It is finished: Battlestar Galactica: "Daybreak" - Part 2

And I am saddened on many levels, some good, some not so good.

The re-imagined Battlestar Galactica is now over.
Spoilers for Galactica's "Daybreak Part 2," follow:



Some of what happened in the last episode was great stuff. Bear McCreary's score and the tear jerking emotional moments were all good. There were such touching moments here, Bill Adama and Laura Roslin on Earth just before and just after Roslin died were beautiful and sad, that I can't just rant against this ending. However, in spite of the good stuff a lot of what happened in this final show was extremely disappointing in exactly the way I feared and predicted it would be in my previous posts. The journey towards the end was fantastic, but the destination sucked and it started sucking mostly in the last half of season 4. That's not just my opinion, but a general consensus I've been picking up in other blogs and forums. For example, PZ Myers, who didn't even watch the show, put up a "Battlestar Galactica open thread" where a lot of people are complaining about the ending but still expressing love for the show.

What a waste, the show was almost building up to be this great combination of Shakespearean tragedy and intelligent science fiction but then ultimately failed on both fronts. Instead we got some good music and expertly handled emotional manipulation and character development which are only nice ingredients but don't make a whole stew.

The roots of my disappointment on the science fictional content go back to some things I said in some of my earlier posts, "Six of One" : The disappointing part, being one example.

It was then that I noticed that there was a failing on the part of the writers to understand some of the basics of certain transhumanist themes that Galactica stumbled into but that had already been handled much more intelligently, sometimes decades before, by science fiction writers like Greg Egan and Bruce Sterling. Greg Egan's "Permutation City" and "Diaspora" would be good reads.

Apparently the writers absorbed some half-assed transhumanist ideas from the science fiction culture around them but did no research on transhumanism itself. You could start this research here on the Transhumanist Reading page.

One example of a half-assed understanding of a transhumanist concept was the idea of "uploading." That idea comes from some early science fiction (for a few early examples try Roger Zelazny's 1968 novel "Lord of Light," Frederik Pohl's 1955 story "Tunnel Under the World" and Philip K. Dick's "Ubik") and then it was refined by the transhumanists and futurists into something far more interesting than what the Galactica writers imagined. What the Cylons did in Galactica, when one died their memories were uploaded into a new body, they even called it "uploading," has dramatic implications the writers failed to grasp.

In most science fiction the uploading is done into virtual realities, like Star Trek's holodeck except there in no human body on the deck. For example Frederik Pohl's "Gateway" series (Heechee Saga) had a man uploaded into a virtual computer world in the 1976 novel, before William Gibson coined the word cyberspace in his novel "Neuromancer." Galactica's technology is necessarily more advanced than anything in either of those novel's. There was, however, the 1982 novel "Software", by Rudy Rucker, that got closer, in that novel a human mind is uploaded into a very human-like android body and the process was sold as a way to become immortal. If you read any of those works you were probably surprised by how badly the Galactica writers screwed up the concept and its implications.

In Galactica uploading is magical and undetectable, but in more sophisticated and scientifically literate SF the odds are that even our modern technology, like x-rays, could detect, though not replicate, many proposed devices that could be used to transfer memories, even if genetically constructed. (In Greg Egan's "Jewelhead" stories the human mind was transferred from an organic brain to a small, immortal backup computer at the base of the skull which could be removed and placed in an android body after death. It would have been something a doctor with our current technology could have found on an x-ray.) More damning is the fact that some heavy duty signal would need to broadcast those memories to a distant Cylon Resurrection Hub. Such a signal might have been detected and jammed, but such things were never considerations by anyone on Galactica, including Baltar the scientist. This is no doubt because the writers didn't understand that aspect of uploading, that it relies on physical substrates you can guess at without knowing exactly how to build them.

