Madeline Muntersbjorn
Westworld (2016) picks up narrative threads from previous builds of Michael Chrichton’s theme park to weave a cinematic tapestry, a woof of Western nostalgia over and under a time warp of science‐fiction dystopia. The show relies on layers of contrasts – man/machine, choice/habit, self/other – sent up like so many clay pigeons to be shot down by so many guns, plot twists, and shocking revelations that inspire avid viewers to re‐watch earlier episodes through new eyes. This chapter discusses Westworld in light of perennial philosophical questions and two specific conjectures put forth by Annette C. Baier (1929–2012). One of Baier’s conjectures connects our capacity for self‐conscious awareness to our personal interactions growing up; another connects our capacity for personal freedom to shared habits of cross‐examination. Our integrity as individuals depends upon a robust network of fellows; our capacity to make choices depends upon these fellows’ willingness to challenge, rather than reinforce, the lies we tell ourselves about who we are. As in the most fruitful hybrids of literary and philosophical analysis, Baier helps us understand Westworld better and vice versa.
As a philosopher I am often asked, “Do you think people have free will?” My impulsive reply, “Are you asking how many of my beliefs about freedom have I internalized from my culture and how many reflect free choices I have made?” The inner voice of weary experience suggests this elaborate re‐articulation is not what folks want. People prefer simpler answers but the best short answer to the question is probably “it depends.” Do people direct the course of their lives? Or are there paths each must walk according to some master plan? On my view, freedoms come in kinds and degrees. Humans have less freedom than they realize but more freedom than they exercise. That is, people think they routinely make free choices even though, as Ford says, “we live in loops as tight and as closed as the hosts” (“Trace Decay”). Humans, like Westworld’s hosts, could live more free lives but only if we confront the extent to which we are vulnerable to the power of suggestion and other external constraints. Understandably, we may be reluctant to admit that our selves are fictions made possible by our interactions with others. Yet a more horrible fate would be for our exquisite dependence upon others to go unnoticed. We cannot free ourselves from shackles we cannot see because, “that doesn’t look like anything to me.”
My next remarks concern intelligent machines, specifically androids that resemble human beings. How shall we regard our not‐so‐imaginary mechanical friends: Shall we look forward to their care? Or fear they will rise up and exact their revenge? Some argue that, given enough time, people will construct genuinely intelligent machines while others insist that any artificially intelligent beings we may bring forth will remain soulless automata, serving at the behests of women‐born people. 1 On my view, very little is obviously or necessarily true about the kinds of people the future may bring. As a general rule, however, we cannot treat others as beneath contempt and expect them to regard us in a better light. Android stories remind us that if all we teach our offspring to do is gratify carnal desire, suffer, maim, kill, grieve, and die, then that is all we can expect them to do. The Golden Rule shines so brightly in Westworld that it trumps the park’s premise that wealthy guests may “live without limits” within Westworld’s borders. There are always consequences, whether we stick to the storylines we are given or make up our own narratives as we go along.
My final remarks are inspired by how distinct Westworld’s characters are from each other, and how fresh and real their agonies feel despite reliance on well‐worn tropes. The question, “What is Westworld about?” is perhaps not as interesting as the question, “Who is Westworld about?” How we answer this second question helps us answer my final question, “What attracts so many viewers to this horrific show?” The more we learn to see the power of interpersonal interactions to shape who we think we are, the better placed we become to recognize the power of imaginary people, especially those make‐believe fellows who we can recognize as unique individuals, rather than stock characters or interchangeable stereotypes, whose suffering brings us pain and whose joy fills us with delight.
In Fred Foster and Kris Kristofferson’s 1969 song, “Me and Bobby McGee,” a young couple travel cross‐country, singing the blues for rides along the way. The song’s refrain, “freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose,” suggests that the more things we have the more beholden to them we become. We hear talk about this kind of freedom a lot these days, as folks downsize by getting rid of unnecessary things. “We want to spend less on square footage and more on travel” or “We want to spend more on memories and less on things” are presumably sincere sentiments and not lines of dialogue scripted by service economy executives in support of the experience industry. But consider this conception of freedom in light of Westworld’s animatronic hosts. These beings seem to have nothing to lose, not even their own lives, for they can be rebuilt and brought back online again and again. Whether we see them as sympathetic persons or ambivalent others, during most of the first season of Westworld none of the hosts is “free” in any ordinary sense of the word despite having neither possessions nor obligations. Hosts are given names, backstories, and motivations as well as desires and memories. These past lives were never lived and their imagined futures never come to pass. Hosts exist to provide experiences for others and are not free to stray outside their zones. If a guest would like to play “Me” while a host plays “Bobby McGee,” that host may taste the freedom that comes from an unscripted life on the road, just as Dolores was permitted to “run away” with William. Eventually, all guests leave and all hosts stay; even the most besotted guests must let their beloved hosts slip away.
