Westworld - Hopkins, robots, six-guns

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Bakker is a novelist, not a scientist. His theory is seriously challenge by actual cognitive scientists. you might like it, but it is not necessarily true, nor does it reflect a consensus in the scientific community. It is as mumbo jumbo as the concept of soul. A pure hypothesis without way to experimentally verify it.

Different scientific fields define consciousness differently, to the point that, yes, there is not an established definition. And, until we have an externally verifiable definition, conscience can only be defined by that which we experience as conscience. It’s, in its root, a purely philosophical term. But there’s nothing spiritual about it, just epistemological (we experience it, so it’s a “real” experience).

To be clear, current neuroscience does not claim that consciousness is an illusion, just that it does not provide intentionality (that is, that it is the byproduct of a decision making process, not the process that makes the decision). That is, current neuroscience experiments seem to point towards what we commonly define as free will not existing. But note that this says nothing about the existence of our experience of consciousness. That experience is still there. The only thing this challenges is the meaning of that experience.

Thus, it is easy to see how you can have a distinction between a conscious and an unconscious process with the same result. Again the chinese room experiment. It is trivial to imagine a decision making process so distanced from our own that creates the same result (undistinguishable from a person) without any internal experience of self, as long as the process is indeed designed to fake the appearance of an internal conscious process.

I can write a basic Javascript program that writes “I am in pain”. At the same time I can write “I am in pain” and really be in pain. One of the lines reflects a real conscious internal state and the other is just a copy of it through a non-creative process. Should the javascript program have rights?

You say that the hosts react to everything around them as a human does. I say we are just seeing them react as a human, but what drives them to that reaction could a a different process through which they don’t experience consciousness as we do.

Now, whether that is important or not, that they share that perception of self we do, is open to debate.

If the hosts are indeed conscious then the subject of the show is indeed people in chains, and only to an extent. But there is a lot of stuff, specially in Ford’s dialog, that puts out the possibility of the hosts not being more than glorified puppets playing back prerecorded behavior designed to fool guests into believing they are real.

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[quote=“Juan_Raigada, post:363, topic:75914, full:true”]
Bakker is a novelist, not a scientist. His theory is seriously challenge by actual cognitive scientists. you might like it, but it is not necessarily true, nor does it reflect a consensus in the scientific community. It is as mumbo jumbo as the concept of soul. A pure hypothesis without way to experimentally verify it.[/quote]

Bakker is currently in cahoots with both Dennett and Metzinger, who have encouraged along the years to step out of his soapbox and publish something. In fact I think it’s next year that an article will be published on a scientific journal.

There is a pretty substantial consensus. In fact it takes a lot of effort to still find people in the scientific field who still believe consciousness can be salvaged somewhere.

I also think a lot of recent effort from Bakker is to pin down ways to verify the theory. It’s a work in progress same as everything in this field.

You keep chasing the tail of the problem. There’s no externally verifiable definition because consciousness IS experience. They are all placeholders for the same concept.

You can scroll down here where it describes the Mary experiment by Frank Jackson. That has also been solved today.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia-knowledge/

No one says experience “doesn’t exist”. The challenge is to explain it. That’s what Bakker does.

When you say the sun runs around the earth you say how it looks. Proving that the earth actually goes around doesn’t mean the movement didn’t exist, just that you have re-contextualized it. The same will happen with human consciousness.

The chines room experiment has been debunked so many times no one takes it seriously anymore. For example Dennett again:

Yes, and this won’t fool anyone believing your program is conscious.

We cannot reproduce consciousness because we don’t have enough information about how a brain works. You cannot “mimic” function unless you know how it works.

And unless your copy is IDENTICAL, you won’t obtain exact behavior under all circumstances, unless you believe there’s something in a human brain that is superfluous and could be cut out without consequences.

So the day you can simulate exact human behavior likely is the day you’ve built an artificial human.

I will point you again to the Ship of Theseus philosophical problem. All this stuff you’re talking about has already been exhaustively explained.

