Monday, October 30, 2006

caught up on "Galactica"

I've made it. I'm through Season Two of "Battlestar Galactica," and at the suggestion of Jason, have also begun to listen to the Ronald Moore podcasts. I'll try to follow Season Three somehow. Not sure how yet, but I'll figure it out.

The story, so far, seems not to be quite as liberal as some would make it out to be (though Ronald Moore himself does come off as a typical Hollywood lefty). As a political centrist, I see the show, overall, as fairly left-leaning, but offset with some perspective from the right. The idea, for example, that a military should remain vigilant and that humans too easily forget the horrors of the past is illustrated quite clearly by the time we reach the end of Part Two of the Season Two finale. The episode about the black market reaffirmed the conservative conviction about the necessities of human imperfection. The political aspect of the show seems pretty much to derail (wildly!) by the end of Season Two, but the thing that interests me most right now is the question of Cylon consciousness.

It's established early in Season One that Cylons come in twelve distinct models and that the humaniform Cylons, if killed, can have their consciousnesses uploaded and then downloaded into new bodies. We discover in Season Two that this procedure also applies to Cylon fighters, and that these fighters learn from experience with each successive download after each successive death. Death, it turns out, is a painful, unpleasant experience for Cylon entities, humaniform or otherwise, and individual Cylons can develop grudges if killed too often by the same parties (cf. the episode titled "Scar").

Imagine it this way. You're playing a video game. There's a nasty character in the game who always nails you: you die several times, always killed by the same bad guy. Your frustration builds, you keep on dying, but pretty soon you've got this character's patterns pinned down. Eventually you nail the bastard, because he has come to occupy your full attention. Understand that mindset? That, apparently, is what a Cylon becomes if it's killed often enough. It nurses a grudge, gains experience, and eventually gets its way. Pretty cool.

I'm tempted to say that Cylon consciousness follows a Hindu reincarnational template (in fact, the so-called "resurrection ship" doesn't facilitate resurrection, but reincarnation, as it's not the same Cylon body that comes to life). An individual Cylon, once killed, can be downloaded into another body. To that extent there's continuity of experience.

But several copies of the same model can have separate experiences, and it appears that, if more than one copy is killed, memories from the various bodies can be transferred into a single new Cylon body. The Cylon notion of selfhood, which appears still to be forming (Moore tells us the Cylons are "a young species"), is already something of a metaphysical-- not to mention psychological-- muddle. I find the muddle fascinating, but right now I'm not quite sure how it can be coherent.

Another question I have about the series relates to Cylon and human prophecy. Prophecy-- if defined as "words or visions having predictive value in relation to concrete future events"-- presents obvious philosophical problems for human freedom. In what way are you free if the future is already known?* The humans in the series view freedom as paramount: to be without freedom is to be like a Cylon, a slave to one's programming.

What, then, is prophecy for the humans and Cylons in "Battlestar Galactica"? It's not obvious that the series advocates the existence of any deity or deities; the Cylon predictions seem explainable by naturalistic means, and even President Roslin's chemical-induced visions strike me as little more than riffs off reality, low-risk predictions about the very near future. The series is frank about the diversity of religious perspectives, even within the respective human and Cylon societies.

So when a Cylon makes a prediction like, "You're going to find Kobol," the planet on which humanity supposedly originated, I would argue that the prediction's realization has everything to do with either Cylon manipulation or commonsense deduction. After all, as regards the Kobol prediction-- it turns out the Cylons are already on Kobol. The constant human search for a habitable planet, and the fleet's location in that part of the galaxy, made it inevitable that Kobol would be found. An easy call, then, for the Cylons. When President Roslin sees a vision of ancient Kobol on a satellite map, the vision is merely an extrapolation of what the satellite map actually shows: the ruins of a city. Prophecy in this series, then, doesn't seem to offer much in the way of stunning revelations.

Cylon society continues to intrigue me. We have no clear idea about Cylon social hierarchy. Who's in command, exactly? Cylons are a strange mix of telepathic massmind, machine consciousness, and human individualism. It's hard to say whether this is (a) the result of sloppy writing or (b) the tantalizing hints of a much larger but still-hidden civilizational pattern. It's interesting to see certain Cylons-- those that have experienced love to some degree or other-- developing something approaching a conscience.

Gaius Baltar, alas, remains about the same as he's always been, which is a disappointment. There is one Baltaric twist I enjoy, however: just as the curvy number Six infects his consciousness and appears in visions, so it is that Baltar now appears in visions to one of the Sixes on Caprica. This would seem to suggest that the illusory Six and the illusory Baltar really are just unconscious projections. But don't quote me on that. This might not be the "Fight Club" scenario I think it is.

The writers have to be careful, though. If Cylons are already capable of human emotion, they should be capable of falling into the same psychic traps humans do. They should be foiled by their own impatience, for example, and dissension should be more a fact of life in Cylon culture than it currently is. This, I think, needs to be worked out in successive episodes. I'm not sure the writers themselves have a clear idea what, exactly, Cylon society is all about-- how it's organized, what motivates it, etc. Season Three apparently brings a new writer on board; I view this move with some caution, because there's a chance that too many cooks can spoil the pot.

By the way: you all know that Jim Kirk wouldn't hesitate to fuck a Cylon woman. All hail the interstellar Canadian!

*Example: I know my son will eat a cookie I place on the corner of the dining room table. Some people leap on this scenario as an example of how human freedom and foreknowledge can be compatible: I foreknow the cookie-eating event, and my son freely chooses to eat the cookie. But that's not the case: if I know for a fact that my son will eat the cookie, in what way have I made a case that my son is free? If anything, my foreknowledge would appear to be based on my son's lack of freedom, to wit: his inability to break a compulsion.

The deeper point is this: if you know something is going to happen, then it must happen. Your foreknowledge doesn't cause the event, but it is a reflection of that event's inevitability. Something known must be there to be known. To know of a future event is to imply that the event actually lies in one's future.

Coming back to the son/cookie example, then: if there's even a chance that my son might not eat the cookie, then it cannot truly be said that I know what my son is going to do. All I can say is that I know what he might do, or what he's likely to do. Not the same thing at all as knowing what will come to pass.

Let's expand this discussion. If (1) God knows that you're going to sneeze in five minutes, and (2) God has known this since eternity, and (3) God's knowledge is infallible, then you will sneeze in five minutes. In fact, if you think about it, you will see that cosmic events have to line up in such a way that your sneeze is even possible: this galaxy has to form; this solar system has to come into existence; this planet has to coalesce; natural history has to produce human life; humans have to produce precisely the civilization in which you currently find yourself; your life has to be ordered in such a way that you find yourself before a monitor, reading this prediction: your sneeze will occur in a spatiotemporal context that is the result of an amazing constellation of factors. All those factors crystallize into the sneeze-moment. To say that "God knows you'll sneeze in five minutes" is to imply God's foreknowledge of all the events leading up to the sneeze. And quite likely, those that follow it, as no one seriously argues that God's foreknowledge has temporal limits.

The above is an argument for strong determinism; I reject it not on logical grounds, but on the hunch that people enjoy a measure of free will, and that there are "possible worlds" in which certain events occur or don't occur. Freedom means that, when I perform action X, I could have done otherwise. I am not a compatibilist; I don't see how freedom and determinism can be reconciled.


No comments: