HBO's Westworld

[Ryan Ruck]

Anyone else watching HBO's new Westworld series?

It's only 2 episodes in but I watched both today and I'm liking it! Recommend checking it out if you haven't.

I actually hadn't seen the original 1973 Westworld or the 1976 Futureworld but I'll be giving them a watch soon.

[American Patriot]

I thought westworld the movie was great. Had that bald guy from King and I. Yul Brenner?

[Malsua]

That bald guy with lung cancer. heh.

SO IT SHALL BE WRITTEN, SO IT SHALL BE DONE!

[American Patriot]

Thats the one. lol

[American Patriot]

I forgot that part. Pharaoh on Moses.

[Ryan Ruck]

Just watched the newest episode last night.

Gina Torres is apparently now part of the cast.

[Ryan Ruck]

A little reading to accompany the show.

'Red Dead Redemption 2' Will Be Our Inadvertent 'Westworld' Video Game In 2017

October 18, 2016



Well, it’s official, Rockstar has announced Red Dead Redemption 2, which is actually the third game in the series, but apparently a direct sequel (or prequel?) to the open world title that became a video game legend in 2010.

The game will have both a single player component and some sort of integrated online multiplayer, as Rockstar has already indicated in their initial announcement, where a full trailer is coming Thursday. The game is said to be coming out in fall 2017, which is surprising many who imagined that Rockstar might have waited until closer to launch to announce, and we might see the game this spring. But, given the usual delays associated with AAA games these days, with this new date, many are predicting it could get pushed to 2018.

But if it did come out next fall? That would correspond with presumably the second season of HBO’s Westworld, if the channel keeps the current schedule. We’re currently three episodes into a 10 episode first season, and it would be an interesting pairing to have Red Dead Redemption 2 released at exactly the same time.

I know this will inspire some surface comparisons, “Westerns are the new zombies!” and all, but the connection between Westworld and Red Dead Redemption runs deeper than that.

Red Dead Redemption is the most famous western video game of all time, and Westworld is not just a show about cowboys. Rather, as anyone watching the show has realized, it’s actually essentially an analog for video games, using a park full of “fake” androids to fulfill the pleasures of real-life human guests.

No, Westworld isn’t a video game, or even some elaborate VR simulation, but the parallels to gaming are more than clear, and that’s no accident. The show’s creators have spoken extensively about how they were influenced by Rockstar’s own creations, Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption, along with BioShock for good measure.

So, I find it rather fascinating that when we will be in the middle of season two of Westworld, we will simultaneously be playing the presumably gorgeous, well-scripted sequel to one of the very games that served as a direct inspiration for it.

While I presume the single player story mode will have a fairly scripted narrative that will assign players to a certain personality, John Marston or otherwise, the online component will be much more free-wheeling, if it’s anything like GTA Online. And therein lies the opportunity for players to essentially be playing through Westworld version 1.0, if the show depicts version say, 13.0 dozens of years in the future. But they’ll be faced with similar choices. Rugged vigilante or chaos-sewing outlaw? White hat or black hat?

I’ve already talked briefly about Westworld’s connection to the modern day moral choices we face in video games. Here’s what I said when the show premiered:

We are obviously a long, long way away from say, fully haptic VR bodysuits that put us into games with photorealistic, human-like AI characters, but it’s the same principle. If you’re put in a world like that and abuse your essentially unlimited power to rape or murder, what exactly does that say about you as a person? Westworld very clearly wants us to hate the kind of guests that do truly perverse things in the park, and the creators of the park that allow this stuff to happen, but in a way, we are already moving toward this in our games. But it’s just because we are far away from “believable reality” that most people don’t seem to realize it or care about it.”

We are already doing this in video games on a daily basis with the sorts of freedoms they allow, but it will be especially interesting to have a direct analog to Westworld in the form of Red Dead Online. No, I’m guessing players won’t be able to commit brutal rapes like the ones depicted on the HBO show, which is a line mainstream video games have not crossed (and I’m certainly not advocating for that), but they can probably do anything but. You can be the Man in Black when he tortures a man in the lonely desert, or murders an entire town on a whim.

As I said in my last piece, we’re supposed to despise the black hats on Westworld for indulging their worst desires, but we really don’t think twice doing so when it’s us holding the controller.

