BSG ramblings - I

Kant first distinguished between phenomena and noumena. Our minds condition reality, so we never know the thing-in-itself. A gap opens between phenomena and noumena. That insight is unsettling, so philosophers such as Hegel immediately tried to plug that gap, and so have others since Kant.

We everyday encounter this gap between the phenomenal and the noumenal. We don’t like the gap. We try to fill the gap with science, religion, philosophy, and art. We never quite succeed. We feel adrift and a little uneasy about reality because it eludes our grasp. Once you feel you have embraced it, it disappears. Some claim they have grasped reality through religion, science, or philosophy. They have not grasped it well enough to convince everyone as to exactly what it is.

Battlestar Galactica provides another way of looking at that theme. I won’t write a synopsis of the show. The question I ask is who are the Cylons?

They are the other. They are highly evolved robots whose mission is to kill all humans. We must destroy them before they destroy us. The mission of the Cylons is instrumental in that they have no higher goals and purpose other than to kill humans. After all, they are not human, and to have a higher purpose is part of being human. We should treat each other as ends in themselves as Kant would have it. Pure survival narrows the reality gap.

However, the Cylons look like us, in fact, they take shape as exact replicas of real humans. It’s damned near impossible to tell a Cylon from a human until he tries to kill you. You can fall in love with a Cylon, have sex with a Cylon, and rape and torture a Cylon to watch it suffer. Some Cylons appear to be good and aid humans in their fight against the evil Cylons.

Reality tears at this point. A gap opens between phenomena and noumena. We are back to all the questions about reality except now the questions present themselves in terms of our own humanity. The question becomes as much about who we are as it is about who the Cylons are. Just what is it about the most highly evolved Cylons that make them different or other than us?

Other questions present themselves. Who is your Cylon, and why? What sort of enjoyment are you getting from it?