Exactly as in the history of humanity people felt entitled to enslave what they considered lesser human beings without dignity just to please their own petty needs. It’s exactly Westworld scenarios.

But that’s also the point. It’s because Bakker is a novelist that he has the tools to bridge the gap and explain to an audience the implications of modern scientific theories. That’s what Westworld is supposed to do when it takes a scientific concept and tries to make popular and accessible.

It’s doing a terrible job, in my opinion. It’s creating plenty of confusion and doesn’t provide any insight. And this is a VERY big deal exactly because someone like Trump represents exactly that: anti-science.

The next step is make everyone believe in creationism. Westworld isn’t helping with the concepts it is touching.

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Wrong. Again you seem to be missing the whole concept of black boxes and their applications to software engineering. A neural network (self learning code, in general, but this is probably the more generic application) is designed precisely to mimic an outcome that can’t be isolated and solved by analytical means.

You can mimic something using a method that has nothing to do with the process mimicked, and understanding only the mimicking process but not the mimicked one. This is not philosophy, this is hard maths (of course, the computational cost of this mimicking can be order of magnitudes bigger than the possible analytical solution (it’s bound to be) so it’s not efficient, but its a real phenomenon).

Which is exactly why the hosts don’t behave exactly like human beings in all circumstances. They could be just competent enough fakes.

And the Chinese room though experiment has not been debunked. It’s been challenged, and it’s been defended. It is still pretty fundamental to the discussion. The link you provides is simply an attack on the precise formulation of the though experiment (a person in a room) but it does not challenge the underlying nature of it.

You seem to take one side in a scientific discussion that is still ongoing, claiming that side is unequivocally right. I’m just saying the jury is still out and you can’t cherry pick your sources.

Bakker explains what a purely internal experience is without any way to experimentally test if it’s description is correct. That’s not science, that’s philosophy, and thus it is neither right nor wrong. It’s just an approach to a problem that you happen to agree with.

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You’re talking of philosophical zombies, this too has been solved :)

Which is kind of the point. We’ve tried to salvage consciousness for hundred of years. It’s really, really unlikely to come up with a new idea no one considered before.

But we are talking about Westworld. And if Westworld wants to play with the concept of hosts not having consciousness, then it HAS TO SAY HOW.

It cannot hand wave it, state the hosts have no consciousness without any motivation for this thesis. It’s wildly incoherent and why I call it out as baseless mysticism.

Yes, because it’s akin the debate between Darwinism and creationism. It’s bullshit. Of course I take a side.

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Nothing has been solved!

There are many interpretations of what the p-zombie thought experiment concludes. Hell, the Wikipedia page you linked is full of them. Philosophy by itself can’t solve anything. It can propose, but solving requires provability.

Again, mathematically, two completely different processes can have the same outcome in enough cases or certain resolution to fool an observer. This is provable.

Mathematically, it is possible to approach mimicking behavior without understanding the process you are mimicking, given enough computing power and training time. This is provable.

The real question is whether our particular outcome depends on consciousness (that is, if consciousness is created at the high-level of outcome interaction and anything that is similar enough to it will then require conscious experience) or if it comes from the low level process (and thus a different low level process can create a similar enough outcome without going through the experience we call conscience).

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[quote=“Juan_Raigada, post:367, topic:75914, full:true”]Nothing has been solved!

There are many interpretations of what the p-zombie thought experiment concludes. Hell, the Wikipedia page you linked is full of them. Philosophy by itself can’t solve anything. It can propose, but solving requires provability.[/quote]

But of course. This is the big field, along with quantum mechanics, that is keeping modern science very confused and occupied. That’s why it’s interesting, because it’s the big, crucial problem that defines this time and the future.

When I say the problem of the philosophical zombies has been explained I mean that it also backpedals to the hard problem. That itself is not solved. Same of your idea of black boxes, that are ways to contextualize a problem in order to induce a particular answer. Because the problem is not the content you are examining, but the flawed premise, the context. The perspective you’re observing from.

