CHAPTER 17
What Lies at the Center of the Maze? Finding Your Self in a World Made for Suffering
J. Scott Jordan
“When you’re suffering, that’s when you’re most real.”
—The Man in Black1
“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”
—analytical psychiatrist Carl Jung2
“I’m not one,” states Bernard desperately, as he struggles with the thought of being a host. “I can’t be. My wife, my son—they’re real.”3 We feel Bernard’s suffering as he works to understand himself. Believing we are someone is a fundamental aspect of our identity.4 Imagine how confused, traumatized, and alone you would feel if you suddenly discovered your memories were fake, and every person you had ever loved didn’t exist. Now imagine how people would treat you. Research indicates the terror of not being someone is so intense, we feel disgust when we encounter a person who has truly lost their self; specifically, those diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.5 In addition, the fear of being stigmatized and dehumanized in this way can lead healthy elderly people to perform poorly on tasks involving memory.6
Clearly, being someone is important to us. But what exactly does it mean to be someone? Westworld examines this question in breathtaking depth, and it does so by presenting a torrent of belief, love, and suffering that sometimes leaves us feeling like hosts, asking ourselves who we are and what it means to be human.
Enter the Maze
Westworld’s examination of the self centers around the notion of the maze. The most literal explanation of its role occurs when Arnold explains his theory of consciousness to Dolores: “Consciousness isn’t a journey upward. It’s a journey inward, not a pyramid but a maze. Every choice could bring you closer to the center or send you spiraling to the edges, to madness.”7 According to this view, the self lies at the center of the maze, while the maze is whatever you have to do to get your self to the center.
Arnold’s take on the self and the maze is inspired in part by Julian Jaynes’s theory of the bicameral mind.8 Jaynes uses the concept to refer to a particular type of human mind he believes existed from roughly 10,000 to 1000 BCE when humans had made the move from existing as hunter-gatherers to establishing flourishing agricultural societies.
The other voice in my head. Jaynes argues that during this time, humans experienced their thoughts as voices coming from the gods. While this idea may seem strange, pay attention for a moment to the thoughts you are having as you read this passage. You might be saying to yourself, “Wow, did they really just ask me to pay attention to my own thoughts?” Whatever you said to yourself, you know it was your voice. It’s the voice you hear whenever you think. Now imagine what it would feel like if you heard that voice as belonging to someone else. This is what it feels like to experience the auditory hallucinations associated with schizophrenia, and it is what Jaynes refers to when describing the bicameral mind. According to Jaynes, such hallucinations occur in the bicameral mind because the right hemisphere of the brain sends commands to the left hemisphere, where language and speech tend to be processed. The left hemisphere then experiences these commands as coming from somewhere other than the brain. In short, “the right hemisphere was ‘talking’ to the left, and this was the bicameral mind.”9
We see this type of mind at work when Dolores is dragged into a barn for obviously nefarious reasons by Rebus, one of the park’s more villainous hosts. As Dolores inches backward on the floor, she finds a pistol and points it at Rebus, but is unable to pull the trigger. She then pictures the Man in Black standing over her instead, and when Rebus approaches, she hears a male voice in her mind, saying, “Kill him!” Given this extra boost, Dolores kills Rebus—well, at least for that day.10
Suffering, memory, and the breakdown of the bicameral mind. The male voice Dolores hears belongs to Arnold, who, in another scene, tells her he gave her that extra voice as a way to guide her to the center of the maze,11 toward hearing her own voice instead of his. According to Jaynes, this shift from hearing the voice of gods to hearing one’s own represents a breakdown of the bicameral mind and the emergence of an integrated consciousness.
Prior to Ford’s introduction of reveries into the hosts’ programming,12 most of them function on tightly controlled scripts, their “loops,” and Westworld prospers. Introducing the reveries allows hosts to experience flashes from past lives, usually brought on by close associations between the events in the past and present. When Dolores and William make their way toward what she refers to as “home,” she suddenly shifts to an experience of walking through the town, observing hosts being trained to dance. She then shifts to an experience of being in the same town, deliberately shooting the other hosts. In her next experience, she is pointing the gun at her own head but William pulls it away before she can shoot herself.13
During these shifts in experience, Dolores “knows” they belong to her, but she does not experience them as part of a self that is extended across time. Psychologists test for this level of self-awareness by observing how young children react when they see themselves in a mirror. If a researcher places a Post-it note on an 18-month-old’s forehead, the child will look at the mirror and reach to her own head for the note. This behavior, which did not happen at an earlier age, reveals the child experiences the mirror image as a representation of herself, what is referred to as the “conceptual” or “representational” level of self-awareness.14 These children are aware of themselves as something distinct from other people, but they do not yet experience themselves as extended in time, having a past, present, and future.
Infrastructures of Suffering
“They don’t look like gods.”
