, Series 2, HBO, to 24 June
IF YOU have yet to catch Westworld (fast approaching the end of season 2), here鈥檚 why everyone from your friends to serious philosophers have been raving about it, or even writing long, serious essays on the issues that it raises.
Westworld is set in a near future where, for a price, you can visit a super-realistic Wild West theme park in which the hosts are played by convincingly humanoid robots. As in the 1973 film on which the show is based, the robots are flesh on the outside, but machine inside. Westworld鈥榮 visuals are stunning, and the tone set to deadly earnest.
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Inside the park, you can do what you like to the hosts, even if what you like is committing rape and murder. When the guests leave, the saloon gets cleaned, the robots are stitched up and have their memories wiped 鈥� and it all begins again. Reset.
Philosophers and psychologists are still wrestling with the morality of Westworld. If the robots are only programmed to feel pain, if it鈥檚 not 鈥�real pain鈥�, is it wrong to hurt them? Would you hurt them? Would people you know hurt them? We need answers to these questions 鈥� and soon 鈥� when out in the real world, robots already look half-convincing and can hold pretty good conversations.
And then there are the tough problems of consciousness and self-determination. Again, this is a big deal when, thanks to the billions being spent globally on brain research projects, scientists are working to understand human consciousness and the nature of such things as free will.
Westworld circles and recircles these questions. It is a brutal show at times 鈥� a line from Romeo and Juliet keeps being repeated in the first season: 鈥淭hese violent delights have violent ends.鈥� At other times, though, it is slow and meditative as we close in on the nature of these robots.
They think they are 鈥渞eal鈥�, but we know they have been programmed by humans, that their memories are frequently false and almost always patchy, and that everything they say is from a script. It is a flexible, adaptive one, but still a script. We hear them repeat the same words over and over as each new group of guests arrive.
Yet the robots seem conscious, even if their memories are being messed with, and they have at least the illusion of free will. Robert Ford, co-creator of the theme park (played by Anthony Hopkins), references the bicameral mind, advanced in the 1970s by psychologist Julian Jaynes, when he explains how he achieved these states of mind in the robots. They are programmed to hear guiding voices in their heads, voices that they might eventually believe to be their own.
鈥淎re the robots truly human 鈥� a new species of us 鈥� now they are writing their own story?鈥�
Sure enough, as the show evolves, so do the robots. Some of them have been in the park a long time now. How many times has Dolores, the rancher鈥檚 daughter (played by Evan Rachel Wood, and pictured above), been attacked and killed, and then put back together? The robots start to remember that this isn鈥檛 their first time around the block. They wake from their dream. They go off-script. Are they truly human 鈥� a new species of us 鈥� now they are writing their own story?
This is Westworld, though, where nothing is simple. In fact, it is frequently beyond baffling, chopping up timelines like there鈥檚 no tomorrow, or maybe no yesterday. It is possible the robots have merely been programmed to 鈥渨ake up鈥�. Maybe their new lines were written for them, just like the old ones were. Maybe their new-found free will is nothing of the sort. But it is also possible that the same goes for all humans, even the old-fashioned, all-flesh kind. Somewhere in this dazzlingly difficult puzzle lies the genius of Westworld.
This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淭hese violent delights鈥�
