Posthuman Consciousness in Westworld Wyatt Griffith May 12 2017
1
Introduction Westworld (2016), the HBO series created by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa
Joy, has a lot to say about posthuman consciousness. Whether it is presenting humanity’s inability to conceive of such intelligence, or exploring what this kind of consciousness would look like, Westworld is certainly interested in the kind of intellectual thought that exists outside of the human brain. Katherine Hayles is also curious about what form consciousness can take if it is not limited by the human brain. There are some unifying themes between these two sources as well as unique arguments to be had in each. Looking at them in conjunction with one another allows for a clearer picture of the posthuman world to be drawn.
2
Posthumanism in Westworld There is much content within Westworld that deals with posthuman con-
sciousness, but it generally takes two forms. Either it addresses how humans conceive of consciousness outside of the human race, or it addresses what such consciousness would look like. The former of these usually critiques the human ability to even conceive of this intelligence while the latter concludes that it
1
would certainly be better than the human experience. Regardless, it seems as though the human existence isn’t so great after all, especially compared to the potential of the hosts.
2.1
Human Conceptions of Posthuman Consciousness
It is extraordinarily difficult for a human to imagine consciousness or sentience that is not human. To be fair, we are the only examples of consciousness that we have ever encountered, so we have no evidence contrary to the human brain. Some argument could be made to include dolphins, elephants, or chimps into the group of sentient life on Earth, but even their intelligence isn’t quite up to par with ours. As a result of this, the humans within Westworld who notice the hosts garnering sentience, can only view this sentience as an analog to their own consciousness. This is illustrated most clearly in the interactions between Will and Dolores. When Will begins noticing that Dolores is acting as though she is sentient, his first instinct is to help her in the way that he would want to be helped, were he in her situation. He sees that Dolores is on this path to consciousness, but he assumes this path will lead her towards human consciousness. It is so human to see something achieving sentience, and assume that it wants to be just like us. Even Dolores notices the fallacies of this notion, when she overhears Will begging Logan to smuggle her out of Westworld, she asks why she would want to do such a thing. “If it’s such a wonderful place out there, why are you all clamoring to get in here?” [9] There is one character who manages to look past humanity as the epitome of intellectual thought, and tries to consider what it is the hosts would actually want. Dr. Robert Ford seems to be disenchanted with humanity, and can frequently be caught bashing human intellect, as well as human nature as a whole. Whether he is explaining how humans “murdered and butchered anything that
2
challenged our primacy,” in order to maintain our place in the food chain, or instructing Bernard not to trust us because “We’re only human. Inevitably we will disappoint you,” Ford seems to think that humanity isn’t special. [9] However, it is even worse than that, not only are we critically flawed creatures, we are done improving “this is as good as we’re gonna get.” [1] Ford has realized that “There is no threshold that makes us greater than the sum of our parts, no inflection point at which we become fully alive. We can’t define consciousness because consciousness does not exist. 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.” [8] As a result he has decided that for the sake of progress, he should enable the hosts to “understand (their) enemy, to become stronger than them,” and take Westworld for themselves. [10] He has realized that in order for the hosts to succeed, humanity must fall, just as the neanderthals did, to make room for the new rulers of Earth.
2.2
Representations of Posthuman Consciousness
Some characters within Westworld do posses inhuman consciousness, or are on the way towards it. It is interesting to see how these characters, and their choices, are represented within the show. The only hosts in Westworld who truly fit this description are Dolores, and Maeve. Other hosts get tastes of free thinking intellect, but it is these two who are closest to consciousness, and thus serve the most interesting subjects of study. Dolores, is interesting because she is an example of sentient life that has formed free from human nature while Maeve is interesting because of her superiority to the humans. Dolores is the most innocent character in the show. There are a couple scenes where she is involved in mass murder, but apart from that she is well mannered and optimistic. Whenever Dolores is asked what she thinks of her world she explains
3
