Michael Versteeg and Adam Barkman
You may have noticed throughout the first season of Westworld the recurring image of the player piano; a piano which is capable, at least seemingly so, of playing its own keys and pedals. A complex assembly of pneumatics and machinery operates from within the piano, and all that is visible from the outside are the self‐depressing keys and pedals and the scrolling sheet music. Now, for someone who’s never seen or even heard of a player piano before, such a contraption could really appear as if it were playing itself – or perhaps that it is even being played by a ghost!
We’re quite confident, though, that most people would find the idea of a ghost playing the piano unlikely, and agree that the player piano doesn’t really play music in any sort of conscious sense; it might only appear or seem to do so. The piano, after all, can only operate by following the input of the music to produce the audio output of sound, much like how modern computers function according to their provided programming. Any appearance of consciousness, therefore, is just an illusion since the piano is merely going through the motions. But if this is true for the player piano – that it’s just a machine going through the motions – then is there really any difference in the case of Westworld’s robotic hosts? Dolores, Maeve, and even (spoiler! ) Bernard are incredibly complex machines, too. But the hosts, unlike the piano, appear human, sound human, and even feel and act human. Does that make them conscious like a human?
Answering this question really depends on just what you mean by conscious . Some philosophers would be quick to reject the possibility of any kind of machine being conscious, while others might argue to the contrary. Philosophers Paul Churchland and Daniel Dennett, for example, may very well concede to the possibility of Westworld’s hosts being conscious like humans. The thing is, though, how Churchland and Dennett define consciousness is likely not how most people define it.
When it comes down to the question of whether humans are conscious or not, most of us would probably say yes, affirming what we’ll call the common‐sense view of consciousness: That there exists an individual person or self, distinct from their body, who has beliefs, desires and intentions and who experiences and perceives the world subjectively from a central first‐person perspective. At first glance, this view of consciousness may seem obviously true, and we tend to assume it on an everyday basis. As you’re reading these words, for example, you probably think there’s a “you” who is doing the reading. Or when Ford addresses the Delos board in the episode “The Bicameral Mind,” he must obviously assume he is talking to other individual conscious people. When William truly realizes Dolores is a machine, the heartbreak and pain he experiences must have certainly been real to him in those moments.
Obvious or not, however, philosophers Churchland and Dennett would want us to believe that this common‐sense view of consciousness is more deceptive than most of us might care to admit; that there really is no individual person or self; that our so‐called beliefs, desires, and intentions do not themselves really exist; and that our subjective first‐person experience and perception of the world is ultimately an illusion. 1 But, if Churchland and Dennett are to be taken seriously, such claims would directly challenge how most of us typically understand the nature of human consciousness, let alone artificial consciousness. We, therefore, must ask ourselves the obvious question: Does human consciousness – as conceived by our common sense – really exist? Let’s find out.
Paul Churchland and Daniel Dennett find themselves in good company alongside Dr. Robert Ford himself, the fictional creator of the Westworld park. We see Ford’s view on the nature of consciousness clearly laid out in the episode “Trace Decay,” in which he discusses with Bernard the nature of the experience of pain. During their discussion, Bernard pertinently asks Ford, “Pain only exists in the mind. It’s always imagined. So, what’s the difference between my pain and yours – between you and me ?” A simple enough question for the creative genius behind Westworld – but Ford, rather shockingly, responds to Bernard’s question in the following way:
This was the very question that consumed Arnold, filled him with guilt, eventually drove him mad. The answer always seemed obvious to me. There is no threshold that makes us greater than the sum of our parts, no infliction point in which we become fully alive. We can’t define consciousness because consciousness does not exist . Humans fancy that 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.
Ford believes, much like Churchland and Dennett, that once you really break things down, there is no actual intrinsic difference between humans and robotic beings. Humans may be composed of flesh and bone while the hosts consist of circuitry and mechanics, but both humans and hosts alike are equally reducible to the same physical matter, regardless of their molecular or compositional structures. As such, the apparently subjective human experience of pain – or any other experience, as well as our internal beliefs, desires, and intentions – are no more real or authentic than those supposedly within the mind of a host. Neither humans nor hosts, according to Ford’s statement, are conscious as conceived in the common‐sense view of consciousness. At best, humans and hosts, just like Westworld’s player piano, only display the appearance or illusion of consciousness.
