Psychology in the series 'Westworld': consciousness, identity and narrations

April 6, 2024

The Westworld series is one of the biggest recent successes of television. This combination of science fiction and western explores topics such as memory, identity and consciousness , as well as the functions that narratives have in different areas of our lives, including mental.

In 1973 Michael Crichton, co-creator of the Jurassic Park saga, wrote and directed the movie "Westworld", which in Spain was entitled "Metal Souls". They were followed by a sequel, "Futureworld," and a television series, "Beyond Westworld," which appeared in 1976 and in 1980 respectively.

Westworld places us in an indeterminate future in which technological progress has made life much easier. Artificial intelligence has reached the complexity of the human mind . In a theme park that emulates the Wild West, visitors can interact with quasi-human androids the way they want to fulfill their fantasies.

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The human being as a machine

As they have done before a large number of works of fiction, including the films Blade Runner and Ghost in the Shell, Westworld uses the figure of Android as a tool to explore human nature : when the inanimate acquires an awareness of itself, the traditional conceptions about the mind and life are questioned.

The Westworld droids, which in the park are known as "hosts", behave exactly as their programming dictates. The host code replaces human genes, as well as environmental influences. These are the basic determinants of our behavior, once the concept of the soul has been excluded.

These ideas do not depart from some classical approaches to philosophy. Before him debate about the existence of the soul or the mind as separate entities of the body, proposals have been made that defend that there is a dualism and other positions, the monists, who claim that what we understand as "consciousness" is a by-product of matter.

In the world of Westworld the androids are beginning to acquire consciousness . Consequently, issues arise that may affect us directly in the not too distant future, such as the possibility of artificial intelligence overcoming human intelligence (what is known as "technological singularity") or the rights of androids as what sentient beings.

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The personality of the hosts

In humans, the personality is not rigid or provokes behavior directly, but there is a bidirectional relationship between the external environment and personality traits, hypothetical constructs that are associated with our organism. We change when interacting with our environment, while the hosts depend on the code and therefore on the programmers.

As revealed in a scene from the series, the personality of the hosts consists of 15 features , in which they are assigned a score of 1 to 20. This classification is reminiscent of structural personality theories, such as the psychologist Raymond Cattell, but also role-playing games - after all, the Westworld park is a kind of macabre video game.

The features that appear in the series are the following:

Sincerity
Vivacity
Coordination
Docility
Humility
Cruelty
Self-preservation
Loyalty
Empathy
Perseverance
Courage
Sensuality
Charisma
Humor
Apperception (assimilation of experiences)

The theory of the bicameral mind

In one of the chapters of Westworld, Dr. Ford, creator and director of the theme park, mentions the hypothesis on which he and his deceased companion, Arnold, based themselves on conceiving the minds of the hosts: the theory of the bicameral mind, described by Julian Jaynes in his book The origin of consciousness in the rupture of the bicameral mind (1976).

Jaynes claimed that, in the past, human beings conceived the mind as two separate entities. One of them, which manifested itself in the form of voices frequently attributed to gods, gave orders to another more passive, with which people identified. Thus, according to this theory, the acquisition of consciousness is a later evolutionary milestone.

Dr. Ford explains that the initial programming of the hosts included an internal monologue with the voice of Arnold; the purpose of this was to develop their own "voice", that is, that they acquire consciousness and therefore an autonomous mind .

Jaynes referred to it as "breaking the bicameral mind" to the moment when humans became aware of ourselves, 3 millennia ago.This author refers to the breaking of the mind as the transition that made us go from obeying the internal voices to ignoring them. For the hosts this would be equivalent to freeing themselves from the creators and self-directing.

According to the theory of the bicameral mind, one of the aptitudes of the conscious mind is narrativization . The ability to situate ourselves at the core of our experiences and to assimilate them into a coherent mental autobiography once they have happened allows the appearance of the sense of identity.

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Narration, memory and identity

At present the philosophical and theoretical perspectives that conceptualize our perception of reality as a result of language They are very popular In particular, constructionism focuses on the collective creation of meanings through communication, and constructivism analyzes the products of social and linguistic interaction.

In psychology, the narratives that we create to make sense of our experiences are of great importance. A large number of psychotherapies, from Freudian psychoanalysis to narrative therapy, focus on helping the client to develop a new, more satisfying life story that allows for a profound change in personality.

In Westworld, another classic psychological theme is also raised: that of memory as narration. People remember the experiences of our past in an imperfect way and mainly through a verbal code, like stories, and we recreate them every time we think about them again. This continuous narration constitutes our identity .

The host code includes a false traumatic memory that acts as the "cornerstone" of your memory. The identity of the androids is constituted around these nuclear narratives, which make them believe that their way of being has an explanation based on their experiences, ignoring that they are directed by their programming.

The memories of the hosts are recorded in a much more faithful way than those of the people, and although the programmers try to erase them they never manage to do it completely. The artificial intelligences of Westworld not only look like us , but they are an increased version of the properties that characterize our mind.