The Philosophy of Westworld – Wisecrack Edition

Hi Wisecrack, Jared here. Today we're talking about television's most ambitious attempt to superimpose intense philosophical dialogue onto extended frontal nudity: Westworld. Westworld has a special place in my heart because overthinking a piece of art is a pastime that both the Man in Black and I share. "I think there is a deeper meaning hidden in all that something that the person who created it wanted to express, something true." Oh, and in case you didn't predict all the plot twists in the second episode, or couldn't figure out that "the

philosophy

of" probably means we're talking about the main plot points: there are spoilers ahead.

Westworld takes place in the theme park of the same name, where for the low cost of forty thousand dollars a day, humans can experience a real-life open-world game a la Red Dead Redemption. And just like open world games, most players ignore the side quests and go straight to sex and murder. The most obvious questions that arise in West World are: are the hosts really aware? Do they deserve rights? What separates man and machine? And while those are great questions, we won't answer them today. "Bullsh*t" But stay until the end and we'll show you a video that does it.

Instead, we'll see how Westworld draws on one of humanity's oldest stories to explore how free will shapes our understanding of good and evil. Welcome to this Wisecrack

edition

on the

philosophy

of Westworld. But first, a quick recap: There are a few threads in Westworld that we'll talk about. First, there's William, who ventures to the park with his brother-in-law and falls in love with android/host Dolores. Then there's the Man in Black, who spends his time torturing and murdering in search of a mysterious "labyrinth" laid out by one of the park's now-deceased founders. Then there's Maeve, the seductive brothel boss who discovers she's a hostess living in a theme park.

And finally, there's Ford, the park's creator and tortured artist who spends his time fending off encroachments from his corporate overlords and planning a robotic revolution. To say that Westworld is a show about man playing God is an understatement. Religious imagery is everywhere, and while all the talk about God is pretty obvious, "you can't play God without being familiar with the devil," the writers also draw some pretty deliberate parallels with the biblical story of the Genesis. It is through Genesis that Westworld is able to explore how free will creates the possibility of ethics. Invoking God's motto of “let there be light,” Ford notes: The hosts live like Adam and Eve in paradise: they exist in perfect bliss, unashamed of their nakedness, and they hear the voice of God.

Of course, don't take my word for it, the show tells us straight: In Westworld, a bunch of whispers take the hosts on a journey toward self-knowledge: "These violent pleasures have violent ends." which resembles Eve's temptation by Satan, where the serpent's whisper convinces her to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge, thus granting her and Adam their own self-knowledge and thus they have become like God . Dolores, in addition to serving as a temptress for Maeve, also represents Satan's temptation toward self-knowledge. It is revealed that Teddy and Wyatt's flashbacks were altered: that it was actually Dolores who massacred the hosts after they dumped Wyatt's show on her.

Dolores, as Wyatt: a harbinger of the host's sensitivity. The head of Armistice's snake tattoo represents Wyatt, even says about him: invoking another guy with many names. After Eve's transgression, God punished humanity with suffering and mortality. Likewise, Ford maintains the original state of the hosts, in perfect bliss, with the ability to remove pain and suffering. "You don't need to suffer Maeve, I'll take it away from you." All of this ends with consciousness, or with the search for the labyrinth, and Dolores laments that she has only caused him pain. "You told me to follow the maze, all I found is pain." If anything, Westworld is like the Genesis story on a loop.

Dolores, Bernard, Maeve and others become self-aware, lose their blissful ignorance, only to be pushed back by Ford. So Westworld vaguely resembles the biblical creation story. So what? Well, in doing so, the show addresses some of the same questions about Adam and Eve's fall from grace that scholars and theologians have argued about for millennia. Questions like: What do elections mean if they are coerced or destined? Can we ever act ethically if this is the case? Many, logically, read the Genesis story and think that an explanation places God in a position similar to that of Arnold or Ford.

God wants his children to love him, but he knows that this love is meaningless unless they have the power to choose. God, then, knows that only true love comes from a being capable of not loving Him. Westworld offers us three parallels. First, Bernard questions why Ford allowed him to explore his own memories, which Ford reflects on. Maeve, who gains godlike powers, comes to the same conclusion when she tells Hector. And finally, if Arnold, like Bernard, lost his son, perhaps his quest to bring sensitivity to the hosts is a way to replace the authentic love he has since lost.

