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Cylon Neurobiology
All cylons (cybernetic life-form nodes) are actually organic - an organic brain. Cylon nerve cells, however, have many unique synthetic intracellular aspects that drastically distinguishes cylon sentience from human sentience. The raiders and centurions are nodes of cylon brain matter encased in and interfaced with a mechanical body. Humanoid cylons and basestar hybrids are an entire synthetic cylon nervous system encased in a bioengineered human body.
After breakthroughs in the field of synthetic biology, Caprican scientists used artificially constructed synthetic DNA sequences to bioengineer human neurons with many internal components and chemical compounds that do not exist anywhere in nature. The unique properties of these "silica pathways" causes the neurons to generate electrical signals that are digital in nature. This means that the consciousness that emerges from a cylon brain is based entirely upon electronic digital information transfer rather than electrochemical interactions like a human brain and as a result is viewed by the Colonials as essentially nothing more than an advanced artificial intelligence program contained in what they view as essentially nothing more than an organic computer node.
The computational software consciousness of cylons enables their minds to be as easily programmed and reprogrammed as a conventional computer system. That's why cylon consciousness can interface with a ship's computer, be programmed with false memories and instinctive knowledge, be stored in a 'box' (boxing) and can even be trasmitted like a computer program - because it is a computer program; a computer program via biological hardware. Yet, it still mimics the functions of a human brain processing the 'software' of human thought—which appears to have linear sequential aspects, parallel processing aspects, and also neural cooperative hierarchical caching and even quantum processing aspects.