Cybertronian Database

tfwiki:

This is a tricky one, and one that forces us to loosen up our thinking a bit. Because the Transformers are robots, and because the spark is a tangible concept, we expect their mechanical biology to be more explainable, but really – it’s not.

Think about a human being. It’s an endless and unanswerable philosophical debate over what the difference between the “mind” and the “soul” are, and if those things are, or are not, distinct and separate from the ideas of the “consciousness,” and exactly what relationship they have to the physical “brain.”

Well, Transformers are the same. The spark is the “lifeforce,” the animating energy that makes them actually living creatures and not just machines, which as a tangible concept is more “knowable” and “provable” than the ethereal concept of a human soul. But they also have brain modules that contain the programming that is their “mind,” called a “core consciousness” in Beast Wars that was a concept distinct from a spark, which made up who they are as a person.

And the relationship between the two is just as undefinable as it is for humans. Even in Beast Wars alone, seemingly contradicting what we were told about core consciousnesses, Optimus Primal’s disembodied spark was transferred from one body to another alone, taking his mind and all his memories with it – but that happened in the same story in which Rhinox was able to project his core consciousness – his mind, not his spark – out of his body and into the Matrix. And then later in Beast Machines, we’d see multiple sparks moved from body to body, consciousness travelling with them each time. So where does consciousness lie if both these things are possible?

Presumably, the spark is what “fills” the brain module with that personality programming upon a Transformer’s activation. But, it is just programming, and it can be overwritten – Beast Wars used shell programs, while in Energon, Megatron could do it himself, and did it to Inferno, who only escaped by destroying his physical body and having his spark – unaffected – moved to a new body.

And how connected the mind and spark are once that initial birthing is forever in question. If you can alter a mind without altering a spark, must they then be considered separate concepts? In Binaltech, for example, Wheeljack was able to “resurrect” the dead Prowl by loading the programming from his mind into a new body, and using the lifeforce of Chip Chase in place of a spark. And it’s possible to have robots who have “just” programmed minds – no sparks – who are totally indistinguishable from normal Cybertronians in all cognitive functions, appearing just as sentient and alive as anyone else (Beast Machines’ Diagnostic Drone, Afterburn from the Animated comic) – but who are just considered… not, purely because they don’t have sparks. 

So you see, sparks and brain modules co-exist with these philosophically-intriguing overlapping qualities, and exactly which truly makes a Transformer who and what they are is…. open to interpretation. When Megatron transferred his mind into Bumblebee’s, he was essentially moving programming from one piece of hardware to another. Did he remain “alive” in Bee’s brain because of Bee’s spark, providing animating force to his body? Or was it because his own spark remained alive inside his own body, his intangible “soul” transcending any kind of physical limitation, in the more abstract sense we might think of if a human character were to do the same?

These are the questions…