Love and obedience, if forced, are meaningless, and this logic, as we will see, becomes even more central to the show's view of good and evil. This tension between coercion and choice by the gods of Westworld also plays out between predestination and free will, two predominant themes in the show. Predestination is the idea that God, being omniscient and all-powerful, has laid the foundation for all events, past, present, and future. An omniscient and omnipotent being understands the cause and effects of all things. As a result, he has a cosmic, eternal list of naughty and nice, and he knows who will burn in hellfire since the beginning of time.

He knows that the creation of Adam and Eve will end with his banishment from paradise, that his offspring will do a lot of shitty things in his name, and that giving man dominion over nature will culminate in stuffed pizza: the greatest achievement of Western civilization. Theologians hotly debated predestination because it poses the same dilemma we faced in Adam and Eve. Can free will exist in a world where God is omniscient and all-powerful? What does it mean to live ethically when those decisions were made in advance by the person who made them? As God, Ford is omniscient and all-powerful in Westworld, and has created the hosts' seemingly human behavior through a series of predestined loops that interact with other hosts and guests in a predictable and recognizable manner.

Hector will steal an empty safe, "It's the end they gave you." Clementine will seduce the guests. "You don't have much bark." and Dolores will witness the death of her father. Or, as Dolores aptly points out in the first episode: his crimes or triumphs are no more or less significant, good or bad, than a clock striking midnight. It is this lack of choice, this predestination, that helps humans justify their misdeeds in the park: they claim that the hosts lack free will and make the leap that they therefore also lack conscience. "You never understand that the game is rigged, you are here to be the loser." Whether this is true or not is up for debate, but for the characters, free will and consciousness are intertwined.

If the fact that hosts have predetermined loops defines them as automatons, free will anchors their claim to consciousness. "I believe that when I find out who I am, I will be free." Maeve, affirming his own free will, proclaims: Although this logic is flawed, the ability to choose to do “good” or “evil” separates man from machine. Westworld even goes so far as to suggest that the hosts aren't the only ones who lack free will. As Ford points out: What would this mean, then, for our own human ethics? Let's also not forget that just as hosts long for freedom, so do guests.

Here Westworld suggests a kind of unfreedom that exists outside the park in our own lives. In a world where our lives are defined by social pressure to get a job and a house with a white picket fence, where marriages are often professional posturing, "Marrying my sister, who by the way, you seem to have forgotten for complete." Ford suggests that we have not become more free than the hosts. We are reminded that people come to Westworld to be free, to see who they really are. But this is also a lie, a lie that better explains how William came to be the man in black.

Just as freedom ceases to make sense in a predestined world, where everyone's path has been marked by a divine creator, it also ceases to make sense in the park. Westworld is not necessarily unethical, it is completely unethical. The show indicates this in some pretty interesting ways. As Hector's gang slaughters hordes of people in Sweetwater, we hear an instrumental rendition of the Rolling Stones' decidedly grim song “Paint it Black.” But the instrumentals rob the song of its dark tone and make it frivolous, even silly, just as Hector's murderous foray has no significant consequences. Just as Adam and Eve could only judge good and evil after eating the fruit of knowledge, William can only do good or evil when Westworld becomes, in his words, “real.” We could simply believe that William is an obsessive-compulsive completist looking to find the final Easter egg in the Westworld game, but that wouldn't give the Man in Black the credit he deserves.

He might even go so far as to suggest that the Man in Black is not evil and that he is actually the only guest in Westworld who seeks the conditions for ethics, the ability to do good or evil. Good and evil play a strong visual and thematic role in the show. When William first enters the park, he can choose between black and white hats. His counterpart Logan dresses in a black suit to represent that he has opted for the family version of the park game. Despite this, good and evil don't really exist in the park if the hosts are pure unfeeling, choiceless automatons.

For the guests, doing right or wrong is of no importance in a world where nothing is at stake. "Go find that photographer. I want to take a picture of this." As Logan reminds us: This goes for hosts, too. Whether they sin, love, or resort to cannibalism, it is just a matter of programming. They are no different from the greyhound of Ford's childhood that snapped a rabbit's neck. It is his realization that Westworld is a sham that leads William down his dark path. Despite all of his good deeds, when he sees Dolores return to her original programming, William is faced with the fact that nothing he did mattered;

Despite his white hat approach and his compassion towards Dolores, he couldn't do good, all of it. It was simply a game. When he murders Maeve and her daughter, he aptly says: In addition to literally wondering if he could play Black Hat, he is also faced with the reminder that he is absolutely incapable of being evil when nothing is at stake, just as Dolores reminded him he was. he incapable of being "good." But the spark of conscience in Maeve sets him on his own path, the path to the truth, the path that will allow real good and evil to exist in Westworld.

