Psychology in the Series ‘Westworld’: Consciousness, Identity and Narratives

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

In 1973 Michael Crichton, co-creator of the Jurassic Park saga, wrote and directed the film “Westworld”, which in Spain was titled “Almas de metal”. It was followed by a sequel, “Futureworld,” and a television series, “Beyond Westworld,” which appeared in 1976 and 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 in any way they want to fulfill their fantasies.

The human being as a machine

As a large number of works of fiction have done before, including the films Blade Runner and Ghost in the Shell, Westworld uses the figure of the android as a tool to explore human nature: When the inanimate becomes conscious of itself, traditional conceptions of mind and life are questioned.

The Westworld androids, known in the park as “hosts,” behave as their programming dictates. The host code supersedes 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 are not far from some classic approaches to philosophy. Before him debate about the existence of the soul or the mind as entities separate from the body, proposals have been made that defend that there is a dualism and other positions, monists, that affirm that what we understand as “consciousness” is a byproduct of matter.

In the world of Westworld androids are beginning to gain consciousness Consequently, issues arise that may directly affect us in the not-too-distant future, such as the possibility of artificial intelligence surpassing human intelligence (what is known as “technological singularity”) or the rights of androids as What sensitive beings.

The personality of the hosts

In humans, personality is not rigid nor does it cause behavior directly, but rather there is a bidirectional relationship between the external environment and personality traits, hypothetical constructs that are associated with our body. We change by interacting with our environment, while hosts depend on the code and therefore on the programmers.

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

The traits that appear in the series are the following:

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 partner, Arnold, were based when conceiving the minds of the hosts: the bicameral theory of mind, described by Julian Jaynes in his book The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind (1976).

Jaynes stated that, in the past, humans conceived of the mind as two separate entities. One of them, which would manifest itself in the form of voices often attributed to gods, gave orders to another, more passive one, with which people identified. Thus, according to this theory, the acquisition of consciousness is a later evolutionary milestone.

Dr. Ford explains that the hosts’ initial programming included an internal monologue in Arnold’s voice; The objective of this was for them to develop their own “voice”, that is, that they would acquire consciousness and therefore an autonomous mind

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

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

Narration, memory and identity

Currently, 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 meaning through communication, and constructivism analyzes the products of social and linguistic interaction.

In psychology the narratives 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 develop a new, more satisfactory life story that allows for a profound change in personality.

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

The hosts’ code includes a false traumatic memory that acts as a “cornerstone” of their memory. The identity of 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 hosts’ memories are recorded much more faithfully than those of people, and although programmers try to erase them, they never manage to do so completely. Westworld’s artificial intelligences don’t just look like us but rather they are an augmented version of the properties that characterize our mind.