I understand why, and no, the two are not directly parallel. Even a beautiful new Red Dead game will not be nearly as immersive or realistic as a real-life place with flesh-and-blood androids like Westworld, making the disconnect from reality far greater. And one of the reasons that Westworld’s patrons seems so cruel is because we know that the lifelike robots are slowly becoming self-aware and remembering all the atrocities that have been committed against them. This obviously isn’t the case in a game like Red Dead Redemption. We are not worried about the feelings of the NPCs we slaughter, nor should we be, and we are certainly not fearing any sort of AI uprising.

However, as Westworld tells its guests, it’s not just about how the hosts act and react, it’s a place you go to in order to learn about yourself. And as I’ve admitted in the past, the more realistic games get, the more uncomfortable I start to feel about going full “black hat” by needlessly slaughtering civilians, even if I don’t need to care. This effect is starting to take shape all the same, and now we will have essentially an ultra-primitive version of Westworld at our disposal when Red Dead Redemption 2 comes out this fall.

I’m not claiming any sweeping moral guidance or revelations here, but it is interesting that we are starting to move down this road all the same. The hot new trend isn’t “Westerns” per se, but considering what our digital “imaginary” presence may or may not start to reveal about us as people, something both Westworld and new open world games like Red Dead may ask us to explore.

[Ryan Ruck]

An Obscure Theory From The Late 1970s Is At The Heart Of TV's Biggest Mystery

October 17, 2016

The idea that technology inevitably mimics — then trumps — evolution is, on first blush, the subtext of HBO’s new hit show Westworld. This makes the prestige science fiction drama zeitgeist-y as hell. At the dawn of the age of artificial intelligence, the public is used to hearing from neural net weavers and Judgment Day prophets claiming that robot self-awareness is a few software updates away.

But what makes Westworld fascinating and unexpectedly subversive is that its allusions to cutting-edge research seem to have been — to a degree — an intellectual smoke screen. Fans just got a peak through that haze in Episode 3, “The Stray,” when Dr. Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins), the show’s modern Prometheus, name-checked Julian Jaynes’s theory of the “Bicameral Mind.” For an instant, the show was laid bare.


Introduced in the blockbuster 1976 treatise, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, bicameralism suggests that the human brain hasn’t always functioned in the same manner. As recently as 3,000 years ago, the theory goes, men and women lacked what their ancestors came to define as self-awareness because they didn’t yet have the linguistic tools for introspection. In essence, bicameralism states that humans needed better code to function like individuals rather than like horny defecation machines. That code was metaphorical language.

In introducing the concept, Westworld’s writers make it clear that the show’s artificially intelligent robots aren’t breaking out of pre-programmed bondage because of a glitch or a virus — as was the case in the original film. They’re breaking out because of their exposure to increasingly complex language. They are being given the code mankind developed over millennia on parchment and papyrus. Not only does this explain why one of Westworld’s most powerful engineers is so furtive about providing a bot with access to Lewis Carroll, it explains why the show seems to vacillate between literary and technological ideas at neck-breaking speed.

In short, bicameralism, as a concept, organizes the show’s key ideas into a narrative line. And yes, it’s a straight path toward confrontation.


Inverse reached out to Marcel Kuijsten, author of Reflections on the Dawn of Consciousness and the executive director of the Julian Jaynes Society. An IT professional fascinated with the idea of emergent consciousness, Kuijsten provided new insight into what has been going on in Westworld and what is likely to happen next.

The theory of the bicameral mind is name-checked in the third episode of Westworld, and a character immediately suggests that it’s been debunked. Has it?

It’s really never been debunked, just ignored. That’s how I would put it. It’s definitely not mainstream, and it’s definitely not considered something that is widely accepted in academia.

What are the key differences between a bicameral mind and a modern human brain?

When we’re talking about the bicameral mind, we’re talking about this period after language develops, but before we learn consciousness. In lieu of an introspective mind-space, we’re hearing a commanding voice when we have decisions to make. As language gets more complex through metaphor, we develop the ability to have introspection and little by little, the hallucinations are suppressed.

The term bicameralism is borrowed from civics. It alludes to the interaction of two governing bodies. What are they, and how do they function in concert?

We have language areas in both hemispheres, but we’re really mainly using the dominant one — if you’re right-handed, the language area is in your left hemisphere. The question was always, “What are the areas in the non-dominant hemisphere doing?” And for a long time people thought, well … nothing. It wasn’t until the late ‘90s — actually 1999 — that the first MRIs were done that confirmed what Jaynes called the “neurological model.”