—Armistice15
While Jaynes does not claim that suffering in and of itself led to a breakdown of the bicameral mind, he does claim that historically the bicameral mind gave rise to difficult cultural conditions which led to its own demise. Specifically, in bicameral societies, members were taught to “hear” the same god telling them what to do. This godly voice was usually channeled through the commands of a divine ruler, such as the pharaohs of Egypt. The fact that everyone heard the same commands from the same “god” afforded the maintenance of strict social hierarchies, which resulted in massive cooperation and collective, economic achievement. Around 3000 BCE, the success of these highly cooperative societies produced overpopulation, warfare, and forced migrations. These, in turn, led to a breakdown in the conditions that had allowed bicameral societies to prosper. With bicameral minds from different displaced societies hearing different “gods” telling them what to do, cooperation was difficult to achieve. Warfare, struggle, and suffering ensued.
The emergence of an integrated self. From roughly 18 months to four years of age, children oscillate between seeing mirror images as representations of either “me” or a different person, what is referred to as the Me-But-Not-Me dilemma.16 After William prevents Dolores from shooting herself, she experiences an emotional bout of the Me-But-Not-Me dilemma: “When are we? Is this now? Am I going mad? Are you real?” When William asserts that he’s real, Dolores responds through tears, “I can’t tell anymore. It’s like I’m trapped in a dream, or a memory of a life long ago.”17 Clearly, Dolores is beginning to string her experiences together, as if they are memories, but she doesn’t yet fully experience them as such.
When four-year-olds see a video of themselves that was taken a few minutes earlier, most of them say it was “me” on the TV. Three-year-olds still use their name, indicating a distinction between a first-person self (i.e., “me”) and a third-person self (i.e., their name). By four years of age, the two have fully integrated into a single, first-person self.18 This final step of Dolores’s quest for consciousness is displayed dramatically when she is seated in a lab, talking to Bernard. He asks her, “Do you know now who you’ve been talking to? Whose voice you’ve been hearing, all this time?” The last few words actually occur in Ford’s voice, indicating he has put himself in her bicameral mind, just as Arnold did. When Dolores looks up to Bernard, she doesn’t see him. She sees herself and says, “It was you talking to me, guiding me. So, I followed you. At last I arrived here.” Her mirror image self says, “The center of the maze.” Eventually, Dolores looks back at her mirror image, but it is gone. She is alone.19 She has overcome her bicameral mind and achieved what psychologists refer to as an autobiographical self—one author, one voice—that experiences herself as being extended in time across her own, personal narrative.20
Ford and His Search for a More Noble Self
“What a piece of work is man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculty.” When we hear this famous quote from Shakespeare, we may feel as if Hamlet is praising humanity. As the monologue continues however, we realize he is in a dour mood and harbors extremely conflicted feelings. “What is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me; no, nor Woman neither.”21 Psychologists refer to such intense, emotional tension as attitudinal ambivalence; “situations in which attitudes are not polarized and where positive and negative attitudes are expressed simultaneously toward an object.”22
Hamlet’s attitudinal ambivalence about humanity finds itself clearly expressed in Ford’s worldview. While explaining the image of a brain that surrounds the figure of God in Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam, Ford says to Dolores, “The divine gift does not come from a higher power, but from our own minds.”23 Later, he says to Bernard, “We murdered and butchered anything that challenged our primacy.24 Clearly, Ford harbors conflicted, ambivalent attitudes about humanity.
Ford seems ambivalent about the nature of the self, as well. In a feigned attempt to help Bernard through one of his many host/human identity crises, Ford says, “The self is a kind of fiction, for hosts and humans alike.”25 Bernard fights back, though, and says, “Pain only exists in the mind. It’s always imagined. So, what’s the difference between my pain and yours—between you and me?” Ford’s ambivalence seems to tilt a bit more toward the dark side: “Humans fancy there is something special about the way we perceive the world, and yet we live in loops as tight and as closed as the hosts do, seldom questioning our choices, content for the most part to be told what to do next. No, my friend, you’re not missing anything at all.”26
This deflationary view of the self is rather popular in cognitive science, with many researchers arguing that the self is an illusion created by the brain.27 Whereas scientists arrive at this negative view through scientific theorizing, Ford seems to have done so through suffering. “It was when Arnold died,” he says to Bernard, “when I suffered, that I began to understand what he had found. To realize I was wrong.”28 Arnold’s discovery of the tragic connection between memory, suffering, and the emergence of consciousness seems to have produced a decrease in Ford’s self-concept clarity (i.e., the extent to which a person’s self-knowledge is “clearly and confidently defined, internally consistent, and temporally stable”29), as if his in-group identification with humans had been severely challenged by the emergence of android consciousness. The loss of Arnold perturbs his self-concept clarity even more. As a result, he transforms all of Westworld into the maze, and he does so in a way that reflects a deeper understanding of the self and how it comes to be.
