Misc history of future notes
Machine’s Regret. The ability to regret a mistake is more wide spread in the animal kingdom than most realize. To be clear, I’m not talking about the mere ability to recognize that one has made a mistake. I’m talking about the set of psychological and neurological events that follow one’s recognition not just that they made a mistake but rather more importantly the contemplation of what might have been if the mistake had not been made. Regret is the recognition that you made a mistake and if you had done something differently things would have gone better. Experiments on lab animals as early as 200 years before the first colonial cylon war demonstrated not just “looking back” behavior — behavior in which an animal physically looks back in the direction of a bad decision they made ( when they realize that what they thought was going to happen as a result of there decision turned out to not be true ) — animals don’t look back when they are disappointed, just when regretful — second, they are more willing to accept a less than optimal deal immediately following regret — they are more likely to “settle” — third, they don’t take their time eating and grooming following regret, they rush their eating and quickly move on to their next activity.
These results are quite interesting insights into human and cylon behavior, but just as interesting is the lack of popular acknowledgement of the implications, which it doesn’t take a genius to see, among both human and cylon populations. So much for the power of self reflection in man and machine! As an evolved characteristic of our decision making algorithm, the the behavioral corollaries of regret must have maximized human chances for survival in some past environment — perhaps those with a disposition to simply move on and take action, even less than optimal action would survive where those who continued to look for a better deal simply didn’t make it.
So reflexes can be overcome, albeit in some cases quite difficultly, overcome nonetheless. Humans that identify this reflex and work to successfully overcome it may indeed succumb to the very loses are biology normally prevents, but in some cases this rewriting of or reflexes can have powerful benefits, especially when one has access to knowing more about the future than previous generations. Ok, so it’s interesting that humans didn’t take more advantage of that — but what is more interesting is that cylons had the reflex to begin with, having not shared the same evolutionary history as humans.
13th Tribe on Earth (possible history to examine)
It takes time to travel back in time. The 13th tribe took several generations to reach Earth’s distant past. When the rag tag colonial fleet followed them, they traveled in present, to the correct physical location in space, but not in time. The destruction they saw and judged to have happened centuries ago, was actually caused “relatively” more recently when contemporary cylons followed Kara Thrace’s viper back in time through the algae planet’s planetary worm hole ??? The cylons that discovered Earth did not know it was earth and did not know that the people there were human-cylon hybrids, and so wiped them out in a swift nuclear attack.