For William, the labyrinth, which represents the hosts' consciousness, is like a ray of authenticity in this false world. Unable to find authenticity in the real world, for whatever reason, William searches for it in Westworld. "I want to know what it all means." Young William laments to Dolores about having been a suitor all his life: "I've been pretending my whole life." acting out to do things just so they can fit in, giving up their own authentic choices. In contrast to this rant to Lawrence, we learn that the falsehood of Westworld that bothers William is probably also the falsehood of the real world.

This lack of real choice, or consequences, precludes the possibility of doing good or evil. William's true goal in all of this is that his actions have consequences. This is all foreshadowed in the first episode, when he tells Dolores, "I didn't pay all this money because I wanted it easy, I want you to fight." Not to put on fighting airs, but to hurt him. In the season finale, he is visibly disappointed when Dolores does not shoot him, and only in the final scenes, when the host army shoots him, does he finally seem happy. What William finally achieved is the condition for ethics.

We were previously told: But we could say something about being ethical: good means nothing unless we are capable of being bad. Which brings us to Westworld's next theme: suffering. According to Arnold, suffering is fundamental in the development of consciousness and the understanding that the world is not what one wanted it to be. "It was Arnold's key idea. What led to thehosts to their awakening: suffering." So why is suffering so important to consciousness in Westworld? Suffering creates the stakes in Westworld. If the hosts can experience pain, then the guests can be evil by torturing them or good by saving them.

Suffering allows the hosts to do good or evil to each other, it becomes a precondition of ethics. In a sense, all this choice we have been talking about is meaningless without suffering. Being aware of pain, in Westworld, is synonymous with consciousness. Even William, who seems interested in bringing consciousness to the hosts, tells Lawrence: Going back to the Genesis story, Eve's free will allowed her to violate the will of. God, but also eating from the tree of knowledge, the tree that revealed good and evil to them. In this way, the fall of man is like the origins of consciousness in the theory of bicameralism mentioned in the program and shouted in. the title of the final episode. "The bicameral mind." When we stop listening to the voices in our heads and start judging things for ourselves, we become truly conscious.

And with that awareness he brings the consequences that God brought to Adam and Eve: mortality, suffering and expulsion from paradise. As the season concludes, we learn some important things. First, "The Labyrinth" was Arnold's test of conscience for the hosts, one that Dolores passed with flying colors. Second, after Arnold realizes that he cannot prevent the park from opening and that he cannot prevent his sentient creations from suffering unspeakable torture, he uploads the code of a murderous character from "Wyatt " in Dolores. We learn that this story and Arnold's death are the flashbacks we've been seeing of Teddy and Wyatt.

Finally, Ford reminds Dolores that she killed Arnold, hands her a gun, and then goes to reveal her new "story." All this leaves us with one last question. In true show style, the Season 1 finale ends with a rerun. Dolores killing Ford is almost identical to her killing Arnold, but with this repetition the difference also emerges. Arnold, who wanted the hosts to love him by his own choice, programmed Dolores to kill him in his final resignation. Ford, however, in his desire to bring consciousness and freedom to the hosts, lays the groundwork for his own murder in a different way.

Ford's murder reverses the story of Adam and Eve. God allowed Adam and Eve to disobey his will so that their love would be meaningful. Ford allowed Dolores to choose to kill him so that his violence would make sense. Or, in his own words: Westworld, then, ends original sin. Unable to harm the guests, the point at which the hosts have lost their state of happiness and innocence is when they can harm the guests. As much as we can write about Westworld's unfree and unethical condition, the show also asks us to look at our own lives. If Ford is right and we live in our own pre-programmed cycles, pretending to enjoy doing what others tell us, what does that say about the meaning of our own lives?

If our decisions are not really ours, what actions do we take to get out of this? Now that we've covered free will and all this biblical jazz, you're probably dying to know: do robots deserve rights? Click HERE to watch our friends at In A Nutshell answer that question and be sure to subscribe to their channel while you're there. In a Nutshell explores incredibly thought-provoking questions with some of the most beautiful animation around. So watch his Robot Rights video now and subscribe.