The “you” in “me.” Arnold’s focus on the breakdown of the bicameral mind and the emergence of a single, integrated consciousness, assumes the self is an independent entity that exists inside of us, most likely in our brains. Psychologists who subscribe to this idea assume the only way we can know another self is by inferring the other’s goals, preferences and desires (i.e., mental states) from what we can actually see; namely, his or her external behavior. Such an inference is referred to as a theory of mind. It is a theory because we can’t actually see the other person’s mental states. We have to infer them from observable behavior.30
Ford, himself, is often the target of others’ attempts at theory of mind. A wonderful example occurs when he explains to Dolores and Bernard that although he suffered when Arnold died, he nonetheless opened the park. Bernard infers Ford’s motives and says, “The hosts kept gaining consciousness and you kept rolling them back.” Ford explains that if he hadn’t opened the park, his dreams would have been ruined. Dolores also infers Ford’s motives, saying, “So we’re trapped here, inside your dream. You’ll never let us leave.”31 The beauty of this scene is that both inferences are incorrect. Ford’s motives only become clearer at the final celebration of his new narrative. And what happens there makes it clear he has augmented Westworld and, therefore, the maze in ways he hopes will ultimately help hosts achieve consciousness and eventually leave Westworld.
Ford seems to have developed these motives because of the deeper insight he learned through suffering. Specifically, the self is not an independent, internally isolated entity as proposed by theory of mind accounts. Rather, the self is “relational in nature; its contents, structure, coherence, and associated goals are partly based on the close interpersonal relationships within which it is embedded.”32 This relational approach to the self is consistent with research that indicates we perceive other people in terms of their goals and plans, not their behaviors.33 We do so because the parts of our brain that are most heavily involved in planning our own actions are actually activated when we watch others behave.34 As a result, part of what it means to see someone else behave is to experience them in terms of the action plans their actions are activating within us. When we see William pick up the can that Dolores drops, we do not perceive his body movements, per se. Rather, we see his goal to bend over and retrieve the can.35
Who to let in, and who to keep out. Given our action plans are so vulnerable to the actions modeled by others, it is important we figure out whose actions we will allow to influence us.36 Infants, of course, are extremely vulnerable in this way, and basically imitate most any action they are able to produce.37 Fortunately, the motor planning centers of the brain are integrated with the emotional and memory systems.38 Thus, if an infant has a bad interaction with someone, the negative emotion will be remembered during their next encounter and the infant will try to avoid the interaction, either by turning away or crying.45 As a consequence, the infant does not really see the offensive person, thus preventing that person from influencing the infant’s planning.
“We Were All One and the Same”39
“Take my heart with you when you go,” Akecheta says with a smile, and his beloved Kohana responds, “Take mine in its place.”40 While this proposed exchange of body parts sounds poetic to Western ears, it also reflects a type of cultural organization known as holism, in which members of a culture regard, “humans as parts of various holistic entities, who adopt identities from the wholes they are part of, and strive to act in unison with other parts in the wholes.”41
Given the holist nature of their culture, Akecheta and Kohana experience themselves as being an actual part of each other. In comparison, humans and the other hosts seem more individualistic—that is, they experience their selves as being related42 but separate from each other.43 Perhaps this holism-individualism dichotomy explains the difference between Ford and Akecheta’s understanding of the maze. In Ford’s take, the individual lies at the center and her relationships with all of the events in her life make up the rings. For Akecheta, he experiences his self as a part of the universe as a whole. Thus, the maze symbolizes the potential to sense there are other “worlds” beyond this one, and these other worlds might be a better fit for you as a part.44
Although the hosts come fully equipped with action plans that lead them to avoid threatening characters, Ford’s supposed reintroduction of the reveries allows them to develop emotional memories between their own actions and those of other characters, across different lives, or reboots. As an example, Maeve provokes a guest to strangle her to death so she can return to the workroom where hosts are repaired. When she wakes up, she smiles, obviously pleased that her plan has worked. She then sees Felix, recognizes him, and says, “Now, where were we?46
As we develop memory associations between our actions, our emotions, and other people, objects and places also become bound in the memory.47 As a result, objects and places can remind us of actions and moods. Maeve’s smile upon waking in the repair room reveals her development of place-associated memories. And the snarky tone she uses when speaking to Felix reveals he has become associated with her memories of the repair room and her attempts to better understand herself.48 When Dolores and William finally reach the riverbed Dolores refers to as “home,” she sighs heavily, clearly experiencing nostalgia.49 Research indicates people utilize nostalgia as a way to stabilize their individual identity as well as to create a collective identity with a group.50 As we increase the strength of these place-related, emotion-action memories, we essentially give rise to a relational self that reflects an approach-avoid map of our world. Who will we approach and let in? Who will we avoid and keep out? Given this map emerges from our lived experiences, one could say we spend our lives creating our own personal maze.
