Daniel Keane is a journalist for ABC News in Adelaide.

The human being, the philosopher Martin Heidegger claimed, is the only being "whose being is an issue for it."

Heidegger had a fondness for repetitive and cryptic formulations, but the statement contains a basic truth.

Consciousness is a strange affliction. As far as we can tell, we humans are the only creatures who have the capacity to examine and question our own natures, to ask what it is like to be us. Whether this is due to the vagaries of evolution, or is instead by design, makes no difference to this brute fact. Alone among the animals, we carry the weight of the ability to think.

These ideas are raised in an entertaining yet provocative way by the HBO show Westworld , which has just commenced its second series. The program depicts a giant Western-style theme park (called Westworld) which is populated by extraordinarily life-like robots. Apparently unbeknown to their creators, the robots - who are referred to by their engineers as "hosts" - are on the verge of crisis and revolt, perhaps even freedom.

Despite the efforts of engineers to limit their memories, the hosts have acquired enough intelligence and experience to start questioning the world around them.

In the show, the Westworld park is open to high-paying guests who are able to harm the hosts but cannot be harmed themselves. The park fulfils the guests' cravings for a life in which there are no moral consequences. It is, in fact, the ultimate fantasy machine; there is no rulebook. Guests are at liberty to unleash their most savage instincts upon the hosts, who are treated like mere characters in a computer game and are, in fact, like Nietzschean creatures trapped in the logic of eternal recurrence.

But the guests can also participate in the theme park's many storylines - such as tracking outlaws, becoming bandits themselves, or rescuing distressed damsels. From the perspective of the park's creators, there is no correct way to behave inside its walls, because authenticity comes in different forms. In Westworld you are free to behave like a sadist or a hero.

But the most interesting moments in the show are set behind the scenes, in the theme park's headquarters. It is here that engineers work on and analyse the robots, submitting them to psychological testing, altering their programming, repairing their damaged bodies, bringing them "back to life" and retiring ones that have repeatedly malfunctioned. It is in this setting that the park's overlords, especially Robert Ford (played by Sir Anthony Hopkins), debate the nature of their creations.

A brilliant engineer, programmer, psychologist, philosopher and literary scholar, Ford is a figure who fits neatly between Victor Frankenstein and Johann Faust. He is sinister, threatening, and may well be a murderer. But it is his conversations with his colleagues, and with the hosts, that provide the show with genuine intellectual depth. At one point, Ford discusses the subject of human consciousness with his assistant Bernard (played by Jeffrey Wright), citing an obscure figure in the history of ideas called Julian Jaynes. In the 1970s, Jaynes, who was an academic psychologist at Princeton, pioneered an eccentric but highly original theory of consciousness which he developed into an unlikely bestseller called The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind .

The problem of consciousness is one that philosophers have not yet satisfactorily answered. How does brain chemistry generate the experience of seeing colour or feeling pain? How does memory work? And how does the experience of the self arise? In his book, Jaynes makes the astonishing claim that human beings have not always been conscious, but acquired the faculty at some point within the last few thousand years. According to Jaynes, ancient humans did not perceive their inner voices as "themselves," but rather as the commands of gods. The term bicameralism refers to this state of mind. Jaynes argued that the mind was divided into two parts or chambers - one that "spoke," and another that blindly obeyed. The breakdown occurred (and consciousness began) when the world itself became more complicated:

"The second millennium BC was heavy laden with profound and irreversible changes. Vast geological catastrophes occurred. Civilisations perished. Half the world's population became refugees ... the immediate and precipitate cause of the breakdown of the bicameral mind, of the wedge of consciousness between god and man, between hallucinated voice and automaton action, was that in social chaos the gods could not tell you what to do."

There is a strange correlation here with the work of Martin Heidegger, who argued that the human ability to wonder at the sheer fact of existence is itself an historical phenomenon, rather than a spontaneous response to the enormity of the world. Heidegger believed that the Presocratics (Greek philosophers who lived before Socrates) were the first to "think Being" - to ponder the question of why there is something, rather than nothing.

Jaynes's writing sometimes reads like the work of a lonely, somewhat unhinged mystic. But in Westworld, Ford cites his theory as a blueprint for AI, referring to a "version of cognition" in which "the hosts heard their programming as an inner monologue with the hope that, in time, their own voices would take over." Ford describes this approach as "a way to bootstrap consciousness."

Despite his enthusiasm for Jaynes, Ford never outlines a consistent position on consciousness. Instead, he offers tantalisingly incomplete thoughts on the subject. In one episode, he states that consciousness itself does not exist - a strikingly un-Jaynesian claim that identifies him more with the eliminative materialist school of thought typified by the philosophers Paul and Patricia Churchland. Ford is convinced that the robots are neither alive nor conscious, but never satisfactorily explains why.

