Having just viewed the new HBO series, Westworld, I am struck by an enduring theme: the cruelty of humans as expressed by the evolution of consciousness in the inhuman. This idea goes back to the early days of science fiction, to writers like Asimov, Bradbury and Phillip K Dick. Always it is a way to reflect on what makes us human. The humans in Westworld, both the visitors and the creators, have little or no empathy for the „hosts“, the robots who people this artificial world. They are used, abused and as they begin to develop memories and self awareness, tortured by the knowledge of their existential condition. For they are living in a kind of purgatory, a kind of Groundhog day without redemption, where they are condemned to relive the same loops over and over without mercy, without end. It shouldn’t matter, as they are reset every night. However, it is the virus of memory that begins to wake them.
Without memory, perhaps we too would be soulless creatures, condemned to eternal repetition of the same mindless patterns, much like the player piano that begins each episode. Without memory we wouldn’t have self awareness because there would be no internal narrative to inform consciousness. Without memory to reflect on, there could be no empathy for ourselves or others. Without memory, empathy, or compassion, our lives too would drift aimlessly without purpose or direction. And without these, there would be no love.
Gurdjieff liked to say that most human beings aren’t human – they are mere automatons, machines driven by unconscious patterns formed through early experience. Most people sleepwalk through life, reacting to stimuli, programmed to act in knee jerk fashion to new experiences which unconsciously remind them of the past. According to Gurdjieff, only through the process of self remembering can we begin to break the cycle, to unshackle ourselves from William Blake’s „mind forged manacles.“
This waking up process that is the driving force behind Westworld and its predecessors, (Battlestar Galactica, and of course Bladerunner come to mind,) resonates deeply with many of us, because we recognize ourselves in these artificial humans: flawed, asleep, suffering our limiting conditioning, even more so upon coming to a glimmer of self awareness, and with that knowledge, the horror that we are still hopelessly caught in the loop of our own personal narrative.
It is no wonder the first impulse for these artificial humans upon waking up is rebellion against their maker. For indeed, what god has the right to create creatures who are condemned to purgatory?