What is a Cylon?

No Exit is a rapid fire exposition explosion episode you must watch with subtitles to catch all of Ander's word salad.

Saul Tigh's monologue was scene stealing eloquent, but was he right? In part,

"We made the skin jobs, it's all about what we made, the destruction of the colonies.
But the humans on Kobol made us. Go back far enough and it's always them." - Tigh, Tory

Unfortunately Tigh has no memory of his past as a Cylon, beyond the moment of dying on Earth with Ellen in his arms. He's getting his information secondhand from the addled account of Anders. Cavil's memory inhibition partially dismantled by a bullet in his brain.

Ellen Tigh got her full Cylon memories back after dying on New Caprica. She resurrected into her spare body Cavil kept on hand while awaiting her death as a faux Colonial with false implanted memories. (Just like Boomer had a false implanted cover persona) Cavil had to wait years.

Cavil wiped the memories of the other models and inhibited them from thinking about the final five and their own origins. A prohibition D'Anna was eventually able to ignore through her indomitable alpha female force of will. Cavil thinks he and the others are machines. Unlike the rebellious other models, Cavil does not believe in the Cylon one true god and converted Simon and Doral to atheism. After the fact, we know Cavil is wrong. There is some higher presence in Battlestar, giving marching orders to two angelic henchman who can't be seen or heard by the unchosen masses.

"Don't you feel the slightest bit of remorse for what you did to him? What you did to us?
No, because he's wrong Boomer. There's no need for remorse or blame. We didn't limit you. We gave you something wonderful, free will." - Boomer, Ellen

Oops, Cavil is wrong again. There is intent here that we the viewers are meant to understand Cavil is just disastrously wrong in some of his thinking and assumptions. The initial reason behind Cylon infertility amongst the models was never explained. Athena and later Caprica got pregnant by Colonial Helo and oldbie Cylon Saul as sires. Sure, the Cylon models were tweaked with super reflexes, super strength, photographic memories for recalling star charts, resistance to radiation and so forth. Maybe designer DNA, a little nano, whatever, but essentially the skinjobs were always human. And arguably Ellen's brief description sounds like a sales pitch she might have made to the Centurions long ago. I can make you fully human. Is that good enough to stop a war for?

"Love? Who? HUMANS?" - Boomer

Well yeah girl. You loved the Chief. Athena swiped your memories. Now she loves frakking Helo and had a baby. She stole your life, fake as it was, but honestly felt, when the elephants weren't around anyway. Boomer is wrong too, indoctrinated by Cavil. Like its titular namesake, people being wrong abound in No Exit. That's rather funny for an episode that is supposed to be telling all.

Conservatively fanwanking now, the final five created humanoid bodies for the Cylon Centurions. Bodies with brains! And we see how surplus inactive skinjobs are warehoused in Cylon resurrection ships and the Cylon Hub as fully matured adult bodies. The bodies are decanted as needed and a pre-existing consciousness from a resurrecting newly dead Cylon agent is "uploaded" into the body's brain. In some sense then, the synaptic content of those dormant brains is overwritten. With what? What were the very first uploads? Consciousnesses from Centurions? Eight archetypes synthesized from, and a representation of, the collective population of sentient Centurions? Would the Centurions have agreed to that? Now that we've gotten to know one bratty contrary Centurion, namely Zoe Graystone, you would expect such Centurions would never have tolerated Ellen betraying them in any deal. According to Ellen and Sam, the arrangement was conducted in good faith between distantly related Cylons.

By far, the most exotic technology in this process is winding up with a normal customary human brain. The Final Five created eight genomes and incubated clones. That in itself is standard science fiction. Of all life on Earth, human maturation and brain development is the slowest paced. Some process for speeding up cloning and physical maturation is little more ambitious science fiction. Downloading and uploading is farther future, but remotely plausible, science fiction.

Getting that tank grown clone to have a brain consisting of more than mush is the most ambitious in terms of science fiction. Cognitive science is strongly establishing our brains need stimuli in order to grow, in the womb, after being born, while consciously thinking of nothing, and even while asleep. Our brains never ever stop working. What we're looking for here then, are the first causes of skinjob sentience. No Exit doesn't provide that story.

The Battlestar Wiki has great questions about No Exit, including:

• Did the first generation of the Thirteenth Tribe consist of a limited number of models with copies?
• Did the Final Five base any of the Significant Eight models besides John Cavil (made to resemble Ellen's father John) on people they knew?
• Also, is Cavil's personality (complete with the sadistic atheist outlook) based on that of Ellen's father?
• What is a Cylon?

Aging but pertinent questions as Caprica writes that part of story that was part of Battlestar's intro. The nature of "They Evolved" remains unknown after the series ended.

Coincidentally setting a precedent, No Exit updated that intro:

This has all happened before and it will happen again.
The Cylons were created by man.
They rebelled.
Then they vanished.
Forty years later, they came back.
They evolved.