So, ALL of these paradoxes and examples lead to question the canons of the observation. Because you can manipulate the observation, and so the answer you arrive to. So you keep retreating toward language, toward perspective. And those are hard nuts to crack, because the problem is the opposite of being intuitive.

(one of the strengths, and also weaknesses from my point of view, of Bakker’s theory is that it is post-semantic, and so it does away with experience. Meaning that it can sidesteps all these paradoxes and so sidesteps that conundrums that otherwise will never be solved, because the trick is in the eye, and if you keep using that eye you keep being fooled without understanding what it is that fools you, or, worse, believe in what you see)

And in the end you arrive to question epistemology and ontology.

But those are the questions you nitpick about on a blog dedicated to them, not a forum thread about Westworld.

My problem with Westworld is not that it doesn’t conform to my own current convictions about consciousness. The problem is that the moment it states something, like deciding that hosts “aren’t conscious”. Then it has to provide a motivation. It has to describe a plausible theory of what consciousness is at least within the fictional context of the show.

And up to this point it’s only trying to hide that behind the typical baseless mysticism, suffering, power of love and general sentimentalism. It’s the Trump effect.

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[quote=“Juan_Raigada, post:367, topic:75914, full:true”]The real question is whether our particular outcome depends on consciousness (that is, if consciousness is created at the high-level of outcome interaction and anything that is similar enough to it will then require conscious experience) or if it comes from the low level process (and thus a different low level process can create a similar enough outcome without going through the experience we call conscience).
[/quote]

Yeah :)

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Firstly; whoa, you guys are going all in deep. I like it. I have not been redditing it but I have been following a podcast and was on board with the Bernard-is-a-host and the 3TL theories.

Juan, with regard to what you alluded to under the spoiler blur. My blurred thoughts: I am guessing Arnold was a host; perhaps the best, first prototype that Ford created and then used to expand en masse. Nothing concrete, just a hunch. In my ‘keep it simple, stupid’ way of thinking… Bernard begins with a ‘B’. Thus he followed Arnold who begins with an ‘A’. Ford. Model A.

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I think at this point evidence is piled so high it’s very unlikely that’s not true. I mean Bernard as Arnold.

About the 3TL, that’s also basically given. What’s still uncertain is whether we’re seeing flashback or just memories (or re-enactions) of what happens.

It’s still possible the show is all in the present, sprinkled with memories of the past. It would even be a more elegant solution than trying to disguise timelines through trickery of editing.

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This show, just. Ugh. About 2-3 hours (being generous) of actual stuff happening and the rest some sort of drawn out discussion on consciousness that even if the audience was in on more than 1/2 of, I’m not sure it would make sense. At this point, I’ve lost trust in the show. Mostly due to the park making no sense and not having established rules. If it were interesting enough to me, I’d rewatch the episodes. And I think binging them would help some to. But, unless it saves face in the final 2 eps, I don’t expect I’ll rewatch it.

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Like Game of Thrones then!!!

In all honestly, that’s non-episodic fantasy and sci-fi TV now. I accept that for what it is. This is the reason episodes are several millions and not several dozen millions.

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Yeah, no. GoT while having plenty of stories up in the air at any given time with plenty that could be called ‘filler’ has never been built on the series of half-truths WW seems to be giving the audience to this point. WW, as it currently stands, has far too much behind the curtain.

edit: normal ‘my opinions are my own’ sorta thing. Those that are digging WW, more power to ya.

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GOT is a much better show than WW.

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This show sucks . It was my wife who made me realize this when she told me that “this show isn’t entertainment, it’s too much work”. She is right. It is too much work.

Lost was lighter and fun. Even GOT allows you to sit back and relax.

WW is like work. I already work 8-10 hours a day.

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So a rainy holiday weekend day gave me a chance to re-watch the latest episode. And the end of it I realized just how many unanswered questions there are to be wrapped up in two episodes … and I’m not even talking about William, tricky editing, or Maeve’s surprisingly easy path.