When people have a hallucination, the non-dominant language areas are activating, and then that hallucination is perceived in the dominant language areas. This produces a voice we don’t associate with our sense of self. It’s perceived as coming from outside of us.

How would we know if we met a being, robot or human, with a bicameral mind?

When Jaynes is talking about bicameralism, he’s not talking about someone in a sort of zombie-like state. That’s a total misconception. He’s describing a highly intelligent, linguistic person minus the introspection. The truth is, we can all actually get through most of our days non-consciously. If the robots in Westworld are bicameral, then they would be responding to some kind of external guiding voice.




So it’s a deeply internal thing that would be hard to diagnose in someone else.

People that don’t read Jaynes’s book often say, “Well, evolution doesn’t work that fast and we couldn’t have seen such a rapid transition in the brain.” But Jaynes never makes the argument that it’s a biological, evolutionary change. He’s talking about a learned process.

Daniel Dennett, the philosophy professor, uses a metaphor: It’s a software change, not a hardware change. So it’s like a new operating system.

So, within the context of Westworld, that would suggest that the robots would inch toward consciousness every time someone read them a book, something that happens a lot. Would that transition be apparent to the engineers putting these automatons through high school English Literature curriculums?

I think there’s a sense that Jaynes makes it a little bit more of a stark transition, and I think he had scientific reasons for doing that, to make the theory seem more testable. But the more I’ve learned and the more I’ve read ancient literature, it looks like consciousness is not a sort of an on-off type of switch, but a package of features.


The robots on the show are starting to have hallucinations. Let’s assume they’re in a bicameral state, what would they represent within that state? What is the function of hallucinations within a bicameral state?

Historically, it’s how we came to this whole notion of God.

The voice functions sort of both as a form of social control and also as a way to direct behavior. You would hear the voice of the chief of the tribe, or the king, and then as the leader died, what would happen was that followers would still hear his commanding voice. So that’s why you see all around the world, the dead are treated as living, and fed, and propped up, and worshiped. So in the death of the leader, we see the birth of the concept of the gods. In ancient Egypt, for example, each king that dies becomes the God of Osiris.

The robots on the show are less like machines, and more like pre-modern humans.

In modern religion, it’s all so remote, but in the ancient world, the gods were not distant at all. A friend of mine once said the old gods are like your high school football coach: They’re right there telling you what to do all the time.

So, when the Dolores bot hears a disembodied voice telling her what to do, she’s engaging on some level with self-consciousness within a social context.

Many, many more people have hallucinations than most people realize. And a lot of the people who have hallucinations have what are called “command hallucinations.” It’s exactly like what Jaynes is talking about: They hear a voice and it directs their behavior.

What the Westworld writers have done is taken this idea that the robots are non-conscious, and acting out these behavioral routines when they start getting these glimmers of memory. That’s the beginning of introspection, and sort of parallel to that, they’re getting voices directing their behavior.

Sounds like we’re on the road to self-consciousness and we’re going to get there one passage of Alice in Wonderland at a time.

The question is: “Can a robot with sufficiently complex language become conscious?”

I guess there’s no reason to really think that it’s completely impossible if they have the metaphorical basis of the external world to build up an interior space.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

[Ryan Ruck]

Just finished the most recent episode. 6 episodes down, only 4 more left in this season, and I've got to say, I am really liking the show!

The writing is great. The casting is well done. And the end of each episode definitely leaves you looking forward to the next. At this point, you are just getting a look down the rabbit hole. A shame this isn't a 12-13 episode season.

Right now IMDb has this as a 9.1. Definitely not much out there on TV in the 9+ territory but this deserves every bit of it and a bit more, in my opinion.

[Ryan Ruck]

A small Easter Egg from the last episode. No real spoiler.

[Ryan Ruck]

Just watched the 90 minute season finale.

Holy cow! What a great way to wrap up the season! HBO made sure lots of questions were answered and left a lot to look forward to in season 2.

Unfortunately, season 2 won't air for nearly an entire year in late 2017/early 2018.

If they're only going to do 10 episodes per season, I'm thinking maybe they should just release 1 every 2-3 weeks to reduce downtime between seasons.