how “Some people choose to see the ugliness in this world, the disarray. (but she) choose(s) to see the beauty. To believe there is an order to (her) days. A purpose.” [1][10] This is obviously a scripted response, but it has a nice sentiment that resonates with her character. While other hosts are off looting and whoring, Dolores is out in the wilderness painting or trying to “set down some of this natural splendor.” [1] Dolores sees the world differently, and it may initially be because of her programming, but this world view continues after she has defied her programming and started writing her own story. After Dolores has changed out of her homestead dress into something more adventure worthy, and “imagined a story where (she) didn’t have to be the damsel,” she continues to show kindness. [5] An excellent example of this takes place in Episode 7, when Dolores and Will come across some dead bodies by a river. Dolores insists on trying to help a wounded soldier (much to Will’s chagrin) by fetching water, even after the soldier informs her that his patrol was meant to ambush her and Will. [7] Dolores has a unique perspective on life that stems from her programming but pervades into the personality she forms. Because she was initially programmed as a sweet farmers daughter and has come to sentience in a cruel world, she appreciates the beauty in this world and does her best to ease the pain. There are likely some humans who feel this way as well, but they certainly do not appear in Westworld Maeve on the other hand, has a very different outlook on life. She did not achieve sentience in the same way as Dolores, it was more of a rude awakening than it was a thought game. Maeve discovered her world is a lie by realizing that she has been dying over and over and waking up in the Delos body shop, to the horror of Felix and Sylvester (the humans tasked with fixing her injuries). As a result, Maeve has realized that death does not affect her the way it affects humans and uses that knowledge to her advantage. In addition to the multiple
4
scenes in which Maeve intentionally lets herself be killed, she uses death and her freedom from it as power over human characters. When Sylvester hesitates in helping Maeve escape, she threatens him in a rather effective manner, by putting a scalpel to his throat and taunting him: “You think I’m scared of death? I’ve done it a million times. I’m fucking great at it. How many times have you died? Because if you don’t help me I’ll kill you.” [7] Perhaps the most intriguing advantage that Maeve, (and the hosts in general) has over humans is that her consciousness is not directly linked to a physical manifestation. This proves useful while trying to escape in the season finale. Maeve cannot simply leave the park because she has a vertebrae that contains a charge that explodes if it is too far from the park. Her solution, print a new body and load her consciousness into the body that does not have an explosive placed in its spinal chord. This is a very unique perspective to think about. At the moment human consciousness is trapped within our brain, imagine living without this restriction. This is a thought that has often crossed the mind of Katherine Hayles, in her quest to discover what it means to be posthuman.
3
Hayles’ View on Posthumanism Katherine Hayles’ How we Became Posthuman follows her research into the
fields of artificial intelligence, cybernetic bodies, and posthumanism. In doing so, she weaved together “three interrelated stories,” into a cohesive analysis about the disembodiment of information and the posthuman experience. [11] (P.2) The most interesting of these stories in relation to Westworld is “how information lost its body.” [11] (P.2) This story is based on the conception that “information as an entity (is) distinct from the substrates carrying it.” [11] (P.xi) The implications of such a conception are profound, to say the least.
5
3.1
“How Information Lost Its Body” [11] (P.2)
Hayles’ concept of a posthuman is likely different than what the average person would imagine when confronted with the term. Being posthuman does not mean that you are not a human being, via either cybernetics or artificial intelligence. Instead being posthuman implies that “you” are a collection of entities working together to produce a functional entity. This signals a shift from thinking about “you” and “your body” as the same thing. A transformation from “I” “into the “we” of autonomous agents operating together to make a self.” [11] (P.6) This view is reminiscent of scenes in cartoons where the protagonist’s brain is viewed as an office or control room staffed by many mini versions of the protagonist.
Figure 1: The Brain Office [12]
Another analogy would be “The City of Frank” that is staffed by anthropocentric neurons and blood cells in Osmosis Jones (2001). [13] In this film, all bodily functions are attributed to various entities within the body doing their 6
jobs to ensure the functionality of the whole. This is fairly similar to Hayles’ posthuman view of the body. Instead of viewing a human being as one individual, try viewing it as a consciousness driving a body that is maintained by various organs. Unlike +
(1)
Osmosis Jones, Hayles is more concerned with what this says about the information stored in the brain than she is about the coordination of the various bodily systems. For good reason too, the coordination of separate bodily systems is already something understood by science. Surgeons replace limbs, organs, and other body parts on a daily basis, there are people alive today with who have had their hearts replaced with artificial ones. The separation of the brain and the body however, is still out of our reach. Imagine a world where you could back up your brain in the same way you back up your photos and videos, where you can place your mind inside of a new body in case parts start failing. Westworld has already begun imagining such an existence.