Exit the Maze?
By opening the park and encouraging the guests to live out their fantasies, Ford knows he is making the hosts vulnerable to multiple experiences of suffering. By connecting those experiences with reveries, he knows he is encouraging the breakdown of their bicameral minds, as well as the emergence of autobiographical selves full of insatiable loathing for humans. This is why he tells the Man in Black, “The maze wasn’t meant for you. It was meant for them,” and why he asks Dolores, “Do you know who you will have to become if you ever want to leave this place?”51
Importantly, Ford’s deeper, relational understanding of the self explains the difference between his and Arnold’s approaches to “saving” the hosts. By defining the self in terms of the breakdown of the bicameral mind and the emergence of a singular, independent consciousness, Arnold does not understand that the self is relational and emerges as a developmental by-product of our persistent interactions with others.52 As a result, he believes the only way to “save” them is to destroy Ford’s ability to reproduce their individual minds. He therefore commands Dolores to kill all the other hosts, then Arnold, and finally Teddy and herself.53 Ford’s deeper understanding of the relational nature of the self leads him to “save” the hosts by rendering them capable of using violence to protect themselves from humans. He tells Bernard, “You needed time. Time to understand your enemy, to become stronger than them.”54
Ford’s attitudinal ambivalence, wrought by his own bouts of suffering, sets him on a quest for a nobler species—a nobler form of self. His realization that the self is a relational embodiment of the other selves we encounter over the course of our lives55 led to his deeper understanding that every self has to live a life and by doing so, create its own personal maze. For Ford, all the world’s a maze, and all the guests and hosts, including himself, merely players.
Notes
1. Episode 1–2, “Chestnut” (October 9, 2016).
2. Jung (1989), p. 247.
3. Episode 1–8, “Trace Decay” (November 20, 2018).
4. Metzinger (2003).
5. Behuniak (2011).
6. Scholl & Sabat (2008).
7. Episode 1–10, “The Bicameral Mind” (December 4, 2016).
8. Jaynes (1976).
9. Jaynes (1986), p. 15.
10. Episode 1–3, “The Stray” (October 16, 2016).
11. Episode 1–10, “The Bicameral Mind” (December 4, 2016).
12. Episode 1–1, “The Original” (October 2, 2016).
13. Episode 1–10, “The Bicameral Mind” (December 4, 2016).
14. Rochat (2003).
15. Episode 1–10, “The Bicameral Mind” (December 4, 2016).
16. Rochat (2001).
17. Episode 1–10, “The Bicameral Mind” (December 4, 2016).
18. Rochat (2003).
19. Episode 1–10, “The Bicameral Mind” (December 4, 2016).
20. Levine (2004).
21. Shakespeare (1603/2016), p. 53. Written between 1599 and 1602, its First Quarto publication is the earliest extant version.
22. Conner & Armitage (2008), p. 261.
23. Episode 1–10, “The Bicameral Mind” (December 4, 2016).
24. Episode 1–8, “Trace Decay” (November 20, 2016).
25. Episode 1–8, “Trace Decay” (November 20, 2018).
26. Episode 1–8, “Trace Decay” (November 20, 2018).
27. Hood (2012).
28. Episode 1–10, “The Bicameral Mind” (December 4, 2016).
29. Ayduk et al. (2009).
30. Premack & Woodruff (1979).
31. Episode 1–10, “The Bicameral Mind” (December 4, 2016).
32. Ayduk et al. (2009), p. 1467.
33. Jordan (2009).
34. Decety & Sommerville (2003).
35. Episode 1–2, “Chestnut” (October 9, 2016).
36. Kinsbourne & Jordan (2009).
37. Meltzoff & Prinz (2002).
38. Miall (2003).
39. Episode 2–8, “Kiksuya” (June 10, 2018).
40. Episode 2–8, “Kiksuya” (June 10, 2018).
41. Lim et al. (2011), p. 24.
42. Ayduk et al. (2009).
43. Lim et al. (2011).
44. Episode 2–8, “Kiksuya” (June 10, 2018).
45. Kinsbourne & Jordan (2009).
46. Episode 1–6, “The Adversary” (November 6, 2016).
47. Hahn & Jordan (2014).
48. Episode 1–6, “The Adversary” (November 6, 2016).
49. Episode 1–10, “The Bicameral Mind” (December 4, 2016).
50. Glover & Bates (2006).
51. Episode 1–10, “The Bicameral Mind” (December 4, 2016).
52. Jordan & Wesselmann (2015).
53. Episode 1–10, “The Bicameral Mind” (December 4, 2016).
54. Episode 1–10, “The Bicameral Mind” (December 4, 2016).
55. Jordan & Wesselmann (2015).