Raistlin Majare 1992 wrote...
The Reapers are not fully Synthetic, they are a hybrid of Organic and Synthetic material and for all we know taht extends down to their very core. That alone is an indication that comparing Geth to Reapers is not accurate.
Actually, what is the fundamental difference between an organic and a synthetic intelligence anyway? Why must they be in conflict? Because as far as I can tell, the series has never actually answered that question, just danced around it. It handed out the labels without ever providing concise definitions. The distinction in hardware is insufficient. For instance, consider an artificial intelligence based off of an organic template. Will that mind think like an organic or like a synthetic? What exactly is
Christopher Huerta? Or possibly even Shepard? Therefore the crux of the difference can't be the hardware the intelligence runs on, but the different models of the intelligences themselves.
The obvious place to start would be origin. Organics weren't created. Organic models of intelligence are the lucky product of millions of generations of natural selection. Synthetics intelligences on the other hand are fashioned from the ground up due to the work of other intelligences. The best suggestion I can come up for what this means doesn't really draw upon any lore from the series itself, just a personal hypothesis.
The difference between the human brain and a desktop computer is that the latter is a
truth engine, while the former is a
survival engine. Your brain is there to keep you alive, not to be correct all the time, and as such
efficiency and
speed take precedence over
reliability or
objectivity, whereas computers are the opposite. This is why your visual cortex can be confused by optical illusions, why you can be swayed by ethos and pathos in addition to logos, and how magicians can still pull off sleights of hand even when you're actively trying to outsmart the magician. Like it or not your brain, marvelous piece of work that it is, is a glitchy, exploitable mess that makes Windows ME look like genius programming. This is because natural selection selects for the most efficient solutions available to adapting conditions, not the most ideal possible. This is why computers are so useful for us. Limited as they are, they can do certain jobs
more reliably than we ever could. A human could theoretically do the same work, but they'd do it much slower and be far and beyond more prone to error.
So a synthetic intelligence, if it was developed from truth-engine principles, would be free from the pains of the ubiquitous 'human error'. Except this doesn't mean it's objectively better. Again, natural selection
selected fast-and-loose intelligence over methodical-and-reliable in our own evolution. The simple fact is that when it comes to the two primary behaviors of intelligence, decision making and learning, being fast and mostly accurate will statistically prove more successful than always accurate but slow. A mind running on guidelines can decide, learn, and adapt faster than one based on rigid principles.
I think this is actually sorta reflected in ME lore. Consider the geth station in ME2. Legion, who's thought processes ran much faster than any human's, was still paralyzed by indecision trying to reach a consensus over what to do with the heretics whereas we and our Shepards could come to a conclusion mere minutes after being presented the problem. I doubt any of you actually took the time to observe, interpret, and forecast every variable factoring in to that decision. No, you used guidelines you heuristically developed, flawed or incomplete though they may be. In the grand scheme of things, it's okay to be wrong some of the time. Hell, EDI even mentioned that the possibility of being wrong can introduce an unforecastable element of chaos which can be strategically advantageous.
Neither solution is truly ideal then as a possible model for intelligence. The ideal one would, you guessed it, be something with the strengths of both, the weaknesses of neither. Infallible yet speedy. What this could be exactly, I don't know. But the thought has occurred to me that the reapers are an attempt to closely approximate this goal. I forget the exact name of the theory in question but it's an established theory that a group of well-informed minds will statistically prove more correct in decision making or data analysis than they could individually, since each individual can communicate and correct the mistakes of others. So the reapers emulate several billion organic-derived thought models working in tandem, with an absolutely massive and advanced technological infrastructure to let them operate fast and reliable enough.
So this may be the reason the reapers always held themselves to be so mighty, infallible, inevitable and all that. Yet, we know that the reapers are certifiably evil and insane. How to reconcile this? Well, remember that if it's in possession of incorrect or incomplete data, even the perfect mind will draw incorrect conclusions. If it ever loses sight of its own failings, however small or insignificant they are at first, they can grow to prove that mind's undoing. And an a**hole is an a**hole, intelligence does not correlate with benevolence. Not to mention that the idea of getting several minds to work together to think better than they could individually relies on those minds being sufficiently diverse.
If they share common problems among them, if they are insufficiently well-informed, or if they are standardized on fundamental levels, the strategy would fall apart completely.
I’ve no idea why organic and synthetics should inevitably come into conflict however. They’re alien to each other, yes. They think differently and desire different things, yes. If human history is anything to go by, conflict
will arise at some point for these reasons but total wipeout of one or both sides is not guaranteed. Hell it’s not even likely. It seems to me more likely that such different sides would lay down arms and cooperate if only to study each other in order to better understand and improve themselves. It’s not as diversity hasn’t actually benefitted the world in the long run. The Catalyst says the synthetic apocalypse threatens the galaxy and yet there’s no reason to actually believe this is the case. Bah.
Anyway this is just me throwing speculation at the wall to find out what sticks. What do you guys think about this?
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Now THAT is interesting. BioWare must have added that for a reason. 
Let's see who's winning, eh.
