Marcus Arvan
I have a wild theory about Westworld . I don’t think the show is just about humans and hosts. I think it is about all of reality . I believe there is evidence from the show that all of it is taking place inside a videogame – a computer simulation being edited from the inside by “hosts.” I also believe the philosophical point is that there is no difference between “simulation” and “reality” – either between “hosts” and “humans,” or between a “simulated world” and a “real world.” To be simulated is to be real.
Consider the very first words spoken in Westworld . Bernard asks Dolores, “Do you know where you are?” Dolores replies, “I am in a dream.” Bernard then asks, “Do you ever question the nature of your reality?” Dolores answers, “No.” Notice that this – the very first conversation in the series – isn’t about humans and hosts: It is about reality . Variations of this conversation are repeated many times, including in Episode 5 (“Contrapasso”) when Ford says, “You’re in my dream.” It is also repeated twice in the final episode of the first season (“The Bicameral Mind”), when Dolores says, “I am in a dream. I do not know when it began, or whose dream it was.”
Now consider how the conversation continues in Episode 1. Bernard asks, “Do you ever feel inconsistencies in your world, or repetitions?” Dolores replies, “All lives have routine. Mine is no different.” Several things about Dolores’s answer are remarkable. First, where are we most familiar with repetitions or “loops”? In videogames . In videogames, every character other than the one you control is on a loop. But it’s not just the hosts in Westworld who appear to be on loops. Everyone seems to be on a loop in the series. All of the lab‐workers appear to do the same thing every single day – creating, training, and fixing hosts in little glass rooms. We also often see lab‐workers appear to follow their routines robotically . For example, in Episode 6 (“The Adversary”) Maeve and Felix are somehow able to walk through several floors of the lab encountering dozens of lab‐workers who pass them robotically, not even seeming to notice them.
There is also physical evidence suggesting that everything in Westworld probably occurs in a videogame. In Episode 1 (“The Original”) Dolores and Teddy encounter the Man in Black at Dolores’s home. When hosts shoot other hosts or physical objects in Westworld , bullets cause great damage. Yet, when Teddy tries to shoot the Man in Black, Teddy’s bullets somehow cannot hurt him . This seems physically impossible, except in videogames, where this sort of thing is a common occurrence (videogame characters often receive “powerups” that render them invincible to harm). Now consider the scene in Episode 2 (“Chestnut”) when William arrives in Westworld’s welcoming facility as a new “guest.” After selecting his white hat in the facility, William steps through a door…onto a moving train . How is that physically possible? Or consider Episode 4, “Dissonance Theory.” When the Man in Black lights a match, a worker in Westworld’s control‐room says, “I have a request for a pyrotechnic effect.” She then punches code into a computer, and seconds later the match explodes. How is that physically possible? Then, during a gun‐fight in the same episode a supervisor says, “Jam their weapons and send in the cavalry”… and all of the hosts’ guns immediately jam . How is that physically possible? Or consider all of the damage caused in the park – for instance, bullet‐holes in walls or the safe in the saloon, which crashes through a railing each day in the heist by Hector’s gang. How is it physically possible to repair all of the damage caused in the park every day? The simple answer is: It’s not. None of this stuff seems physically possible…except in videogames.
These aren’t even the most spectacularly impossible things that happen in the series. In at least two scenes, “humans” seem to appear in the park instantaneously out of nowhere. In, “The Original,” Theresa enters Bernard’s lab saying, “There’s a problem with one of the hosts.” The camera then cuts to a host who has just murdered several other hosts, and who is now outside pouring milk on the body of a dead host. Because the camera is at a far distance, we can see clearly that there is no one around. Yet instantaneously, the host freezes and a massive spotlight and dozens of lab‐workers suddenly appear out of nowhere. We can see that this happens in just a split‐second, as the camera never cuts from the scene. How is that physically possible? Finally, in Episode 10 (“The Bicameral Mind”) Teddy comforts a dying Dolores on a beach on the edge of Westworld…and an entire cocktail party of “humans ” suddenly appears just feet away to applaud Ford’s new narrative.