Hosts are built to explode if they cross the park’s borders, both to restrict their movements and to prevent them from being stolen. Built in the image of Daedalus’ marvels, “if they are not fastened up they play truant and run away; but, if fastened, they stay where they are.” 2 In Plato’s dialogue from the fourth century BCE , Socrates refers to the artistry of a mythical forebear, a sculptor so talented his statues not only looked like living things but also moved like living things. Socrates invokes animated statues to distinguish between mere opinion, which cannot be relied upon to stick around, and genuine knowledge, which is what results when opinion is bound, “when fastened up it is worth a great deal, for his productions are very fine things”. 3 Hosts may or may not be persons but they are usually property, specifically intellectual property, and have been for millennia.
If hosts display any sign of unscripted self‐awareness, they are stripped of their clothes and memories, lobotomized and fridged in a macabre underground storage facility like some creepy Terracotta Army where every body is naked, their ranks in disarray, like so many zip‐drive zombies assembled to assist Westworld’s first emperor in his afterlife. Once decommissioned, beings with barely any freedom to begin with have even less. Deprived of their delusions, their unattainable aspirations are replaced by an even more horrific fate, their bodies tethered to a smaller darker space. Of course biological guests have more freedom than their mechanical hosts because the rules of the game are rigged in their favor. Obvious metaphor for institutional evils is obvious. The subtler lesson is that some hosts are freer than others because they are free to believe in lies about who they are, provided they stay in their scripted loops at home on their assigned range.
Westworld calls our attention to the fact that freedom comes in kinds as well as in degrees, something philosophers have been trying to explain for as long as we can remember. There is the freedom of the road; humans vary with respect to how much they can direct the course of their lives as well as how much freedom they have to travel. The less exciting freedom to make commitments and incur obligations is not evenly distributed either. One of the most overlooked freedoms is aptly named by Baier, “The vital but dangerous art of ignoring: selective attention and self‐deception.” In this 1996 essay she writes,
Pseudorationality is the saving consolation of would be rational animals who are fairly well equipped to understand the world they are part of, but not perfectly so, particularly when it comes to understanding their own motives and aspirations. 4
Of course, Baier is not referring to free‐range hosts who manage to stay above ground but human beings in general insofar as selective attention and self‐deception are skills upon which we all rely. As Bernard says, “I suppose self‐delusion is a gift of natural selection as well.” “Indeed it is,” Ford replies in the first episode, “The Original,” a reference both to Dolores, the first host, as well as the original sin of disobedience that resulted in humanity’s expulsion from paradise, burdened with the knowledge of good and evil, as we see happen to Dolores’ father.
One of the premises that makes Westworld work is that hosts are programmed to ignore anything that might disrupt their continued belief in who they are meant to be. As Ford explains, “They cannot see the things that will hurt them” (“Tromp L’Oeil”). When a young visitor to the park says to Dolores, “You’re not real,” she acts like she does not notice. When guests use words that could not mean anything to hosts, like “carry‐on” or “car,” a properly functioning host will insist, “that did not mean anything to me.” Baier points out an important moral difference between two kinds of not knowing, feigned ignorance and selective ignoring. Dolores ignores the young visitor but that does not mean she does not know what he means. Similarly, Hector may not know what cars or carry‐ons are, but he did not ignore the guest who threatened to turn him into a hood ornament as he could repeat their words verbatim. Being able to ignore things is a vital cognitive skill because we cannot pay attention to everything at once and make sense of the world at the same time. To understand anything we must foreground some things while ignoring others.
Shifting things to the background is not the same as denying that those things exist, however. Ignoring becomes dangerous when we mistake an acquired habit of pushing unwanted evidence to the side for actual ignorance. Consider the smoker who insists, “I don't know why it’s taking me so long to get over this cough.” Or the student who did not turn in assignments who laments, “I don’t know why I failed this class.” Acquired ignorance from a habit of ignoring unfavorable evidence may keep a host in service but cannot help anyone recover from ills we bring upon ourselves. A student who says, “that doesn’t look like anything to me,” when confronted with the syllabus sabotages their chances of scholarly success. Since we cannot always discern where our actual ignorance stops and maladaptive ignoring kicks in, we rely on other people to call us out when we pretend to know nothing about things we habitually ignore. Like Ford, and presumably Arnold before him, “One needs to retire from the human world if one really wants sustained success in personal selfdeceptions.” 5 Alternatively, like many others in Westworld , we can keep our ignorance intact by surrounding ourselves with like‐minded fellows who “have the same motives for the very same deception that we have.” 6 (Ibid.). Part of the reason hosts are less free than guests is not because they are “mere machines” but because most of their interpersonal encounters are deliberately scripted to prevent them from questioning the nature of their reality.
