The Souls of Cylons

I watched an interesting episode of Caprica last night, in which Daniel Graystone, the inadvertent inventor of Cylon technology, works on the avatar of his wife, Amanda Graystone.  For those BSG fans who haven't seen the prequel, Daniel finds an avatar program created by his deceased daughter, Zoe.  He downloads it into a robot he's building for the military, and the robot seems to come to life.  In fact, it has "come to life;" it's the avatar of his daughter, Zoe, who lives on in V-World with all the memories and attributes of the original Zoe.  She is, for all intents and purposes, the first Cylon.

So, Daniel works away at replicating this program -- he's building an avatar of his wife, who has left him.  In V-World, he interacts with Amanda's avatar, and at first, the audience believes it's really his wife and he's really asking her for a reconciliation.  "Amanda" grants the reconciliation because she loves him -- why would she continue holding a grudge against someone she loves?  Daniel gets angry because, of course, the real Amanda would never behave in such a way.  Daniel thinks his avatar program is "not human enough."  However, it might be more human than he realizes -- if the souls (for lack of a better word) of humans are inherently good, then he might have created an enlightened version of Amanda, an improved Amanda.

Daniel's reaction is interesting to me because many religious philosophies indicate that the intrinsic nature of humans is good, kind, and compassionate.  In other words, perhaps Daniel thinks his program is "not human enough" because he doesn't know what it means to be human.  From a religious perspective, he has created life.  The avatar of Amanda feels sensations, she reacts to other beings, and she claims that she loves Daniel.  He retorts with a line that BSG fans will remember: "You're just a machine -- you can't love."  But who is he to say? 

One of the earliest religious beliefs, according to Karen Armstrong in The Case for God, was the interconnected essence of all things.  She says, "As life became more settled, people had the leisure to develop a more interior spirituality.  The Indian Aryans... pioneered this trend, achieving the groundbreaking discovery that Brahman, being itself, was also the ground of the human psyche.  The transcendent was neither external nor alien to humanity, the the two were inextricably connected" (19).  I believe that Love is an example of the transcendent, as do many religious people.  The Bible claims that God is Love.  Buddhists claim that once a being is enlightened, she or he behaves with compassion for all beings.  The real problem for Daniel seems to be that a soldier robot cannot have Love as it's fundamental, intrinsic quality.  He considers this a mistake.  He's creating Cylons in his own image.