In order to have an undetectable stealth technology that is able record Cylon memories stored in a brain that the best people on Galactica can't tell from a human brain and then broadcast them across vast distances in space you must necessarily imply god-like technological abilities the existence of which would necessarily challenge many religious assumptions. (But in the Galactica universe no such conflict is ever implied and both their religions and technologies are so vaguely described that you couldn't tell if such a conflict would arise.) So god-like and astonishing are the implications the Galactica writers failed to grasp about such technology that many SF writers make these transhumanist technologies part of future religions. (For example, in the "Requiem for Homo Sapiens" novels by David Zindell there is a church that calls it soul-preservation technology.)

“It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God, but to create him.”
-- Arthur C. Clarke

Consider some other implications of such a technology, like the computer processing power that's implied. Today there is a Project Blue Brain that is struggling to create a biologically accurate, functional model of only part of a mouse's brain, a single neocortical column, using the most advanced supercomputers we now have. And Cylons can not only get all that kind of information from a brain and transfer it across space and into a body that a doctor (Cottle) and a scientist (Baltar) cannot tell from human.

When you imply technology that god-like you can't easily slip in actual gods because there would be no way to tell the gods from the Cylons except by whatever intentions and motives you can detect in their actions. And then you can only deduce those motivations, not whether the abilities are supernatural or technological. To quote science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke:

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” -- Arthur C. Clarke

That basic principle was missed by the writers of Galactica and in the end it was that basic ignorance that undermined the entire series as far as plot and theme go. One implication of understanding the brain at a level where one could transfer memories and make artificial Cylon brains in a goo tub is that such a level of understanding of what a brain is and how it works should make it child's play to create visions and mystical experiences.

When you go up against that kind of technology the last thing you should trust is vague visions and mystical experiences where the motives for the vision are unclear. Indeed, Baltar did not trust his head-6 early on and her motives were indeed suspicious. Keep in mind it was an "angel of God" who told Baltar not to tell Adama about Boomer being a Cylon and you'll begin to see the problem. But she also told him where to attack a Cylon base to destroy it. Baltar wound up merely not fighting her and not so much actually trusting her. She was giving him useful information which he used selfishly and he couldn't really fight her, just ignore her when he didn't like what she had to say. She could only manipulate him with that information it seemed, so it would always be information that seemingly served Baltar's own ends.

Neither Baltar nor I ever guessed her motives and we still can't. The Galactica God's "beyond good and evil" schemes remain as mysterious as ever even in the end. That brings up the next level of failure, the use of "God" as mere cheat to get around explaining the mysteries one has created. Again I saw it coming in my post, "The poo-barge mutiny begins." I'll quote myself:

... the hand of the gods made itself known in this episode and it was a bad thing because we all know who the real gods of the Galactica universe are, they are Ron Moore and his writers. That's the way fictional universes are, they all have gods and those gods are the writers who risk spoiling the illusion they want to create when they inject such plot driving miracles into their stories. And Starbuck's seemingly all too correct faith in Leoben's claims are just such an intrusive miracle.

There's a reason that even writers who preach their religious beliefs at writers conferences have shied away from the use of supernatural events and prefer psychological pain to demonic affliction, and dark nights of the soul to the voice of God echoing out of the whirlwind. They write about what they know. And they know they themselves and most other people don't really experience the voice of God like it happened in the Bible. They know that for every tear drop of wisdom to be found in religion there is a vast ocean of stupidity and insanity behind it. In our world people don't seem to come back from the dead like Starbuck and our miracle workers can often be caught using simple magician's tricks. Even Mother Teresa, a potential Catholic saint, was running on only a few weird experiences she had early in her life where she literally heard God’s voice directing her to go to in India and help the poor. However, as soon as she did start her mission, God's silence began and she spent the rest of her life feeling abandoned by God. Was it all just a couple potent brain farts that changed her life?

God in Evelyn Waugh or Graham Greene is more often a significant absence than a presence. Actual encounters with the divine or the demonic in literature, such is in Philip K. Dick's last books, are usually the product of a writer who has actually become subject to what they think are paranormal visitations. And Dick had been abusing amphetamine for years before that.