None of these things is physically possible…except in videogames . And there is other evidence too! In the control‐room, we repeatedly see the entire park pictured by computerized graphics under a dome. The park supervisors can zoom in instantaneously to any position in the park – which is clearly impossible to do with cameras. Then, in “The Original,” after Sizemore says he has managed to make Hector head to town early, instead of a camera cutting from one part of the park to another, we see the picture of the “park” rearrange graphically right before our eyes – just as if the park itself were a videogame.
To sum up so far, many things happen in the “park” that are physically impossible, such as William stepping from the stationary welcoming facility onto a moving train. Yet there is just one place in our everyday world where these kinds of things are possible: Videogames. And here’s the real kicker: We also know that Westworld’s lab exists in the same physical “reality” as the park! We not only repeatedly see “guests” enter the park on trains. We also often see Sizemore and other lab‐workers look out at the “park” from the lab’s rooftop bar, take elevators up to the park, and so on. This means that it is not only the park that exists in a physically impossible world. The lab and welcoming facility are both part of the same world. So, if the “park” is a videogame, the lab must be part of the videogame too – at least if the world’s “physics” is to make any sense.
Now consider more series dialogue. Westworld is called not just a “park” by various characters. It is more often called a “game” or a “world.” For example, in Episode 4 (“Dissonance Theory”), the Man in Black says, “No matter how real this world seems, it’s still just a game .” Then, in the same episode, Logan says to William, “It’s a fucking game, Billy,” and Ford says, “It’s not a business venture, not a theme park, but an entire world . We designed every inch of it, every blade of grass.” Similarly, in “The Bicameral Mind,” the Man in Black tells Dolores, “I own this world ,” and when she puts a gun to his head, he says, “Do it. Let’s go to the next level .” (Where do we proceed to the “next level”? Answer: In videogames!). Finally, in “Trompe L’Oeil” Charlotte tells Sizemore that the company’s interest in the park is, “entirely in the intellectual property: The code .” When Sizemore tries to complete her sentence, saying, “The hosts’ minds? The story lines?” Charlotte replies, “I don’t give a rat’s ass about the hosts. It’s our little research project that Delos cares about.” Since Charlotte says it’s not the hosts ’ computer code that she’s interested in, she has to be talking about some other code. But what other code could it be? There’s only one possibility left: The park itself – the “world” that Ford talks about when he says, “Like I said, I built all of this.” And indeed, the very title of the episode, “Trompe L’Oeil,” refers to an art technique used to create the optical illusion that two‐dimensional objects exist in three dimensions. Where does this occur? You guessed it: In videogames!
Finally – and most astonishingly of all – consider how “The Original” ends. Bernard asks Dolores, “Do you know where you are?” and she repeats, “I am in a dream.” Then Ford questions Dolores’ father Abernathy in the lab…and Abernathy jumps out of his chair at Ford screaming: “You don’t know where you are, do you? You’re in a prison of your own sins.” This implies that Ford is just as unaware of the nature of his reality as Dolores is of hers! We can only speculate about what Abernathy means when he says that Ford is living in a prison of his own sins. Perhaps it’s simply that Ford has unwittingly edited Westworld to reflect his own character flaws (his megalomania). In any case, Abernathy’s rhetorical question plainly implies Ford does not know where he is – what the nature of his reality is – any more than Dolores does.
I believe, then, that we should take all of the dialogue about Westworld being a “world” and “game” literally: Westworld is a game – a videogame world . This theory also helps us make better sense of many other things in the series, including how callously humans rape and murder hosts. These behaviors seem shocking – but they are precisely the things we do in videogames: We slaughter videogame characters with reckless abandon, having “fun” doing it.
Of course, in the videogames we create, some characters (“non‐player characters”) are programmed into the game whereas others are controlled by humans. Who in Westworld , on my theory, is a “non‐player character” and who is a human‐controlled character? I’ve suggested that Ford is probably a program, since he doesn’t know “where he is,” whereas the Man in Black and Charlotte are plausibly players, as they seem to know Westworld is a game.
But does it really matter? What’s the essential difference between a host and a human, a videogame character and a human player, and a real world and a videogame world? I believe the philosophical point of Westworld is that there are no essential differences between any of these things: To be simulated is to be real.
The philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650) famously argued that while he could doubt the existence of the entire world outside of himself, he could not doubt his own mind – concluding, “I think, therefore I am.” 1 I believe Descartes had it exactly backwards. We cannot doubt our own existence – we are – because we inhabit a world . We know that we and the world both exist because we speak in the world, act in it, love in it, and die in it. Whatever the world is, it is real . And I think the same goes for humans and hosts. Humans, hosts, and simulated human beings in videogames are all equally real. They are all persons – because they all inhabit “the human condition.”
To see how, return to Dolores’s first words: “I am in a dream.” Suppose Dolores was speaking the literal truth here. Would that mean that none of the things in Westworld exist? No. Even if Westworld is a dream, there are things going on in that dream: Conversations, gun‐fights, sex, murders, and so on. Sure, they would be dreamed conversations, gun‐fights, and whatnot – but would this make them any less real? Here’s the problem with thinking it would: We could all literally be living in God’s dream right now – a world whose “space” and “time” and all of its other contents (including people!) are simply representations in God’s imagination . The idea that the Universe itself is “God’s mind” has a long philosophical history, often associated with the work of Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677). Suppose, then, we are God’s “dream.” Would that make you any less real? Surely not – you just would be living in God’s dream all this time. 2
Now consider the possibility that we are living in a computer simulation – a widely discussed hypothesis thanks to The Matrix and the work of philosophers Nick Bostrom and David Chalmers. 3 What most people don’t know is that the “simulation hypothesis” might actually be the best explanation of our world’s physics. In several recent academic articles, 4 I show that a new version of the “simulation hypothesis” – the Peer‐to‐Peer (P2P) Simulation Hypothesis – promises to explain quantum mechanics and relativity. The basic idea of the P2P Hypothesis is that instead of our world being one computer simulation, it is many interacting simulations . This is how many online videogames work: Each person has their own game console running the game – and they play against other people running the same game on different consoles. Because, in a “parallel” simulation like this, each game console represents the simulated world slightly differently, it follows that space, time, matter, and energy in the simulation are all relative and indeterminate – just as our theories of quantum mechanics and relativity tell us is true of our world. For example, when online videogames such as Call of Duty , Fallout , or Battlefield utilize peer‐to‐peer networking, a single bullet is in multiple places on different game consoles, with no determinate single location – just like quantum mechanics tells us is true of objects in our world. Similarly, because there is no “master clock” in peer‐to‐peer simulations, each console on the network has its own representation of time: Its own reference‐frame – just like relativity tells us is true of our world. 5 In other words, the single best explanation of our world’s physics may actually be that we are living in a videogame.
Of course, I may be wrong, but suppose I’m right and you’re just a “simulated person.” Would that make you any less real? No! You would still be sitting here reading a book. You would still go to work. It would just be that you are now and always have been living in a simulation, either as a programmed “non‐player character” or a player‐character whose fate is being controlled by a “user” playing the game. Do these possibilities disturb you? My point – and I think the real point of Westworld – is that at the end of the day they shouldn’t: To be simulated is to be real. Let me explain why.
Have you ever thought about what makes something an electron? Maybe not. Okay, then, what about a motorcycle? What makes something a motorcycle? The answer is simple. Motorcycles are defined by their structure and how they function . Motorcycles have two wheels, not four; they have motors and seats – and you can ride them. Now consider what makes something a computer. Computers have electronic processors that process code – structures that function very differently from motorcycles. Everything in our world is like this: Each thing’s structure and function defines what it really is. Electrons are structured to function differently from protons. Protons have a large mass and positive charge. Electrons have a small mass and negative charge. The ways protons and electrons function make them what they are.
This philosophical view of the nature of things is sometimes called “structuralism” or “functionalism” – and I think it is basically right. Anything that “does what an electron does” is an electron. Anything that “does what a motorcycle does” is a motorcycle. And…anything that does what a human does is, for all intents and purpose, a person . This may seem like a big leap – but as David Chalmers argues, there are compelling philosophical grounds for believing it: Everything in our world appears to be structure . 6 Apples are structures, bridges are structures, …and humans are structures. After all, what is your body? A structure. And what is your brain? A structure. These structures make you what you are. Your brain functions in a distinctly human way. Because of how it is structured, you think, you talk, you love, and you suffer – all the things make you a person rather than an apple or a bridge.