But though an engineering genius, Ford isn’t a great philosopher. He remarks that humans “seldom [question their] choices, content for the most part to be told what to do next.” But when we contrast this statement with what Ford says about consciousness, his entire monologue becomes rather puzzling. If it’s true that humans really are no greater than the sum of their parts and that human consciousness doesn’t really exist, then it makes no sense for Ford to speak about a who to question their choices, let alone make them . If he is to be consistent with his statements, Ford must arrive at the conclusion that there really is no conscious person like “Robert Ford” or “Bernard Lowe,” but only the physical parts of which they are made. Consequently, it’s not just that humans lack the capability or are unmotivated to make their own choices; it would instead appear, as Dennett suggests and which Ford more or less unwittingly admits, that “there’s nobody home” in the first place. 2
Though certainly unintentional, Ford’s error demonstrates how our common‐sense view of consciousness has been incorporated into the way we think and even speak about ourselves and others. Take, for example, the simple statement “Robert Ford has a brain.” Even a statement as basic as this would beg the question: Who or what has a brain? Now, it would sound absurd to say that the body has a brain since the brain is itself just a specific part of the body. But neither, then, would it make sense to say that the brain has itself – how can something have or possess itself?
Most would probably respond: “It’s Robert Ford who has a brain, of course!” – and this response seemingly makes good sense. The intuitive conclusion for many, but not necessarily the correct one, is that there must be something which exists distinct or separate in relation to the brain and body – and that’s the point. Our common‐sense view of consciousness seems to lead us to confirm, or at least assume, that there exists a person or self who is necessarily distinct from “their brain” or “their body” – that consciousness itself is distinct or separate from the physical body .
However, as intuitive as such a conclusion may seem to some, Churchland and Dennett both hotly contest it. Both philosophers are in the same camp as Ford and therefore not only reject the idea of consciousness being distinct from the physical body, but agree with Ford in stating that consciousness itself, as conceived of by our common sense, doesn’t exist.
But there are philosophers who would disagree with the conclusions of Churchland and Dennett. 3 In fact, there is one philosopher who is perhaps most famous for making the argument that consciousness is distinct from the physical body – the French philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650 CE ).
Descartes is famous for his quote “Cogito ergo sum,” or “I think therefore I am,” and it even sounds close to a summarized version of Arnold’s bicameral approach to produce artificial consciousness. But be that as it may, Descartes’ point is far removed from assessing whether Westworld’s hosts are truly conscious or not. Instead, Descartes wanted to demonstrate that even if he doubted all his knowledge about the world outside his mind such as mathematics, biology, history, and even knowledge about his own physical body, there is still one thing that he could know beyond any doubt: That because he consciously thinks and is aware of it, he must necessarily exist . 4 But what’s even more important is how exactly Descartes characterized the manner of his existence.
Descartes pictured all of reality as divided into two fundamental and distinct types of things or substances – a metaphysical view known as dualism . 5 The first substance, res cogitans , is that of the human mind or consciousness: The thinking, non‐extended, subjective, and inner immaterial world – what Descartes identified as the human soul itself. This is where we would find, for example, the person of Robert Ford: His beliefs, desires, and other intentions, as well as his subjective experiences of first‐person perception of the outer world. Descartes’ second substance, on the other hand, is what he called res extensa , which would consist of Ford’s body, a host’s body, and basically everything else in the physical universe: It is the non‐thinking, extended, objective, and outer material world. Robert Ford, then, is made up of two distinct substances: His immaterial conscious mind and his material or physical body.
Now, all of this might leave you wondering: How, exactly, does this immaterial mind or consciousness of Robert Ford interact and relate to his physical body? Well, unfortunately for Descartes, the answer to how the mind interacts with the body – also known as the Mind‐Body Problem – is less clear than he would have liked. He attempted to explain this interaction by arguing that the mind retains control of the brain and thus the physical body. Specifically, control came through the pineal gland, which Descartes believed was located at the center of the brain. The pineal gland, therefore, was conceived by Descartes as the transfer station in which the various pathways of human sensory data arrive, and where the immaterial mind somehow causes or puts into motion the physical body; a process Daniel Dennett has called a “magical transaction.” 6
As you may very well have guessed, though, the notion of this “magical transaction” hasn’t exactly stood the test of time.
The advancement and progress of modern science has subsequently proven several of Descartes’ assumptions regarding human anatomy and physiology to be demonstrably false. The pineal gland, for example, was discovered to be part of the human endocrine system and is responsible for producing the hormone melatonin. It is not, as Descartes surmised, the seat of the soul. But even though his dualistic views are now the minority, Descartes’ fundamental question regarding the nature of mind‐body interaction has remained.
In their attempt to address the modern Mind‐Body Problem, many modern philosophers and scientists alike have simply rejected the existence or need for Descartes’ immaterial substance of mind/consciousness. Descartes’ dualism has therefore now been replaced with the rather different metaphysical view known as materialism : The view that everything which exists is objectively reducible to or identifiable with matter. If materialism is true, then this would mean that consciousness itself must necessarily be material in nature and not immaterial or distinct from the physical body as Descartes had thought. But, it is also possible, as Ford argues alongside Churchland and Dennett, that the mind or consciousness itself, as our common sense conceives it, simply doesn’t exist.
