Cylon Transmission and Faith

[Harvester]

OK, I don't know if this has been covered yet so here goes:
We know that the Cylons are a very religious group of killing and sex obsessed robots. We know that they believe that upon destruction of their current bodies that their conciousness will be transmitted to a new host. We do not know whether this transmission is indeed factual or if it is part of Cylon faith. We have yet to see a cylon that possessed knowledge that could have only been obtained by transmission from another host.
So, the big question is, is the vaunted transmission ability real or is it something the Cylons are programmed with so that they don't feal fear (obviously they have emotions) that might otherwise prevent them from executing suicide missions against humanity?
After all, faith in an afterlife has enabled people from our world to carry out many 'suicide missions'.
If the 'transmission ability' was merely a matter of faith rather than reality it would do away with the hardware requirements to transmit large amounts of data over large distances instantaneously and possibly unexpectedly.
OK, my head hurts. Damn theological questions.

[MarkusB]

I think that they have the capacity to transmit. Remember that Fear w/b a program as well. as any other emotion. You have to admit, it is pretty weird having AI with religous values. It makes you wonder what are the prerequisites for a soul eh?

[CylonGod]

I think they can transmit or share data (a specific event like the ships position). I don't think they can actually send the personality and all the memories.

[Brazedowl]

Well they decidedly can transmitt messages. In the mini when Six tells Baltar she's meeting someone then proceedes to talk to the sky. But now that Harvester has mentioned it I think it might be more difficult to transmit an entire consiousness across space to a waiting body. It raises all kinds of questions.

Are there empty-brained versions just laying around waiting to have somthing to be trasmitted back?

If Six is in Baltar, did her consiousness also get trasmitted back to the Cylons when her body was destroyed?

If so, is this somthing the cylons might find strange or perhaps even threatening? (I.E the bombing by Doral aimed at destroying the Balter-Six, more then the lab)

But this line of questioning quickly spins out of control so I'll just stop and let other people peck away at it.

[CylonGod]

Brazedowl said:

Are there empty-brained versions just laying around waiting to have somthing to be trasmitted back?

But this line of questioning quickly spins out of control so I'll just stop and let other people peck away at it.

To further expand on you question a little.

Do they have empty brained version waiting? Not sure but would have to have something like that. What if they do; do they have a lot? What happends if a whole ship or basestar full of them (bioCylons) gets (destroyed) killed at once? What happens if there isn't enough empty brainers for the sudden rush of personalities/memories.

[Brazedowl]

Well this raises yet another question: Do the cylons have a "home world" of their factories are? They have ships, therefore they must have shipyards and sources of raw materials. I mean they most likely don't produce new bio- or mechanical cylons on the basestars.

So assuming that the Bicy's do, indeed, beam their experiences and personailies back to the Bicy vats, they most likely store these personalies then build models to order. So yes they do "wake up somewhere else in an identical body" but it could be some time later if a large number of Bicys are destroyed (killed?) at once.

[CylonGod]

Off topic? Doesn't this belong in the Cylons thread/section?

[Brazedowl]

hmmm.... I guess so. Let us continue our discussion in the proper local.

[Harvester]

If the admins want to move this thread to the 'Cylon' section.....well, hey they're admins, what the heck do they need my input for?

[Blade Runner]

Harvester said:

If the admins want to move this thread to the 'Cylon' section.....well, hey they're admins, what the heck do they need my input for?

Nah.. bollocks... leave it ;D

[Harvester]

Alright then, lets see if I can tie this in to possible season two scenarios.
We can assume that there hasn't been a lot of cylon deaths up until the invasion of the colonies, so the transmission thing might be relatively untested among the cylons. To this point there's been little reason for them to question their beliefs. If the cylon religion is in fact going to be a focal point of the coming season stories could be developed around the crisis of faith that could arise from the individual units questioning the truth and logistics behind the belief that their entire being could be transferred to a waiting husk insantaneously from many light years away. Setting up for data transmission when when one unit was prepared for termination would be one thing, unexpected death such as in an explosion would be another. It could be less than a second from detonation to destruction of the unit. In this time, less than a second, the cylon would have to process what was happening, determine that termination was inevitable, determine the location of the reciever to which the data must be sent and transmit an entire personality.
This is the sort of thing that could start a cylon civil war. If you start to question your religion you start to question the motives of your religious leaders. This could become evident in the 'flawed' Boomer models (although from what I saw of the Maxim pics there weren't any visible flaws)
Anyway, that's it for now. Maybe I'll come back to it again later.

[Corwin]

I've not seen this episode since the original airing but wasn't the Leoben Interrorgated by Starbuck unsure if his conciousness would be able to travel such a distance to a new body?

If this belief is just something that is programmed into the Cylons why allow for this doubt? The programming should be that his "soul" will be reborn no matter where he is.

On the otherhand if the ability is real then distance could well come into it with more degredation of Data happening the further it has to travel.

Of course Leoben may hav been making this all up.

[CylonGod]

Corwin said:

I've not seen this episode since the original airing but wasn't the Leoben Interrorgated by Starbuck unsure if his conciousness would be able to travel such a distance to a new body?

If this belief is just something that is programmed into the Cylons why allow for this doubt? The programming should be that his "soul" will be reborn no matter where he is.

On the otherhand if the ability is real then distance could well come into it with more degredation of Data happening the further it has to travel.

Of course Leoben may hav been making this all up.

In the Mini the Leoben stated the same belife. Conoy couldn't transmit any data as he had to report directly to the Cylons when they boarded Ragnar station at the end of the mini. This gives some validity to the transmision of some data but not necessarly the whole personality. It also shows that it can be interfered with. The radiation from Ragnar prevented transmission of data and probably of Leobens personality. Distance might also be a problem as a data stream will degrade over distance and time. So the belife could be both programed into them and something that actually happens. To what extent it happens and what are the limits remain to be seen.

[Tato]

I think it might be worthwhile thinking about the capacity limitations of any potential data transfer process. Communicating some specific data, e.g. location of the fleet (some sort of interstellar GPS co-ordinates) wouldn't be that hard. The equivalent of a few kilobytes encoded and compressed, if that.

But transmitting an entire consciousness complete with memories, personality (assuming each unit has some unique variations), relationship and emotional information...that's not going to fit on an 80GB hard drive!

Even if that much info was transmitted, I would assume that Galactica would have electronic warfare and countermeasures in place to pick it up (eventually). Military comms today uses narrow band burst transmitters, encrypted etc. to try and avoid interception. Still, it seems to me that it may pose a major technical challenge.

HOWEVER all of the above can be avoided if cylons have a SOUL which simply flits off death to inhabit a new body! (A kind of reincarnation???)

Mind bending.