Psychology and 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 life, 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". A sequel, "Futureworld," and a television series, "Beyond Westworld," followed, appearing 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, guests can interact with human-like androids in any way they want to fulfill their fantasies.

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The human being as a machine

As a great number of works of fiction have before it, 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 acquires a self-awareness, the traditional conceptions about the mind and life are questioned.

Known in the park as "hosts," the Westworld androids behave as their programming dictates. The hosts' 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 classical 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 there is a dualism and other positions, the monists, who affirm that what we understand as "consciousness" is a by-product of matter.

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

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The personality of the hosts

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

As revealed in a scene from the series, Host 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, like that of psychologist Raymond Cattell, but also role-playing games - after all, the Westworld park is a kind of macabre video game.

The traits that appear in the series are as follows:

• Sincerity
• Vivacity
• Coordination
• Docility
• Modesty
• Cruelty
• self preservation
• Loyalty
• Empathy
• Perseverance
• Courage
• Sensuality
• Charisma
• Humor
• Apperception (assimilation of experiences)

The bicameral theory of mind

In one of the Westworld chapters, Dr. Ford, creator and director of the theme park, mentions the hypothesis that he and his deceased companion, Arnold, relied on when conceiving the mind of the hosts: the bicameral theory of 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 of the mind as two separate entities. One of them, which would manifest itself in the form of voices frequently 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 initial programming of the hosts included an internal monologue with Arnold's voice; the objective of this was that they develop their own “voice”, that is, that they acquire consciousness and therefore an autonomous mind.

Jaynes referred to the moment when humans became self-aware, 3 millennia ago, as “bicameral mind-break”. This author refers to the rupture of the mind as the transition that made us go from obeying the internal voices to ignoring them. For hosts, this would mean breaking free from the creators and becoming self-directed.

According to the bicameral theory of mind, one of the abilities 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 emergence of a sense of identity.

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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 to develop a new, more satisfactory life story that allows a profound change in the personality.

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

The hosts' code includes a traumatic false memory that acts as a "cornerstone" of their 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.

Hosts' memories are recorded much more faithfully than people's, and although programmers try to erase them, they are never able 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.

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