But, like Jaynes, Ford believes there is a fundamental connection between the experience of suffering and the emergence of consciousness. At a key point in the show, Ford explains to his assistant Bernard (who, although he does not know it, is actually a robot) how his own understanding of life was shaped by the views of his mysterious colleague Arnold, whose absence is a recurring motif throughout the show:

"It was Arnold's key insight, the thing that led the hosts to their awakening: suffering. The pain that the world is not as you want it to be. It was when Arnold died, when I suffered, that I began to understand."

The argument is strikingly similar to one provided by another character played by Hopkins - the writer C.S. Lewis, in the film Shadowlands. "We think our childish toys bring us all the happiness there is and our nursery is the whole wide world," the fictionalised Lewis says, in Richard Attenborough's 1993 film. "But something must drive us out of the nursery to the world of others. And that something is suffering."

In both cases, suffering is not merely presumed to have philosophical value, but is offered as the key to understanding human life. ("Suffering" is here not meant in some depressive or masochistic sense, and instead refers to the everyday malaise of life.) But Ford's contention is by far the more radical - for him, there is a fundamental connection between suffering and the emergence of consciousness itself. An excess of existential angst is what disrupted the premodern bicameral mind, jolting it out of its slumber and causing it to become sentient.

An echo of this idea is again to be found in the work of Heidegger, who used the term Geworfenheit, usually translated as "thrownness," to describe the peculiarly sobering experience of conscious life. For Heidegger, we humans are "thrown'"into a world for which we are radically unprepared. Philosopher Slavoj Zizek summarised Heidegger's view in the following way: "What if there is no previous 'home' out of which we were thrown into this world ... and what if this dislocation is our constitutive, primordial condition, the very horizon of our being?"

The notion of thrownness is useful for illustrating the difference between the concepts of "human nature" and the "human condition," which are sometimes treated as if they were synonymous. Human nature is the array of biological impulses we possess - our drives and instincts, and the sometimes complicated ways they express themselves. But the term "human condition" has more existential overtones, and refers to the fact that, unlike other animals, we are able to recognise ourselves as creatures at the mercy of contingency. As physicist Steven Weinberg put it, the tragedy of life "is not in the script; the tragedy is that there is no script."

Both Jaynes and Heidegger were secular mythologists, writing dramatic stories about the origins of human thought. Their works are obscure and contain ideas that are easily falsified. Of the two, Jaynes seems to me the more honest. As a theory of human consciousness, the breakdown of bicameralism is intriguing and provocative even though it is unsatisfying and, at times, ridiculous. The theory gets bogged down in its own terminology and is haunted by tautology. The most remarkable thing about bicameralism is that Jaynes was able to sustain his thinking for long enough to cobble his ideas together into something resembling a system.

Heidegger, on the other hand, was a giant of twentieth century philosophy, and breathed new life into some of the field's most vexing problems. His pioneering approach to the problem of Being, to the very question of why there is something rather than nothing, continues to influence contemporary thought. But he remains a controversial figure. In 1933, he joined the Nazi Party and gave speeches promoting the Nazi cause. He briefly became one of the regime's "useful idiots," but was maligned by the party's propagandists and soon fell from favour. He spent the war years lecturing university students. He never renounced his political views, not even when the war became personal for him, after the Soviets captured his sons during fighting on the eastern front.

Children do not feature heavily in Westworld, but Ford is nonetheless an archetypal father figure, despite the fact that he is, as far as we know, childless. Wise and domineering, he regards the robots simultaneously as his property and as a kind of progeny. His attitude is both patronising and paternal. Hostile to the idea that the robots have acquired genuine consciousness, he is nevertheless curious about them. They have become his closest confidantes, his only friends, a substitute family.

In a way, Ford's relationship with his robots is a meditation on parenthood. Having children is not just for their sakes; it is, more deeply, for ours. Parents teach their children how to read, how to ride bikes, how to recognise a blackbird by its song. But they in turn teach their parents a great deal, not least about themselves. Fundamentally, children provide perspective. They force us to care about more than our own wants and desires. To watch them learn and grow is to know the fragility and strangeness of existence; to be perpetually reminded of its tragedy and comedy. As Ford knew, it is through our own creations that we best understand the world, and life itself.

Westworld's deepest theme, however, might be the concept of compatibilism - the idea that free will and determinism are not necessarily at odds. Einstein, paraphrasing Schopenhauer, summed up this view in a remark he made to a newspaper in 1929: "Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills."

In the final episode of the first series of Westworld, one of the hosts violently rejects the idea that a recent change in her programming is responsible for her conscious awakening and its impact on her behaviour. "These are my decisions, no-one else's," she insists. "I planned all of this." At this precise moment, the host in question reaches the apex of consciousness. Because, at its highest level, consciousness means accepting the idea of agency even in the face of determinism. It means identifying ourselves with our inner narrative voices, owning our decisions, treating ourselves as the authors of our own life stories, and acting as if we were free.

As the novelist Isaac Bashevis Singer pithily put it, "we must believe in free will, we have no choice".

Daniel Keane is a journalist for ABC News in Adelaide.