Here’s a bunch of fairly in-your-face questions no one is even talking about:

What is the Board’s real interest in Westworld? This is the big one that the show’s writers keep calling out and the theorists keep ignoring. In episode one, Theresa tells Sizemore that “This place is one thing to the guests, another thing to the shareholders, and something completely different to management.” In episode seven, Charlotte tells Theresa, “I don’t give a rat’s ass about the hosts. It’s our little research project Delos cares about,” and in the same episode Theresa asks Bernard, “Do you really think the corporation’s interest here are tourists playing cowboy?” But nobody watching the show seems to be asking what the Board’s deeper interest is. (My own guess – the board wants to upload human consciousness into host bodies to achieve functional immortality.) Problem is, without knowing the answer to this it’s virtually impossible to make any sense out of the actions of either the Board or Ford.

Who is Ford’s new narrative for? When Ford shoots down Lee Sizemore’s new storyline, he says the following:
“It’s not about giving the guests what you think they want. No, that’s simple. The titillation, horror, elation… They’re parlor tricks. The guests don’t return for the obvious things we do, the garish things. They come back because of the subtleties, the details. They come back because they discover something they imagine no one had ever noticed before… something they fall in love with. They’re not looking for a story that tells them who they are. They already know who they are. They’re here because they want a glimpse of who they could be. The only thing your story tells me, Mr. Sizemore, is who you are.”

Ford then starts building his new narrative; later he also says his storyline is “quite original” and “not a retrospective.”

But who is this narrative about potential meant for? There are only three guest characters: the Man in Black, William, and Logan. The most popular theory about the show says that Ford’s new narrative flat-out cannot be for William or Logan. Regardless of what you think about that theory, you can’t deny that Ford has never interacted with or shown an interest in those two characters. So unless something big changes, it doesn’t look like the new narrative is meant for them.

The Man in Black, then? The two have shared a scene, where Ford memorably told the MiB he wouldn’t stop his “voyage of self-discovery.”

Thing is, what the MiB wants is the Maze, and the hosts have pointedly warned the MiB that the Maze is not for him. More to the point, the MiB is convinced that Ford’s narratives are all bullshit and that it was Arnold, not Ford, who put in the Maze 30 years ago. The MiB also entered the park before Ford announced his new narrative. So if the MiB is linked to Ford’s new narrative, the link is that the new narrative is a response to the MiB showing up, and not the other way round.

What we’re told is the narrative itself is pretty dubious. Everything we know about Wyatt so far – renegade soldier gone nihilist - sounds like pure Lee Sizemore pulp instead of something original and transformative. Even the Internet’s theory about who Wyatt “really is” – that he’s actually Dolores re-creating The Incident from 30-some years ago – doesn’t add up because that makes the new narrative into exactly what Ford said it is not: a retrospective.

There’s a different theory that Ford’s new narrative is actually Maeve and Dolores gaining consciousness and hence freedom. But in that case I don’t think Ford’s audience for the new narrative could possibly be the hosts themselves. For one thing, Ford doesn’t seem to like Dolores much – he seemed quite sincere when he said he wasn’t her friend. More importantly, in his recent speech to Bernard, he said he doesn’t view host consciousness and human consciousness as being fundamentally different, except for the fact that host consciousness can be edited to eliminate pain, guilt, conflict, etc. And he views that as a feature of the hosts, not a flaw. From Ford’s perspective, “freeing” hosts a la Maeve just means delivering them into a world of perpetual mental pain. It’s not clear why Ford would choose that as a goal in and of itself.

It seems to me most likely that the actual audience for Ford’s new narrative – whatever it actually is – is the Board, i.e. Charlotte and the MiB. Ford plans to make them rethink what Westworld is about. But since we don’t actually know what the Board wants out of Westworld to begin with (see above,) we’re left pretty much in the dark about Ford’s ultimate goals or how storylines about Wyatt or Dolores/Maeve would achieve that.