There's just something incredibly arrogant (not necessarily a bad thing) about making God a character in your story because the real gods in these fictional universes are the writers (or in television, perhaps its the producers). You can pull it off if God himself is actually a character and you have something to say about the nature of godhood, but not if that God remains utterly mysterious and just advances the plot when convenient for the writers. Starbuck's trust in Leoben may yet be explained by whatever force brought her back, but right now it doesn't feel like it.

In the end the use of God was a big cheat on the mysteries they set up. God's motives and abilities remained utterly mysterious and did nothing but advance the plot when convenient for the writers. The meaning of the Opera house vision was merely that it was a vision hinting vaguely and opaquely at the future. Baltar is thus inspired to give the worst speech ever given on Galactica. Here's Baltar's speech, copied from some other blog, it sounds right:

Baltar: I may be mad, but that doesn't mean that I'm not right. Because there's another force at work here; there always has been. It's undeniable. We've all experienced it. Ever one in this room has witnessed events that they can't fathom, let alone explain away by rational means. Puzzles deciphered in prophecy. Dreams given to a chosen few. Our loved ones, dead, risen. Whether we want to call that God or gods or some sublime inspiration or a divine force we can't know or understand, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. It's here. It exists. And our two destinies are entwined in its force.

Cavil: If that's true, and that's a big if, how do I know that this force has our best interests in mind? How do you know that God is on your side, doctor?

Baltar: I don't. God's not on any one side. God's a force of nature, beyond good and evil. Good and evil, we created those. Want to break the cycle? Break the cycle of birth, death, rebirth, destruction, escape, death. Well, that's in our hands, and our hands only. It requires a leap of faith. It requires that we live in hope, not fear.

There's a lot I object to in that short speech, more than I'll go into right now. But let's take that claim that they have all "witnessed events that they can’t fathom, let alone explain away by rational means." That, my dear readers, is nothing but what Professor Neil DeGrasse Tyson would call "a philosophy of ignorance":



Well, yea, the viewers did experience things they supposedly could not explain away by rational means (not necessarily characters like Cavil) because the writers, the real gods of the Galactica universe, set it up that way. I feared exactly this in my last Galactica post, Battlestar Galactica: "Daybreak" - Part 1, and I'll quote myself again:

... but worse, maybe we won't get an answer for how it is Starbuck got resurrected in a new body and viper because some writer thinks that sometimes incredible things happen for no good reason. (That omission I won't forgive them for. How Starbuck came back demands an explanation.)

That is essentially what Baltar's "let alone explain away by rational means" says to us, that sometimes incredible things happen for no good reason. So shove the reasons off on some inscrutable God and claim that you have an explanation when all you really have is merely a philosophy of ignorance. This is only partly about being an atheist. I am not always turned off by the supernatural or spirituality in fiction, but this ending was a cheat, a way to explain away things they really had no explanation for. The whole point of setting up mysteries is to have rational explanations of some sort for them in the end, otherwise no one is ever going to trust your mystery set-ups again.

The problem is, I can still imagine rational explanations in the context of transhuman technologies. Baltar's God could still be a Cylon mainframe that didn't like Cavil's plan. So Baltar's claim is false, the mysteries are not beyond potential rational explanations. Granted that is only speculative, but that's how critical thinking about such mysteries begins. And what else is there beyond reason and critical thinking when it comes to dealing with such mysterious events? Without reason and critical thinking to lead you then one has nothing but visions or if not that people who claim to have visions to lead one. Just keep in mind what kind of people in our world actually do claim to be guided by visions, mysticism and the voice of God and you'll see the problem. They include people like Pat Robertson, Sherri Shepherd, Marshall Applewhite, David Koresh, Jim Jones and other leaders of a thousand other doomsday cults.