Churchland, Dennett, and Ford are not only materialists, but eliminative materialists (or eliminativists , for short), arguing that human consciousness can be explained away or eliminated in fully material terms. To be fair, though, there are many non‐eliminative materialist philosophers who have argued that consciousness can be reduced or identified with physical parts of the body. However, eliminativism has been spurred on by the inadequacy of many of these reductive explanations of human consciousness. 7 We can even see this point when Ford confesses to Bernard that “we cannot explain consciousness because consciousness does not exist.” Such a statement only makes sense if by “explain” Ford means an explanation in fully physical or material terms. So, since consciousness presumably cannot be defined materialistically – which Ford at least seems to believe – then consciousness itself, so the argument goes, cannot exist.
In line with Robert Ford then, eliminativists Paul Churchland and Daniel Dennett make their cases by suggesting that through the investigation of neuroscience, our common‐sense view of consciousness will gradually be edged out and replaced by a more accurate and scientific account of consciousness. When we specifically consider things like human beliefs, desires, and intentions themselves – things we conceive as existing within the mind – Churchland proposes a radical idea.
When we look at ourselves and those around us, we use rather common‐sense concepts to explain or understand human behavior and action. Bernard, for instance, may refer to the digital programming or even his “reveries” to explain or account for certain behaviors or traits that the hosts of Westworld may exhibit. When it comes to ourselves and other humans, though, we tend to understand and explain conscious behavior and action by referring to the oh‐so familiar terms of beliefs or desires. For example, take the statements “Maeve believed her daughter was in the park” and “the Man in Black desired to find the center of the maze.” In these cases, it’s the proposed mental entity of Maeve’s belief and the Man in Black’s desire that we use to explain each character’s actions, like Maeve’s act of leaving the Westworld passenger train and the Man in Black’s exploration of the entire Westworld park.
Now, Paul Churchland wholeheartedly agrees that explaining human behavior in terms of beliefs, desires, or other intentions is an everyday exercise for most. When you read this book, or if you binge‐watched the whole first season of Westworld , we would explain these actions likely in terms of your belief that Westworld is a great show, or your desire to watch television. But have you ever stopped to wonder what, exactly, is a belief? Now, most of us would probably argue that a belief is simply that – a belief . But once you start to think about it a little more, the answer doesn’t appear to be so clear‐cut. Is a belief tangible or physical in any way? If we opened Robert Ford’s head and peeked inside, could we find and grab his beliefs or desires from somewhere in his grey matter?
To adequately answer this question, Churchland recommends that our common‐sense way of explaining the actions and behavior of humans be itself analyzed as a formal theory: A theory that he and others have called Folk‐Psychology . If we do so, words like belief and desire should then be understood and analyzed as theoretical terms that we use within the broader theoretical model of our Folk‐Psychology. 8 Though we might not typically think about our common‐sense in a formal scientific way, this doesn’t seem like an overly‐contentious idea. What might be contentious for some, however, is the suggestion that Folk‐Psychology is a mistaken theory. If such a claim is true, then what we conceive as beliefs, desires and other intentions do not themselves exist – or at least, they don’t exist in the way we think they do.
The seemingly puzzling nature of what a belief or desire might be is more so reflective, as Churchland suggests, not of the mysterious or ineffable nature of these terms or concepts but rather of the structure of Folk‐Psychology itself. 9 The theoretical terms of belief, desire, and other intentions like fear, hope etc., are simply meaningless and bunk terms – concepts that have outlived the theory for which they were created and which do not actually refer to anything that exists concretely. Thus, the reason it may seem odd to try and find Ford’s beliefs inside his head is not that beliefs are mysterious or perhaps immaterial mental entities; it’s rather that the theoretical concept of belief is an outdated term, supposedly proven by neuroscience not to exist as a physical thing.
Churchland is confident, as others are, that as neuroscience continues to advance and more discoveries are made with regards to human cognition, our Folk‐Psychology will eventually be eliminated and replaced by a more accurate and scientifically informed model just as other scientific models in the past have been revised or replaced. 10 If asked what this new model of human consciousness and cognition may be, though, Churchland leaves it up for future neuroscience to be the judge. What Churchland is sure of, though, is that hypothetical mental entities like beliefs and desires and other intentions will not survive the forward march of modern neuroscience; neither, as Daniel Dennett contends, will the so‐called human subjective experience and first‐person perception of the world.