Why does Ford need all that real estate for the new narrative? Why does Ford need to dig up massive tracts of land for his new storylines? He’s ploughed under the agave plantation and is building all the way up to Las Mudas, the little Mexican town. Both of these places are considerable distances from the small town with the church, which is the presumed center of the new story. Nothing related to Wyatt seems to require any terraforming beyond digging up the little town, which is quite tiny. So why does Ford need all that land (and why is the show calling it out)?

Why did the little town with the church get buried? We all assume the town was made a non-place because of “The Incident” 30-odd years ago. But then why go the effort of burying it and leaving the steeple exposed? That sort of poetic detail seems like it ought to have an in-story explanation – if the explanation is just supposed to be “It had bad connotations to Ford, so he stopped using it,” it would have been much easier just to abandon the site and let it rot, after all.

Why is the Man In Black on a ticking clock? Several times now we’ve been told that the Man In Black doesn’t have much time left during this trip. He keeps rushing the hosts along, and at the end of the most recent episode one of the hosts acknowledges they need to rush with him as well. Why is speed required? It’s not because he doesn’t have the money. Now, the MiB is presumably a Board member, and the Board is supposed to be meeting soon. But it doesn’t seem like a man who refers to himself as “a god” would be fretting about that; surely he’s accustomed to people waiting for him. Another possibility is that he’s dying – but Ford tells us all diseases have been cured, and the MiB gets knocked around regularly without either the hosts or him worrying about him being physically frail. So again, why the big rush?

Why take Elsie off the table? Elsie found out that Theresa was spying for the Board and told Bernard. And then she was taken off the table, by Bernard. Why? Wouldn’t “I’ve told Ford about this and he’s going to take care of it, so shut up and keep your head down” been a better solution than having to explain another mysterious disappearance? Unless it wasn’t Ford-puppet Bernard that did it, but ghost-of-Arnold controlling Bernard, bum bum bum.

What’s the deal with Ford’s family? By which I don’t mean the robots, I mean the (presumably long-gone) real one. What ever happened to his brother? Who was the woman sitting in the chair motionless, not saying anything? Why specifically was Ford’s childhood so unhappy? (His father drank, but so far that’s all we know.) The show seems to think this is important, though it feels more like fodder for future seasons than a pressing issue for this one.

Why is Charlotte Hale so terrible at scheming? She breezes into Westworld, stages a totally inept demo, has her spy get killed, has the person who killed her spy gloat about it front of her not at all subtly … and then promptly recruits someone everyone knows is useless and terrible to be her next spy. Then she gives him a plan that is 100% guaranteed to fail in a place where every host and staff member is closely tracked. She couldn’t be a more obvious distraction if she carried around a red big banner reading, “I am a distraction.” The question is, what is she meant to be distracting us from? What’s her real plan? (Oh, and also she looks like someone from a CW show when every other character in a position of authority is of A Certain Age, though I have my own theory about that.)

Why is Lee Sizemore? Lee Sizemore is useless and terrible. Theresa tells him this in Episode 1. Then Ford tells him this again in Episode 2. Then Sizemore demonstrates this graphically to Charlotte Hale in Episode 6. But yet he pops up again in Episode 8, for some reason entrusted with A Vital Plan by the executive director of the Delos Board, no less. Why does he even exist, when apparently the only purpose of his existence is to be useless and terrible? Some people on Reddit have suggested that he’s like the lawyer in Jurassic Park, i.e. he’s there so we can all cheer when he dies a gory death. But the lawyer was competent and annoying, whereas Lee is merely useless. He’s not even hate-worthy, so his demise wouldn’t warrant a cheer. And yet there he is, mysteriously eating up screen time. Couldn’t that precious time have been better spent on something else?