And when Cavil asked how could he know this force had our best interests in mind? How do you know that God is on your side? Well, Cavil, of course, like me, doesn't know that. He wasn't given any visions that led him. So, where does Cavil fit into God's plan? Well, Cavil, you're the evil villain who gets blamed for wiping out the human race in spite of other Cylons, like Caprica-6, playing a part and the real God of the Galactica universe is Ronald D. Moore, so you're just going to kill yourself for no good reason. You're like Pharaoh in the Moses story (you know that other work of really bad science fiction, the Bible) and you don't even have the free-will it takes to use common sense. In the Moses story Pharaoh had his heart hardened by God.

But don't feel too slighted Cavil, God's plan also involved nuking several billion innocent humans out of existence (and you were okay with that). Was that god's plan? If so, that God seems like a monster and the real villain in the show.

So, maybe the writers are setting up another story that will correct these errors? Not likely. Ron Moore talked about his writing process on his last pod-cast, about how he trusted his instincts and was really proud of how he handled Baltar and religion. Yet it is exactly those elements of the show that I thought were just awful and that reflected the full failure of what was wrong with how this show ended. Ron was proud of how the Opera house visions worked out and then, what they led too, Baltar's speech about "God." Proud of the fact that he didn't do any real critical thinking or research.

With that attitude on Moore's part, don't expect things to improve on "The Plan" or on "Caprica" in those terms.

I've hardly scratched the surface of what was wrong with the ending, but this would go on too long if I talked about how bad an idea it was to ditch the ships and go all Luddite, or how like most Trek villains, the Cylons may have been set up to look impossible to defeat, but they were really paper tigers with glass jaws. None of that will matter to Ron Moore now that his series has spawned two new spin-offs. I may give them a shot, but I won't expect much.

How the religious mindfuck really works

In a reader comment (here) that I've already "ranted" on (here) Marian Paroo wrote: "If you don't believe-you don't believe." That's something else that's not right in the way Marian understands beliefs. It doesn't reflect the way the human brain really works. A belief is not something that gets turned on or off. Not believing only means you assign a low probability to basic religious claims. Our brains, in most of our beliefs, work more like a Bayesian belief network than a light switch.

In fact, our brains most probably do incorporate all sorts of Bayesian network-like arrangements of neurons. So, this is potentially more than a metaphor, it's a tool in artificial intelligence research.

Ignorant Belief Networks are one class of Bayesian Belief Networks that are able to reason on the basis of incomplete probabilistic information and to incrementally refine the precision of the inferred probabilities as more information is accumulated. This is what we are doing when we read and study atheistic books as well as Christian apologetics.

Instead of just acting on certain beliefs we really act on all the possibilities we can imagine when we don't have enough certainty, including conflicting improbable beliefs. It works as a kind of fail-safe and in extreme circumstances where no other action seems possible we will resort to the most improbable actions. For example, Steve McQueen, an actor who came across on screen as an intelligent, coolly rational and skeptical man, but who towards the end of his life, after being diagnosed with cancer, became a desperate and perhaps gullible man.

He had mesothelioma, an incurable cancer of the lining of the lungs and he apparently fell victim to some questionable medical practices. The medical profession derided him as a victim of fraud and friends warned him. However, with such a gloomy prognosis any skepticism McQueen may have had fell away and he became a desperate man willing to try anything because he saw no other options. What would you do in his situation? Hope trumps skepticism if there is no other price to pay.

As another more positive example, a fairly agnostic person may avoid doing a horrendous crime when the temptation is weak just because they imagine there might be a remote possibility of punishment in the afterlife for going too far over the line. They may not believe, but they try to do good just in case it is true.