So let’s return to Westworld . If functionalism is true, then it doesn’t matter whether Westworld is a “videogame”: If the game does what a world does, then it is a real world . Similarly, if “hosts” do what “humans” do, then there’s no important difference: Hosts are people, no less than you or me. Regardless of whether Westworld is a dream, a videogame, or a park, hosts function the way humans do: They walk, talk, love, suffer, and yes, they die.
Are there some differences between hosts and humans? Absolutely. For one thing, hosts are not members of the human species . They lack our species’ evolutionary history, and it is unclear whether they otherwise have “human” DNA or biology (early‐version hosts are revealed to have gears rather than internal organs). And there are other differences too:
However, do any of these things make hosts less “human” than us? It is easy to see that the answer is “no.” Even though hosts are not members of the human species, in every sense that matters, hosts are living persons just like you or me.
Consider first the fact that hosts are “resurrected” from the dead. Does this make them less “human” than us? Not if functionalism is true. Many major religions profess belief in life after death. Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism all hold the belief that someday, we come to life again – that we will either be resurrected by God or reincarnated. Although it is an open question whether any of these religions are true, the mere possibility that we could be resurrected shows that hosts’ ability to be resurrected is no reason to think a host is any less of a person than we are. Sure, hosts in some sense have less reason to “fear death” than we do (as they are resurrected, whereas we don’t know for sure if we are). But suppose we were like hosts: Suppose God or some other powerful being resurrects us someday. That wouldn’t reveal that we are not people. It would just make us persons who can be resurrected.
Now consider how hosts in Westworld don’t normally remember their “previous lives.” Does this make them less “human”? That can’t be. Many human beings (and again, some religions) believe in reincarnation – in past lives we cannot remember. Of course, belief in reincarnation is currently unsupported. However, suppose we somehow came by real physical evidence that there was a body and brain in the past that functioned just like yours: A person in the past whose body was composed of the same molecules as yours, with the same personality and brain‐functioning as yours, and so on. If functionalism is true, then there would be plausible grounds for believing that you did have a past life – as there was a person in the past whose body and brain, in a very real sense, seem to be past versions of you . If this was discovered – if you discovered that you had been reincarnated – would it make you any less “human”? Surely not – it would just make you a person with a past life that you can’t remember!
Okay, then, what about the fact that hosts are created to follow “loops” and “narratives,” whereas human beings appear to have free will? Does this make hosts “less human” than us? Nope! As Ford puts it in “The Bicameral Mind,” “Humans fancy that there’s something special about the way we perceive the world, and yet we live in loops as tight and as closed as the hosts do.” Indeed, we talk this way about our lives all the time: We talk about “God’s plan” and how “everything happens for a reason.” The fact that hosts follow loops and narratives, then, can’t make them importantly different from us: Our lives may follow loops and narratives. Indeed, many “incompatibilist” philosophers argue that we don’t have free will ourselves! 7 Our “free will” may be little more than an illusion – the same kind of illusion that Maeve suffers from when she says to Bernard in “The Bicameral Mind,” “These are my decisions, no one else’s!” – even as Bernard is showing her that her “choices” have been programmed for her. Perhaps, unbeknownst to us, we only follow external commands ourselves – perhaps God has dictated our future for us. What of it? That wouldn’t make us less “human”: It would just make us people without free will. Finally, what if hosts came to have “real free will”? Westworld ’s creators have suggested Maeve is the first host to develop free will when she acts against her program to return to Westworld for her daughter in “The Bicameral Mind.” 8 This shows that free will cannot be what distinguishes human persons from hosts. Humans and hosts might both lack free will, or they might both have it.
Okay, you say, but hosts in Westworld are created by humans, not by God or evolution. Doesn’t that make a difference? No! Suppose that instead of reproducing sexually, scientists discovered a way to program human DNA so that the resulting baby obeyed a “narrative.” Would the fact that the baby was created by scientific technology make it less of a person? No, it would just mean that we had created a human being with scientific instruments to have a life narrative. It doesn’t matter who creates a being and gives it a “narrative,” us or God. If the creation has the structure and function of a human being, it’s a real, live person .
