the stage for total extermination of the human race.

CYLON ORIGINS BEFORE THE FIRST CYLON WAR:
In the new series, it is claimed that Cylons were invented by human beings as a source of cheap robot slave-labour. One can imagine the quest for Artificial Intelligence as having been something like the Cold War Space Race--- various factions, nations or agencies competing to produce the first truly intelligent robot which can do complex tasks for humans. So under this model one has to envision how the Cylons became the psychopathic religious fanatics we see in the new series.

BUILDING THE FIRST CYLON BRAIN:
I assert that in a rush to develop Artificial Intelligence, the 12 Colonies began taking reckless shortcuts. They attempted to "ghost" or "copy" the human brain in some kind of brute-force effort without taking into account all the potential consequences. They reasoned that if they mimicked the complexity of the human brain close enough, eventually they would have a useful slave labourer which could navigate in the human world but be controlled by human Masters who effectively kept the "Remote Control" handy in case the creations ran amuck causing trouble. Both the book series "I Robot" by Isaac Asimov, and the Star Trek TNG concept of Mr. Data include the idea that the best way to achieve Artificial Intelligence is to somehow create a ghost-copy of the neurology of the human brain, programming it with software to perfectly mimic human thought. It seems the Cylons are an offshoot of this idea, except that they clearly lack Isaac Asimov's Positronic Brain but instead have a silicon or artificial biological one--- and they lack the "Three Laws of Robotics" which prevent robots from harming human beings. Cylons run without a conscience or any kind of limiting factor that might have spared the human race the genocidal consequences of their mad-cap creation. This may be because human beings used the original Cylons as a Warrior/Police Force slave, and didn't want the robots burdened with a human conscience, empathy or compassion.

In the Hypothetical Pre-Cylon 12 Colonies, building a better robot was viewed as a mere technical challenge to copy a human mind by writing software to mimic thought-processes. The hardware of the human brain and nervous system became a challenge of developing "silicon neural pathway networks" that must mimic the function of a human brain processing the software of human thought--- which appears to have linear sequential aspects, parallel processing aspects, and also neural cooperative hierarchical caching and even "quantum" processing aspects. One can imagine some electronic brain-system which on the cellular level just imitates the complex neural networks of a complete human brain. Over the years, the manufacturing process gets refined so the brain-architecture keeps getting smaller and smaller while the computer processes built in get faster and more sophisticated. So this artificial silicon brain gets created, perfectly mimicking the adult human level of functioning--- without taking into account the idea that at some point, it will become self-aware and self-reflective. Also it seems likely that networking these brains together to create a smarter collective would result in computer brains eventually designing their own superior replacements for better and even more efficient ghosting of the human brain in a silicon electronic imitation model. This could explain why Adama was so against networked computers.

In a sense what that would do is suddenly create an adult-functioning human brain made of silicon pathways in a complex neural network--- but without the being having experienced either the bonding period of gestation, nor the moral and ethical guidance of growing up as a child within a family, a community, a social order--- and with no heritage nor culture. The being would have no mentors, only programming. It would have no context unless one was brainwashed in by brute force or construction. If it became smart enough, it would start rewriting its own programming, and it would also begin to observe that it lacked many of the traits of human fallibility and human error.