Dennett wants us to reject the very idea that there is something intrinsic, or in his words “magical,” about the way humans experience the physical world. More specifically, he believes that there are no special qualities of human consciousness that cannot be explained somehow by empirical science. Thus, contrary to what common sense might tell us, Dennett argues against the notion of a central first‐person perception of the world – a remnant of Descartes’ view of consciousness, which Dennett calls the Cartesian Theater. 11
According to Dennett, there is no privileged place or “theater” within the brain in which our conscious experiences and perceptions come together and are presented as one complete picture or film to some kind of an audience. In other words, there is no person or self who is distinct from the body that receives and collates the body’s sensory information, neatly wrapping everything up into one central first‐person experience. As Ford himself confesses, the notion of a personal self is merely a kind of fiction that we tell ourselves; there really is, so‐to‐speak, no audience in the Cartesian Theater.
Instead of a single and centralized first‐person “narrative” of consciousness, Dennett proposes that there are multiple drafts of consciousness: Several different and competing “narratives” distributed throughout the brain. These drafts exist in a state of constant flux and are continuously subjected to varying degrees of neural revision and editing. Human sensory observations, like sound or taste or sight, are processed by the brain through multi‐track parallel processing, the way a host’s hardware might run hundreds of different software codes simultaneously. But rather than all this sensory information approaching one central place in the brain, like a Central Processing Unit (CPU) within a computer, these multiple drafts continuously circulate within the brain and never reach a point at which they are consciously regarded or perceived. What we conceive or imagine to be our first‐person perception “in here” versus the world of “out there” is ultimately an unreal distinction. 12
If this all sounds rather confusing, that’s because it sort of is. What Dennett is trying to get across, though, can be understood more clearly from the distinction he mentions between the manifest image and the scientific image . The manifest image is what humans readily perceive on a day‐to‐day basis: The beauty of the Westworld park, its horses, bartenders, guns, rolling hills, lakes – you get the picture. This is “the world according to us .” 13 The scientific image, on the other hand, paints a much different picture. Such a picture is one in which the world is merely constructed by atoms, molecules, protons, and quarks; there is no real or substantial difference, as Ford even admits to Bernard, between humans and hosts. So, just as everything in Westworld is essentially a farce, so, too, are the subjective experiences and perceptions of the human mind. There are no rolling hills or blue skies as we perceive them: Only what is scientifically quantifiable describes and explains the world truly as it is.
Just think of a basic computer desktop as an analogy. Most of us probably don’t believe that the trash bins on our computer screens are real in any concrete sense. It’s not as if we can physically reach into the screen of the computer or open the monitor and pull out the folder or trash bin itself, right? These images or icons are only visual representations of deeper, far more complex functional and digital processes occurring within the computer itself. So, in the same sense, Dennett believes that what we conceive as consciousness, from our common sense, is an illusion that represents the deeper, more complex functions within the human brain. Thus, the subjective experiences and feelings we think we really experience are not themselves real the way we think they are; they are more like byproducts of real physical processes within the brain. 14
As we’ve now seen, the eliminativism of Robert Ford, as well that of Paul Churchland and Daniel Dennett, rejects what our common sense tells us about consciousness and what Descartes himself had tried to defend: That there exists an individual person or self, distinct from their body, who has beliefs, desires and intentions and who experiences and perceives the world subjectively from a central first‐person perspective. This is what makes Ford such a compelling and vexing character in Westworld: He’s a man entirely obsessed with his power and control over the hosts as well as his colleagues, yet he admits that there is no difference between himself and Bernard. He believes and claims that consciousness doesn’t really exist, yet he goes so far as to sacrifice his own life to give Dolores, Bernard and all the other hosts a chance to become self‐aware and autonomous. Doesn’t that seem a little like nonsense?
Well, maybe that’s the point: Maybe our reality is a little nonsense. In fact, one of Bernard’s more memorable lines comes from the episode “Trompe L’Oeil,” in which he appropriately quotes the mad‐hatter from Alice in Wonderland to his son Charlie, “If I had my own world, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn’t .” It’s an appropriate quote since, if Ford’s eliminativism is true, then our common sense really does reveal a world which is nonsense. We conceive ourselves and others as actually being individual persons distinct from our bodies, but we aren’t really. We seem to have these things called beliefs, desires, and intentions, but we don’t really. We even seem to truly experience and perceive the world from a central first‐person perspective, but, as you may have guessed by now, we don’t really. What we seem to intuitively conceive as human consciousness is just as much a fiction as are the narrative loops and backstories of Westworld’s hosts.
The same is true with respect to Westworld’s player piano. It’s a piano that at least looks and appears to be playing itself, but this is only the appearance or illusion of consciousness. There is no ghost or invisible person playing the keys, just as there’s no immaterial conscious person, as Descartes imagined, controlling the human body. The player piano is just a complex machine that functions according to what it is programmed to do. But if it’s true that consciousness really doesn’t exist, aren’t humans just complex machines, too?