What’s up with that photograph? By which I mean the photograph Abernathy found in episode 1. Remember that? Who is it of? (Right now the only possibilities I can think of are Juliet, William’s fiancée, or the MiB’s daughter, since they’re the only outside-the-park women of the correct age that come to mind.) How did it get there? Why did it trigger that reaction in Abernathy, but not Dolores? For that matter, why did “These violent delights have violent ends” only spread from Dolores to Maeve and then stop there? My real worry about these last ones is that the answers to the original mysteries of the show are likely to get totally buried under the massive info dumps on less interesting When Was Who Where questions that are coming in the concluding episodes.

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I’m certain episodes nine and ten will be revelatory but some of the mysteries will be longer-term, planned by the writers to arc over the next few seasons. They’re not going to reveal everything in the next two episodes.

Didn’t Elsie find that more than just the board was siphoning data, she also found that ‘someone called Arnold’ was doing the same thing?

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I reckon this has a lot to do with the ages of the hosts. We’re told in an early episode that Dolores is one of the oldest hosts in the park. Maeve’s age is less-clear, but we do know that her role has been shuffled at least once, so I’d speculate that she too is an older host – meaning that she is also able to receive signals from Arnold/Bernard’s secret transmitter. The younger, more modern hosts can’t be activated with that phrase, just the older ones… like Maeve’s presumes “army” standing around in sub-basement 85.

The problem with that theory is that it’s Ford who is associated with Shakespeare quotes, not (presumably) Arnold.

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OK, so I have a theory about Arnold.

I don’t frequent Reddit or any other major board beyond this one, so maybe this is something that has been widely debunked. Also, I don’t have a didactic memory and have only seen each episode once, so take that as a caveat as well. I don’t think this is a spoiler at this point, but I’ll collapse it just in case.

Tin Wisdom's Ridiculous Theory

I don’t believe that there ever was a human Arnold. I think it was always a robotic/AI helper that Ford made.

In early episodes, Ford tells people that he and Arnold made the Hosts and programmed them, but that Arnold was the true genius behind their programming and behavior. This is confirmed with a conversation between William and Logan where Logan talks about Ford’s “mysterious partner” who died early in the park’s history and a few other lines here and there from Teresa or the young Board lady where they talk about Arnold being the true guiding light and how he was interested in the hosts becoming more aware and whatever.

But a lot of that has been washed away with the last couple of episodes. Ford tells Teresa (just before he kills her) that everything in the park is his work. His words are something like: “And make no mistake, this is ALL my work.” This is in contrast to his previous statements.

More importantly, he tells Bernard that he specifically created Bernard to help him do the behavioral programming for the hosts. This (to me, anyway) is the “singularity” concept for computers: you build a computer that is capable of creating something that you are not talented enough to manage, and that computer can create another machine that can do better than IT can do, and so on, and so on.

If Ford did this with Bernard, then it stands to reason that he also did it before. Arnold is “A”, Bernard is “B”… and maybe Dolores is “D”. This isn’t a new theory - Juan and Mr_PeaCH say as much upthread.

So at some point Arnold starts working against Ford, trying to get the hosts fully conscious and free of human influence. There is a struggle and Ford manages to prevail. Ford thinks that he manages to “kill” Arnold, but Ford doesn’t understand how hosts’ memory works: he didn’t actually create it directly, and we’ve seen that when he thinks he’s deleting memory or experiences, he’s actually just getting rid of the surface access to that information. Arnold is far from dead – he is living on in the system or maybe within one (or all!) of the hosts. Arnold is still creating things and controlling the older hosts through the thought-to-be disabled transmitters throughout the park.

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He says ‘Like I said, I built all of this’ when Theresa tries to use her phone and finds it’s offline. But just before that he also says ‘Arnold and I designed every part of this place. It was our dream’

He also says that Bernard wasn’t around then, ‘were you Bernard?’ though there is no answer from him. :)

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HumanTon - I think I like your guess better than mine but for what it’s worth… My guess is the board wants the ability to surreptitiously remove specific human beings and replace them with practically undetectable host versions. That being said I felt having Theresa carry on a sexual relationship with Bernard without detecting him being a host despite her position within ‘the host industry’ as it were to be somewhat incredulous.