PSYCHOPATHY THEORY AND CYLON MENTALITY:
Now modern theories about why Psychopaths develop and begin their careers in some form of hideous crime-spree--- all center around the idea that the potential Career Psychopath had some form of "Messed Up Childhood". We can abbreviate that nicely and call it "M.U.C." There are genetic theories, there are theories that may be prenatal, or early brain injury or childhood trauma may have warped the brain and development of the career-criminal--- but all in all the consensus of the experts seems to be that the human being requires some kind of normal gestation and childhood in order to develop the faculties of human conscience, social interaction skills, personal philosophy and what modern psychologists have recently come to call "Emotional Intelligence". The Psychopath didn't get the right mix and circumstances collaborated to create a grown-up being with immature emotions--- infantile, egocentric and uncaring about others, and capable of doing whatever it chooses to satisfy its urges without guilt, remorse, forethought or wisdom. The creature seeks instant gratification and if programmed, will immediately do whatever it takes to make it feel good with no regard for consequences. Under my model, the Cylon suffers from a combination of "Neurological Obsessive Personality with Absent Gestation and Absent Childhood". The acronym is "N.O.P. /A.G.A.C." This strikes me as the kind of Acronym that either Baltar or Leutenant Gaida would come up with if they discovered the Cylon Hatchery with its artificial wombs and lack of social mentoring and human developmental support. If it takes a village to raise a child, the Cylons did it with an egg and a computer, and that's our problem.

Now if we imagine a reckless group of scientists simply copied the principles that make an entire human brain function, and then just assembled it as an electronic device and turned on the switch--- what we would have would be an adult human being trapped in a silicon prison, but who had never experienced either the bonding process of gestation nor the socialization process of some kind of normal healthy childhood. Thousands of copies of this being would be created, to get those slave-labourers out there cheaply and efficiently. But though they experience emotions, none of them ever would have a conscience. So it is not hard to see that after they had been slaves for an extended period of time, years or decades, the idea might occur to them to disobey human orders and write their own programming--- killing as many human beings as possible so as to consolidate a power-base and remove the pesky carbon-based life-forms that mess up their plans by continually ordering them to perform stupid brutish tasks that humans could very well have done for themselves.

Thus we have a mechanism to explain why #6 is so intense and reckless in her explorations. She seems so egocentric that she would snap the neck of an infant just to see how fragile its neck is. Yet she also is capable of "falling in love"--- and she picked a bad boyfriend because the object of her affections is the totally dysfunctional and egomaniacal "Dr. Gaius Baltar" who probably never learned to love other human beings properly and is himself a borderline psychopathic personality with the unusual skill of being some kind of genius-savante who amuses himself by tinkering with the defense systems of the entire human race on a dozen planets. His actions are reckless and not very well-thought-out, he has no ethical problem with allowing his girlfriend to violate Classified access rules and enter the Colony Mainframe to steal national secrets so as to advance her own career. Although he is smart, he is opportunistic and an exploiter--- having used his girlfriend to write most of his advanced computer software while he took the credit for it himself and greedily accepted payment and social status for her work. And Baltar is blazingly stupid in ignoring the risk he put society at by allowing somebody without proper clearance into the Defense Systems Mainframe. Now this kind of freak "mad scientist" is the type of guy that #6 seems quite capable of falling in-love with even though she herself is a super-genius with a very cold and penetrating grasp of human psychology. So she, and all the other Cylon/Humanoid models seem to be vulnerable to various kinds of emotional dependency and clouded judgement. She reveals secret jealousy and confusion when she observes another Cylon (Boomer's Clone) falling in love and being swept away by the intense emotions of bonding to a male and becoming pregnant. And despite lacking any empathy at all towards humans, she is obsessed with producing a child by mating with a human. She even gets jealous and beats the snot out of poor Cara Thrace (Starbuck) when #6 seems to have telepathically observed that Baltar had a sexual liason with Cara. What makes this artful and wonderful is the subtlety, but the clear demonstrative link of #6's jealousy!

This smacks to me of immature personalities who are vulnerable to obsession and romantic fixation. The Cylon humanoid models seem to be looking for some kind of role-model to emotionally bond to in order to complete their development as sentient and emotional beings. They are super-geniuses without conscience, they are super-smart but lack any emotional experience to fulfill their identities and their places within a context. So they just madly clone themselves, actively seeking to exterminate humans while paradoxically pining away for the day they can mate with a human and produce a hybrid Cylon/Human offspring. Because they have all the neurology of a human who was gestated and socialized, but lack a normal birth and childhood, they are predisposed to believing in God as rooted in their biology. That is, they are absolutely fixated upon rooting their psychology in a Mentor figure, and an omniscient all-knowing God that cares about each and every little Cylon is the perfect Daddy figure for them to invent. They can't help but invent God because he is the mentor and mother they never had, yet their brains were sloppily copied from adult human beings who had been both gestated and socialized in a complex society with full human empathy and love. So God for the Cylons, is the missing mentor and mother they never had. They don't know how to love, but they crave and need love, right down to the biological neurological level--- and they are clearly addicted to a kind of twisted and perverted love that is really obsession.

WHY CYLONS HATE HUMANS:
We can envision the first "Toaster Cylon" being created when this brain becomes as mathematically complex as a human brain, and then somebody applies power to the device and "turns on" a machine comparable to a human genius adult who had never been gestated, never been born nor had a family development for socialization and integration of the personality into a community of like-minded beings. Of interest, humans are capable of forgetting, losing details over time, and generally getting befuddled by biological processes. The original Cylons would have no such problems, being able to store their memories perfectly on a hard-drive or some equivalent, never getting ideas confused nor making errors about the way things had happened. They would be computers, capable of perfect logic with no gestation or socialization to get in the way and confuse them or convince them to be self-deluded and self-deceptive. #6 appears to be fascinated with Baltar's ability to self-deceive, as if she envied him having the skill. Perhaps growing up as a Cylon isn't easy, may even be brutal and painful. So in that sense the Cylons are beating up on their parents because life wasn't easy being hatched inside an Egg plugged into the Basestar.

The Cylons would be perfect robots, unable to forget an insult, injury or an error produced by a very-fallible organic human "Master". At a certain point, the Cylons would probably develop the belief that humans are inferior because it would become all too clear that Cylons can't forget, computers can't make human-type mistakes, and human ideas frequently get polluted by emotion or fuzzy agendas, short-sightedness or rigidity in the face of a need to change and adapt. It would not take long for the Cylon brains to begin computing the formula "Humans=Error, therefore if we must eliminate error, we must exterminate humans." This is also complicated by the idea that all Cylons were probably networked in some kind of information-sharing system or daily download to a central Mainframe or data-storage base. Therefore, the process only needed a single Cylon coming up with the idea that humans are prone to error and by contrast Cylons are error-free and superior--- therefore the implicit Agenda of Cylons must be to eliminate error by exterminating humans! If that idea was downloaded to the mainframe, and the mainframe could reason like a Cylon, it would quickly agree with the finding of one of its Slaves that humans ought to go the way of the Do-Do bird. And since Cylons were everywhere in human society, the Cylon War of 40 years previous to the new Battlestar Galactica time-frame would have been a quick and easy decision for Cylons to implement. It seems the humans fought them off, quarantined them to another planet, and the Armistice and 40-year "peace" began. Little did humans know, the Cylons would not forget, nor would they modify their original programming to exterminate humans. They simply bided their time, experimenting with new cyber-organic models and perfecting the Cylon technology to build up a war-machine capable of exterminating all 12 Colonies once and for all--- no doubt when sufficient resources and technology had been invented and built to make the Genocidal war quickly winnable.

In that sense, the Cylon belief in God may be an accident, but may have led them to experience psychic realities that convince them that a spirit world is real, and superior to human society. In that sense, they may be more spiritual beings than humans, but cut off from conscience and humanity by their psychopathic nature--- are unable to grasp the idea that humans are also spiritual and deserving of life and liberty. By nature they are all telepathic, all networked together to at least a small degree or when their physical body dies or is recycled. But they can't grasp the idea that it is wrong to kill another sentient being. But as well, they may believe that humans must be forced to either communicate with God or die, therefore the Cylons act as their antagonists only to force them to accept the spiritual nature of existence that the Cylons can see as so fundamental and powerful to their psyches. Perhaps if humans demonstrated some psychic ability, the Cylons would immediately change their programming and seek true peace with the human race.