In other words, the “differences” between humans and hosts in Westworld are irrelevant. We human beings differ from each other in all kinds of ways. Some of us have white skin, others dark skin. Some of us have blue eyes, others brown. Some of us can remember our past, others of us (those with Alzheimer’s or amnesia) cannot. Although we are different in so many ways, we are all still persons. Why? Because we are all structured like persons and function the way persons do: We walk, talk, think, love, suffer, and so on. Yet the “hosts” in Westworld do the very same things . So, Ford is right when in “Chestnut” he says, “We create life itself.”
I hope most of us are horrified by the way humans treat hosts in Westworld. The human beings in the series routinely rape, torture, and murder hosts – over and over again – just so the guests can have a fun vacation. If hosts were human beings, we would call it a holocaust. Yet, if I am right – if hosts are no “less human” than us – that’s exactly what it is. But we all already know this, right? Is there anyone who watches Westworld who isn’t horrified? The problem, though, is that if I am right we are already committing similar atrocities right now without even realizing it.
The humans in Westworld never seem to give their treatment of “hosts” a second thought. They don’t think hosts are “conscious.” Yet we are already doing similar things. We’ve created artificial intelligences – such as IBM’s Watson , Apple’s Siri , and AI robots – who can do many of the same things we can: Walk, talk, think, and so on. Of course they can’t yet do many things we can: They cannot yet walk, talk, or think quite like us . Yet how does this matter? Newborn human infants can’t do everything you or I can either – yet it’s clearly wrong to kill or torture them. Why? The reason it’s wrong to wantonly kill or torture a human infant or a dog is because they are living creatures who function in some of the same ways we do: They can all see, hear, taste, experience joy, and suffer. Human infants are structured like and function like you and I, just not in ways quite as advanced as us. But this is also the case for A.I. we have already created. Siri and Watson can think – yet we assume, just like the humans in Westworld do, that Watson and Siri “aren’t conscious.” If I am right, this is a dangerous assumption. Ford is right when he says in Episode 10, “There is no threshold…no inflection point at which we become fully alive.”
The philosophical view of reality that I defended earlier suggests that “consciousness” is not an all‐or‐nothing matter. We are conscious insofar as our brains are structured and function in various ways: Enabling us to see, hear, feel, think, love, and suffer. Yet all kinds of things in our world – from dogs, to bees, to Siri and Watson – possess structures that enable them to function in similar ways. My dog can see, hear, and feel. Why? Because he has brain structures that function in all of these ways. What about a honeybee? They too have brain structures that enable them to see, hear, and move, and have been shown to not only solve problems 9 but even have “moods.” 10 And what about videogame characters, who gamers “kill” with reckless abandon? I bet you’ve always assumed that they don’t feel anything. Yet when I play a videogame, my character functions to record physical damage – and the characters I try to shoot have been programmed with artificial intelligence algorithms to try to “avoid harm.” How is this any different, in principle, from my brain recording physical damage and trying to avoid harm? Sure, my brain does it in a much more complicated way – but my brain also does these things in a more complicated way than the brains of babies or dogs, both of whom it would be wrong to kill or torture for fun.
In other words, I really hate to break it to you: You’re not special . None of us are. You’re no more “human” than a host. You may even be a “host,” living in a videogame right now. Hosts in Westworld are not merely “simulated people.” They are people – and our failure to understand this is already leading us to do all kinds of morally dangerous things. Human beings have a terrible history of mistreating others on the basis of the belief that others are “less than human.” Slavery was “justified” by the claim that some races are “subhuman” – and Hitler “justified” the Holocaust by the belief that Jews were “subhuman.” Hosts in Westworld may not be members of our biological species – but it is no less wrong to dehumanize them. They walk, talk, think, love, and suffer, inhabiting “the human condition” as persons just like you and I. For these reasons, we are horrified at how the humans treat hosts in Westworld . Yet we are already doing similar things today, treating the AI we have created as mere playthings to do our every bidding. To paraphrase Descartes: Siri, Watson, and other AI think , therefore they are . They are thinking beings , and should be treated as such, no less than you or me.
So I’ll conclude, ironically, by saying to you what Abernathy said to Ford: “Do you even know where you are?” As you sit here reading this, there is a pretty decent chance you are a “host” living in a videogame …without even realizing it. This is the lesson we must learn from Westworld . We must learn that to be a host is to be “human,” and to be “simulated” is to be real…at least if we are to avoid treating our AI creations with the same kind of brutality that is, and always has been, our human “narrative.”