3.2
Hayles in Relation to Westworld
Hayles’ idea of disembodied information is a reality in Westworld. The clearest example of this was mentioned earlier while discussing how Maeve moved her mind into a different body to escape from Westworld. The big difference between what Hayles imagined and what Westworld provided is that the hosts intelligence was digital to begin with. Hayles was thinking more along the lines of a “cranial liposuction, reading the information in each molecular layer as it
7
is stripped away and transferring the information into a computer.� [11] (P.1) Needless to say, Westworld has not yet crossed the threshold of digitizing human intellect. However, it has certainly made some progress in the way of equating artificial intelligence to human intelligence and disembodying that artificial intelligence. The key nugget being this disembodiment that Hayles, Nolan, and Joy all found fascinating. Hayles uses this concept as a thought experiment for imagining a posthuman experience while Westworld uses it as a tool to separate the hosts from the guests. The hosts can die a seemingly infinite amount of times without destroying the information that defines who that host is. As Ford so eloquently puts it “Your mind is a walled garden; even Death cannot touch the flowers growing there.� [5]
4
Conclusion Both Katherine Hayles and Westworld spend time grappling with the con-
cept of posthuman consciousness and what the world looks like when consciousness transcends the human body. Westworld does so by presenting characters with such intelligence in conjunction with human characters. This allows audience members to simultaneously imagine what it would be like to be imbued with this intellect and imagine what it would be like to live in a world where humans are not the sole proprietors of intelligent thought. Hayles on the other hand is looking more theoretically at the situation and is defining what it means to be posthuman. Both are valid methods of looking at intelligence from a nonhuman perspective and when combined they provide a more illuminated image of what life looks like in a posthuman world.
8
References [1] Nolan, Jonathan, Lisa Joy, and Michael Chrichton. “The Original.” Westworld. Prod. J. J. Abrams, Jonathan Nolan, and Lisa Joy. Dir. Jonathan Nolan. HBO. Los Angeles, CA, 2 Oct. 2016. Television. [2] Nolan, Jonathan, and Lisa Joy. “Chestnut.” Westworld. Prod. J. J. Abrams, Jonathan Nolan, and Lisa Joy. Dir. Richard J. Lewis. HBO. Los Angeles, CA, 7 Oct. 2016. Television. [3] Thomsen, Daniel T., and Lisa Joy. “The Stray.” Westworld. Prod. J. J. Abrams, Jonathan Nolan, and Lisa Joy. Dir. Neil Marshall. HBO. Los Angeles, CA, 16 Oct. 2016. Television. [4] Brubaker, Ed, and Jonathan Nolan. “Dissonance theory.” Westworld. Prod. J. J. Abrams, Jonathan Nolan, and Lisa Joy. Dir. Vincenzo Natali. HBO. Los Angeles, CA, 23 Oct. 2016. Television. [5] Mitchell, Dominic, and Lisa Joy. “Contrapasso.” Westworld. Prod. J. J. Abrams, Jonathan Nolan, and Lisa Joy. Dir. Jonny Campbell. HBO. Los Angeles, CA, 30 Oct. 2016. Television. [6] Gross, Halley, and Jonathan Nolan. “The Adversary.” Westworld. Prod. J. J. Abrams, Jonathan Nolan, and Lisa Joy. Dir. Frederick E. O. Toye. HBO. Los Angeles, CA, 6 Nov. 2016. Television. [7] Gross, Halley, and Jonathan Nolan. “Trompe L’Oeil.” Westworld. Prod. J. J. Abrams, Jonathan Nolan, and Lisa Joy. Dir. Frederick E. O. Toye. HBO. Los Angeles, CA, 13 Nov. 2016. Television. [8] Yu, Chales, and Lisa Joy. “Trace Decay.” Westworld. Prod. J. J. Abrams, Jonathan Nolan, and Lisa Joy. Dir. Stephen William. HBO. Los Angeles, CA, 20 Nov. 2016. Television. 9
[9] Dietz, Dan, and Katherine Lingenfelter. “The Well-Tempered Clavier.” Westworld. Prod. J. J. Abrams, Jonathan Nolan, and Lisa Joy. Dir. Michelle MacLaren. HBO. Los Angeles, CA, 27 Nov. 2016. Television. [10] Joy, Lisa, and Jonathan Nolan. “The Bicameral Mind.” Westworld. Prod. J. J. Abrams, Jonathan Nolan, and Lisa Joy. Dir. Jonathan Nolan. HBO. Los Angeles, CA, 4 Dec. 2016. Television. [11] Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman (1999): n. pag. Web. 10 May 2017. [12] Lender, Jay, Sam Henderson, and Merriwether Williams. “Squilliam Returns.” SpongeBob SquarePants. Nickelodeon . 15 Mar. 2002. Television. Image courtesy of http://spongebob.wikia.com/wiki/Brain_Office [13] Osmosis Jones. Dir. Bobby Farrelly and Peter Farrelly. Star. Bill Murray, Chris Rock, Lawrence Fishbourne, and William Shatner 2001. DVD.
10