Another example, I once let my brother's young kids watch a horror movie marathon one Halloween night. Early on during the films they were cracking jokes about how improbable werewolves, demons and zombies were but by the time the films were over they were so terrified of the simplest things I could make them jump just by shouting "Boo!" I eventually found them hiding under the bed with trembling flashlights in their hands. It didn't matter how skeptical they were, the movies had loaded their imaginations with all sorts of frightening possibilities and those imagined possibilities trumped their skepticism. Loading your imagination is exactly what religious proselytizers are doing. Have you ever had one accuse you of lacking imagination? I have and I'm a professional artist working in fantasy and science fiction who relies on my imagination.

We estimate probabilities and then plug in our fears and hopes. The real weights and numbers loaded into our Bayesian nodes and variables represent our fears and hopes and the estimated probabilities of encountering what we fear and/or hope for.

Religious propositions and claims we encounter in our mostly Christian culture generally have a low probability of being true. But religions like Christianity and Islam make up for their low probability by plugging into the most extreme hopes and fears that you can imagine. Those hopes and fears alter the way you estimate probabilities and how you collect data. Your imagination can be overloaded.

Christians also propose minimal, fail-safe, low cost actions, initially. They tell you to just study your Bible and then open your heart and ask God to come into it. No big sacrifice has to be made to get you started. The question you might be asking is why does this open your heart approach work on anybody if there is no god to come into your heart? I think it's a kind of hypnosis that works on an overloaded imagination, but I'll pick up on that in later essays.

There is never absolute certainty that can be had in regard to most religious questions. All that we atheists can do is argue against the probability of various claims about gods and religion. We can't really change the numbers in the fear and hope nodes. This is why atheism is something of an intellectual achievement and why it takes a bit of mental work. It's one reason why atheists tend to be scientifically informed and why fundamentalist Christians work against the accumulating scientific evidence of our modern age, denying evolution and neuroscience. You have to get to the point where you are satisfied that the probabilities are sufficiently low that you are as minimally effected by the hopes and fears religious proselytizers try to manipulate you with even if they don't understand what they are doing.

But I wrote about this over a decade ago and to end this post I'm going to quote a huge chunk of my over a decade old essay, HOPE IS THE BAIT:

The toxic hope offered by any kind of mysticism, be it Christian or New Age, is more than just the conquest of death, it's the desire for a supernatural realm beyond this comparatively dull and mundane reality. We all seem to have a profound yearning, a hope, for a magic method that will free us from realities that will not obey our wishes, from loneliness, from sorrow, from failure, from fears of the unknown, and from death itself, from our pain, and from our fragile human bodies that will rot in the earth after our dreaming souls have flown the coup. Because of our egocentricity we cannot accept the idea of death easily. We want to be free of nature's seemingly cruel dictates. It has been called the transcendental temptation, the siren call of mysticism, an escape from reality, and the theological seduction. It is a supernatural promise and it will not be kept.

Some Christians don't exactly know what kind of promise it is they have faith in, but they are sure it is better than rational despair. Yes, it would be nice if we could live forever in some paradise. It would be nice if there were a God watching over us and protecting us. But merely wanting and believing in these things is not enough to make them real. Hope and expectation is the bait that draws the seeker in, but the seeker is soon introduced to the fear of eternal damnation. What goes into the Bible reader's imagination, those highly emotional and secretly irrational processes within the subconscious, may just be objectively collected there at first as he tries to determine for himself what the truth is. The Bible reader tries to learn, but secretly wants to dream of a supernatural realm where his deepest desires might be fulfilled, and also where his darkest fears might come true. Fantasy may be a natural and healthy way to explore our desires and fears, and so discover their nature, and then develop realistic plans for getting what it is we desire and avoiding what we fear, but Christian fantasy is almost totally detached from any contact with reality. The desires and fears generated by the biblical texts are ambiguous, extreme, and unrealistic. The Bible, and especially New Testament, is bewildering, difficult, obscure, and confusing. The Bible creates an unhealthy uneasiness; it stimulates fear and hope with both subtle and direct threats and promises. The New Testament aims to turn the truth seeker inward and work on his subconscious mind. A seed is planted within the prospects subconscious. Any objective determination about the truth or falsity of Biblical claims is difficult for those who do not understand the psychology.

