When HBO announced that the fourth season of the network’s cowboys and A.I. thriller Westworld would be the series’ last, it brought the puzzle-box of the show to a seemingly definitive conclusion. Fans and critics are now left to make sense of the series’ myriad mysteries.
Some of these mysteries revolve around the multiple tangled storylines and the ever-evolving characters. Most, though, center on the complex themes that defined the series from the start, questions like: What is the nature of consciousness? Do we have free will? Do others experience reality in the same way we do?
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Below, we take a brief look at some of these questions and the ways the series addressed them prior to ending before season five.
Determinism vs. Free Will
HBO
The central premise of Westworld is that at some point in the not-too-distant future, visitors pay top dollar to frolic in a wild west theme park populated by hyperrealistic robots, called Hosts. The first episode reveals that these hosts are not merely mindless automata, though, and in fact experience their own consciousnesses in ways that are fundamentally human.
What they don’t understand (or, more accurately, are not allowed to understand) is that their behaviors are entirely predetermined. Their actions are controlled by the computer programmers and writers at the theme park who put them through repetitive, often violent and degrading storylines in order to satisfy the park’s customers.
By season four, the tables are turned, and it is the hosts using humans for entertainment, but even before this, the problem of knowing whether our actions are truly our own was one of Westworld’s central concerns. The seeming impossibility of ever knowing for certain where our thoughts and decisions come from has haunted people for thousands of years, from older philosophers from Socrates, Spinoza, and Locke to newer ones like William James, Sam Harris, and Daniel Wegner. From the beginning, Westworld used their hosts to join in this discourse, speculating that it isn’t just the hosts who had limitations to their control.
Consciousness and the Bicameral Mind
One of the more fascinating and obscure ideas that Westworld uses to explore questions of free-will and determinism is that of the bicameral mind. The bicameral mind was an idea first put forward by American psychologist Julian Jaynes, who believed that throughout the earliest parts of human history, we didn’t experience consciousness in the same way we do today. Instead, Jaynes, claimed that early humans felt compelled by auditory hallucinations that they often misidentified as gods or other outside forces.
In the world of Westworld, the humans’ control over the minds of the hosts is presented as an analogous phenomenon, and the arrival of full, true sentience in the hosts as the equivalent of the arrival of modern self-consciousness in humans.
Jayne’s theories are not widely supported, to say the least, but they present an interesting opening into what philosopher David Chalmers called “the hard problem” of consciousness: the difficulty of understanding how qualia, our subjective experience of being alive, arises in the brain.
As the name suggests, the hard problem of consciousness has proven remarkably difficult to explain. Westworld’s willingness to delve into such a complex and irresolvable issue has been the source of a lot of the series’ complexity and many of the more interesting ideas that it explored over the course of four seasons.
Transhumanism and the Reality of the Other
Westworld’s exploration of consciousness also connects nicely with its interest in transhumanism, the idea that human beings will at some point join with technology in order to transcend the limits of our biological existence.
This is most evident in the character of William, the first season’s “Man in Black,” seeking to unravel the park’s mysteries, and the park’s co-founder Robert Ford. For each of these men, artificial intelligence holds the prospect of immortality, but more than that, the prospect of controlling the consciousness of themselves and others in order to create the reality they desire.
While this deployment of artificial intelligence and transhumanism is Westworld’s most outright science-fictional element, it is also the thing that most closely connects the show to the themes of traditional Westerns.
Westworld and the Western
Warner Bros.
Classic Western movies, in the tradition of John Ford and John Wayne, are preoccupied with the idea of “winning the West,” essentially re-casting the European colonization of North America as a heroic triumph, and doing this, in large part, by making it the story of a rugged individual overcoming the deadly challenges of the frontier.
Among these “challenges” were the Indigenous people who were being colonized and killed. Typically depicted in grossly offensive and dehumanizing ways, Natives are foils for the Western protagonist, an opportunity for him to realize his own humanity and heroism, often in counterpoint to their lack of these things.
In Westworld’s updated take on this motif, the hosts take the place of the subjugated victims of Western heroes who are now no more than tourists. In both cases, these groups are presented as entities known as “philosophical zombies.” Unlike their horror counterparts, philosophical zombies (or P-zombies, as Chalmers has termed them) have a perfectly normal, perfectly human outward appearance, while lacking an inner experience of consciousness.
While many films from the 1970s onward sought to correct or at least address the mistreatment of Indigenous peoples in both the west and in Westerns, Westworld is unique in addressing this aspect in particular. As the hosts are revealed to have their own rich inner lives, their exploitation in the park becomes increasingly unpleasant for viewers. In later seasons, as it is the human characters who are denied agency and full human reality, the metaphors of Westworld come full circle: rather than focusing on the ways computers might attain consciousness, it becomes a story of the way we deny this full reality to other people.
The show’s producers reportedly had planned on using season five to tie up the series’ various plotlines, but even without it, the show has left plenty for viewers to think about going forward.