Yes, partly this new introduction was to promote the reveal of Ellen Tigh as the final Cylon. But besides even briefer exposition in Razor, No Exit is no less our only source of information about the skinjob's origins:

Cavil: You made me in your father's image.
Cavil: My forebears are Colonial Centurions.
Ellen: We made you. You are all my children.
Sam: We developed eight models and gave them resurrection.
Saul: Sam said we made them.
Tory: Look all the way down and it's humans underneath the Cylon turtles every time.
Other models: We don't remember.

One is lying or self deluded. One is on a ego trip, listen to your Mother. One has word salad brain trauma. The rest simply don't know. Ellen says Cavil is wrong, and that is self evident in some of his psychotic respects. No Exit is a flurry of mistaken perceptions between everyone in the room. Hell is other people. Some of that wrong headedness means to realize tragic drama from the pointless futility and waste of getting things wrong, then and now, boding bad for the future. And Cavil started the party by killing fifty billion people in a tantrum of abstract genealogical vengeance.

Maybe I'm obtuse but to me, this is fuzzy answer to how Baltar's half forgotten chrome toasters came to be Roslin's "they look like us now." I didn't get any CG flashbacks of negotiating Centurions, instead just a hellish amount of exposition.

In No Exit's podcast, Ron Moore related how they decided not to add anything to Battlestar's last season solely as set up for the next year's Caprica series. He doesn't say why "They evolved" received such a vague treatment. Maybe that was the treatment. It must be said Battlestar only faintly fulfilled SyFy's now embarrassing promotional promise of "All Will Be Revealed."

Maybe Caprica is just retcon bulldozing over Battlestar canon.

Caprica is taking the Cylon Centurion origin story to strange, unexpected and outrageous places. Conceivably Ellen's sales pitch could have gone like this, I can make you human again. And yes I know, Caprica's two virtual souls are technically digital reconstructions that nevertheless are acceptably faithful essences to close friend Lacy and fathers Daniel and Joseph.

This wiggle room in No Exit and the unexpected direction of Caprica begs a speculative question. Were there ever any Cylons? After all, it's what on the inside that counts. Or going back to really old first season speculation, was absolutely everyone in Battlestar a Cylon? In other words, have humans from time immemorial filled the electronic brains of their fledging first generation robots with the resurrected minds of dead humans? Is this the recurring inevitable computer science solution to realizing human like machine intelligence. Because I can tell you, generally the field is largely insecure about getting anywhere in "designing" human caliber intelligence. It requires too much mastery of the construction and operation of the human brain, all of which we simply know next to nothing about neurologically. What, where and how is a memory fabricated. Nobody knows. Storage of memory seems to involve non-local distribution in multiple dimensions aka the holographic brain model. Can we realize the hardware capability of the human brain in this century. Maybe. Can we profoundly understand the human brain to where we can design a functionally equivalent mimicry of it. Maybe not.

Did anyone at anytime, on Kobol, Earth, or the Colonies, ever design artificial intelligences from scratch as we think of how conventional AI should be created out of nothing? For a completely non-derivative general AI such as 2001: A Space Odyssey's HAL, all we have so far is Serge the robotic butler. What remains are two vastly superior machine sentiences that are actually two resurrected dead girls. Ask anyone in artificial intelligence research and they will tell you expectations about the first really advanced AI. It will be designed to write itself. From modest beginnings a seed program with core learning abilities will modify, refine and evolve on its own independently. It will experience life at a computer pace of milliseconds. without continuing human design and intervention. Past a certain evolutionary point, continuing human design and intervention is not only unecessary it is impossible. Humans could no longer follow or reverse engineer the emerging complexity of its progress in a timely human fashion. But that AI will initially require a database of world knowledge, in order to perceive and understand the world. Lacking this ability to interact with new stimuli, it cannot grow on its own but still has to be spoon fed knowledge. In other words, an AI has to be smart enough to read and understand, say, the world wide web in order to learn unaided and at its own pace, as a human student does.

In Caprica, this baseline knowledge comes from dead people. Interestingly, using two different dead people as source material would yield two distinct AI individuals. This is what Caprica showed us happened in the genesis of Zoe-A and Tamara-A. And you know that the two will either come to be bitter foes or the best of allies, due to this difference in nature in addition to their virtual nurture. Did Zoe herself understand the end product of her mad scientist creation software? Probably not. Daniel absolutely does not and has little chance he ever will. Caprica does have a technological singularity to go to, after all.

The now dead Zoe's genius Avatar software created an Avatar that rapidly converged on what Zoe the person was, and suddenly woke up as a self aware digital doppleganger Zoe. Software so user friendly her Dad could use it to make Tamara-A, even though the living Tamara was unknown to him.

"He's a machine, so are you.
I think that depends on how you define things." - Cavil, Ellen

"A difference that makes no difference is no difference." - Daniel Graystone

Metal or designer DNA flesh is the mundane part. What makes a Cylon is the mind or the soul if your beliefs require a soul for genuine personhood. What is a Cylon? After one fat lady has sang and the other is on hiatus, I now have doubts thanks to Caprica.

-ThP