Those who want to question the nature of their reality need feedback from other people if they want to find liberating answers. Those who retire from the human world so as to minimize contact with others also limit the scope of possible belief revision to the biased imagination of one perspective. René Descartes (1596–1650) famously withdrew from society to see how far he could advance his understanding of reality using naught but his own thought. Less famously, he raised the challenge of humanoid robots, wherein we are expected to grant, on the basis of sketchy evidence, that we are persons living amongst other people. On the second of his six days of private contemplation in his Meditations , Descartes has retreated so far into his own mind, he imagines looking out of the window to see folks walking in the streets. “And yet what do I see from the window but hats and coats which may cover automatic machines? Yet I judge these to be men.” 7 Descartes’ point is not that this possibility is likely but that we must see beyond surface appearances in order to recognize people as such. Our vision only gives us information about ambling shapes in winter garb. Could they be un‐tethered descendants of Daedalus? In seventeenth‐century Holland, Descartes makes the mental leap and infers they are human beings. Guests and employees of Delos, however, must leap in different directions. Perhaps the primary reason hosts are naked while being serviced is not because they have no shame (though that is probably true) or because nudity is HBO’s stock and trade (though that is definitely true) but so the maintenance teams behind the scenes can more readily tell who or what is who.
In the opening scene of Crichton’s original Westworld (1973), a Delos employee interviews a guest returning from Westworld:
MR. LEWIS :
INTERVIEWER :
MR. LEWIS :
This exchange sets out the essential tension in every version of this story. On the one hand, guests are drawn to the park precisely because every experience they have feels more real than the make‐believe games of childhood and the routine rigors of adulthood. On the other hand, Mr. Lewis’s “leap of faith” is more like a revealing stagger backwards. The advertisement entices viewers with the prospect of getting to really shoot people dead without killing any real people. In Westworld (2016) guests are advised to stay at the resort “decompressing” after their adventures to help them transition from “the reality that felt so fantastic” to the “fantasy that felt so real” by swapping stories with other guests.
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) in his 1948 book Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits raises the possibility of intelligent machines and extends Descartes’s observations about the limits of observation:
There is no theoretical limit to what ingenuity could achieve in the way of producing the illusion of life where in fact life is absent.
But, you will say, in all such cases it was the thoughts of human beings that produced the ingenious mechanism. Yes, but how do you know this? And how do you know that the gramophone does not “think”? 8
While Descartes asked us to consider how we come to believe that others are thinking beings such as ourselves, Russell asks, in addition, why we do not believe the same thing about recording devices that “remember impeccably what So‐and‐so said on such‐and‐such an occasion.” 9 Russell suggests we attribute self‐conscious awareness to beings that look like us by reasoning by analogy. Whenever I am thirsty, I get a drink; that being shaped like me is getting a drink therefore she must be thirsty. Both Russell and Descartes take self‐consciousness for granted. The problem they try to solve is sometimes called “the problem of other minds.” How do we come to believe that minds other than our own exist? The problem with this approach to the problem is that self‐consciousness is not nearly as simple as “I think therefore I am.”
For one thing, neither humans nor hosts stop existing when we sleep or stop thinking for any other reason. In her 1981 essay “Cartesian Persons,” Baier writes,
This fact should have given Descartes more pause than it did, for nothing in what he takes to be the essence of a thinking substance explains this rhythm of consciousness, this periodic tiring and lapse into an inferior level of consciousness. … To be mad is to be faulty by interpersonal standards of mental performance, but to be asleep, and to dream, is to sink into a state which is not temporary madness, since no interpersonal testing can go on then … 10
In the first section, we considered self‐deception and how much we rely upon others to fact‐check our beliefs about the world. Here, we consider how much we rely upon others to acquire knowledge about our selves as persons in the world.
Hosts endure rigorous interpersonal checks of their mental performance. Middle‐class intellectuals, the go‐betweens that pimp hosts to wealthy guests are tasked with their routine maintenance. Behavior techs ask hosts, “Do you know where you are?” The correct answer is, “I am in a dream.” One difference between hosts and humans is that when hosts are “in a dream” they do not lapse into an individual level of consciousness because they are held to interpersonal standards designed to make sure they have no idea who or what they really are. When asked, “Do you ever question the nature of your reality?” hosts are supposed to say “no.” Some pithy statement of their life’s philosophy may be part of their script. Hosts that cheerfully warble back optimism or grimly aver nihilism are sent back into the park to say these same things over and over again.