The Christian finds that he is dependent on priestly authority in order to understand his faith. The material that goes in to the mind, Biblical stories, rituals, impressive church structures, the herd instinct, mass media support, and peer pressure can be analyzed and so tell us something about this psychology and how the final effect is produced, and even something of the purposes that lay behind its design.

Supernatural fantasies are generated when the Bible reader speculates on the meaning of the text. And these fantasies are given implicit support by a media that tells us our politicians, presidents, generals, and celebrities are mostly Christian; a media that rarely contradicts the Christian assumptions of our culture. As the Bible reader reads of miracles, the promise of life everlasting, supernatural powers, angels, transcendent realms, and magical healings his desire and fantasy, his fears and hopes, will motivate, develop, and grow as he continues his studies. (One of the darkest aspects of religion's appeal to hope is its appeal to the desperate. To the terminally ill who seek to be healed.) Talk to any Christian and you'll find out that they've created a very personal vision, a private reality map that is uniquely their own. While different Christian groups with different labels, such as Pentecostal, Fundamentalist, Charismatic, or Evangelical will advocate different interpretations of this supernatural fantasy each individual creates
his own particular vision out of the mix of possibilities.

For some people, once the Biblical seed of unreal hope and uncertain fear has been sown, a process of desire, expectation, and imagination begins in the hidden workings of the unconscious mind, in a secret world of mystical ideas, a world of ignorance and enormous possibility. The Bible reader begins to develop a murky image of his supernatural expectations and he seeks to clarify that image with further study. Instead of having his murky ideas clarified he is instead drawn further and further in to the trap. In time those things merely imagined, but still either feared or desired, may become part of our potential believer's reality map. The ideas are no longer just possibilities and speculations he entertains in his mind but are now 'real' to him. But 'real' only in the sense that they are emotionally loaded concepts that influence his desire and aversion behavior. The believer can no longer imagine, comfortably, a world view without his faith, his illusions. The emotion attached to these religious ideas is stronger than the emotion attached to the concepts and ideas in a more rational mind. While I have little experience with it, there seems to be a drug like emotional kick of joyous expectation associated with this process. At least this is what many Christians seem to claim when they talk about being 'born again.'

None of us use logic and reason alone to create our theories and reality maps, or even to solve problems. The ideas seem to just come to us, popping into our heads, or picked up out of books we've sought out, or welling up out of some dark and mysterious depth within our minds. Sometimes when this happens we want to scream 'Eureka!' because we have solved an important problem, as did Archimedes when he discovered a way to determine the purity of gold. We use logic later, to check the work and put it in presentable order after the new ideas and insights have been attained. This does not invalidate the use of reason and logic as tools for understanding our world because the insights and ideas must survive the checking and ordering process which makes them valid, at the very least, if not demonstratably true.

A gestation process seems to be involved in genuine conversion. New insights, beliefs, concepts, and perspectives emerge days, weeks, perhaps even years after exposure to the information. The fuel for the Christian transformation is obviously those deep seated hopes and fears that biblical psychotechnology exploits. The computer programmer's jargon of "garbage in, garbage out" applies to the human mind as well. Cram your head full of scientific data about a problem that needs to be solved and you'll arrive at a technological solution to the problem. Cram your head full of Biblical mysticism and you'll find yourself with superstitious fears of damnation and a desperate quest for salvation. It's the checking and ordering process that is often not carried out when it comes to religion, or if it is, it's carried out improperly. In most cases, it's not even possible to carry out this checking process. Much of the information given to us by our trusted authority figures, our priests and politicians, goes unchecked, for checking is a hard and time consuming process. It's a lot harder to think for oneself than it is to just trust our culture's properly accredited experts, be they priests, politicians, or scientists. The Bible discourages this checking process and asks for faith, and that's one good clue to its false nature.