One of Baier’s best insights is that we are all second persons first. That is, we must be addressed as “you” and learn to address others as “you” before we develop any sense of who “I” or “we” are:
A person, perhaps, is best seen as one who was long enough dependent upon other persons to acquire the essential arts of personhood. Persons essentially are second persons, who grow up with other persons. … The fact that a person has a life history, and that a people collectively has a history, depends upon the humbler fact that each person has a childhood in which a cultural heritage is transmitted, ready for adolescent rejection and adult discriminating selection and contribution. Persons come after and before other persons. 11
Toddler tantrums and “I don’t want to!” outbursts are often taken as evidence that we are born self‐conscious and selfish. From the second person’s first view, tantrums reveal how vexing it is to realize not only that the world is not as you want it to be but also that you, the one who wishes it were otherwise, exist and must deal. Hosts do not have childhoods, of course. They awaken, as if from a dream, infants in fully‐grown bodies with so much baggage already, the poor dears. Significantly, some hosts appear to acquire access to erased memories of genuine suffering around which they start to develop their own senses of self. Consider what Dolores says in the season finale before she becomes more self‐aware:
I’m in a dream. I do not know when it began or whose dream it was. I know only that I slept a long time. And then … one day I awoke. Your voice is the first thing I remember.
(“The Bicameral Mind”)
The voice she remembers is that of her creator, Arnold, who engages tête‐à‐tête with Dolores. When Arnold realizes his creation is on the precipice of self‐consciousness, he uses her to kill them both and all the other hosts. He tells her she must do this hideous thing or the park will open to the public and she and her kind will suffer even more horrible fates in the hands of human depravity. Alas, for Our Mechanical Lady of Perpetual Sorrows, both scenarios come to pass.
Repeat customers remind newly arrived guests they must not cry when our android hosts suffer and die because they are not real, not like you and me. But “real” is a slippery adjective, as J.L. Austin reminds us in Sense and Sensibilia, a seminal work in ordinary language philosophy. Austin thought anyone who wanted to understand reality would do well to pay attention to how people use words like “real” and “really.” We must always ask, not real what , exactly, and recall that “something which is not a real duck is not a non‐existent duck.” 12 Not real cream may be real non‐dairy creamer and both differ from so much “milk” spilling out the bullet‐riddled side of a rogue robot. For the puppet masters pulling the strings in Westworld, spilt milk is worth crying over only when it signals a host has deviated too far from their script.
Every morning when Dolores wakes up, she rides into town and drops a can of milk. What happens next varies depending on whether anyone picks that can up. By sundown her slaughtered family may lie in pools of their own blood mixed with milk spilt by an outlaw dismayed he cannot find something better to drink. That may be too bad for her but at least it’s in the script. Walter is “homicidal by design.” He’s meant to kill Rebus for the umpteenth time. But when Walter goes rogue, pouring milk into the gaping maw of Rebus’ fresh corpse, shouting “A growin’ boy! A growin’ boy!” – something no host ever can ever be – then it’s off to cold storage for him. Suddenly, the young man who was such a horrifying monster moments ago becomes a sympathetic shell of his former self. Much as we love to see evil punished, the more impressive narrative trick is to make us feel compassion for the bad guys. We shudder as monstrous humans and hosts play out their hideous fictions but shed tears as they meet their even more horrible fates.
The hosts aren’t real human beings; but could they be real people, individual beings with personal beliefs, fears, and desires? Their backstories are inaccurate, incomplete, and co‐written by others; they have limited powers of improvisation and scant inclination to go off script; if they veer too far from the storylines written for them they are retired; they frequently power down only to be brought back online, by processes they do not understand, to live whatever lives their programming allows. But if we withhold personhood from beings bound by these constraints, would any humans qualify as people? Perhaps the most salient moral of Westworld is that agency and purpose come in endless varieties, wondrous to behold. You can choose to see the beauty in this world despite repeatedly suffering the grossest injustices. You can have brilliant insights into the intricacies of human behavior yet be mistaken about what motivates your own behavior. Ford, an old white man, sees himself as a divine architect, supreme ruler over all he surveys. Hale, a young black woman, is an authoritarian diva, unimpressed with the view and dismayed that Ford holds so much of her company’s actual value hostage inside his dumb resort. In Westworld , even the powerful narcissists with delusions of grandeur are not cut from the same cloth and do not seek the same ends.
The constraints upon Westworld’s residents and guests remind us that humans live in inherited institutions and internalize one another’s ideas. We need each other to help distinguish true knowledge from mere opinion even as we also need help maintaining our delusions, especially those that keep us alive. We need other people to keep us honest about what we ought to ignore and what we deny at our peril. Humans rely on horror stories, in general, to remind us of this difference especially when, “the call is coming from inside the house,” or from our limited ability to know things about our minds we urgently need to confront. Android stories, in particular, help us remember that if we want future generations to treat us kindly, we must treat them with kindness first. If Baier is correct and if androids ever do become persons “just like us” then they too will be second persons first.