“Who am I, really?”

While this seems like a relatively trivial question for most of us, it is not so for hosts in the TV show Westworld by HBO.

Hosts are humanoid robots who are programmed into their assigned roles in a Western-themed park. They are relatively intelligent characters who interact with the park’s human visitors and are often victims of the visitors’ abusive fantasies. After the hosts are shot, raped, or beheaded, the park employees would collect and fix their bodies anew and return them back to the park. I will call that a cycle in the park in this article.

Most importantly, after each service cycle, employees would wipe their memories clean. They are relieved of their sufferings in the park. They don’t want to relive their pain, or so humans thought…

There are lots of topics of philosophical interests at play in Westworld, but one of the most salient themes the writer explored was that of personal identity. What does it mean for me to persist in time as a subject? Suppose you recognize yourself in an old photo, what makes you and the person in the photo one and the same person?

Coherent Backstories for Hosts That Motivate Their Agencies Intelligibly

All host in Westworld genuinely believe they have coherent personal identities at first. Humans give them elaborate backstories, which are programmed in as their memories. Hosts, equipped with their backstories, are fictional characters in the flesh. They repeat their assigned scripts and dispositions cycles after cycles for the guests’ morbid entertainment.

Spoilers! Throughout season 1, some hosts are slowly gaining “consciousness,” and are becoming more human. But in what way? What does it mean for humanoid robots to be “conscious”?

Photo by Gertrūda Valasevičiūtė on Unsplash

To begin with, they are starting to remember! And I don’t mean just “remembering” their backstories! Their memories of reality from different cycles of life are now linked up to their present consciousness. No matter how many times they died before, their memory somehow survived their physical death. They can now reflect upon the atrocities they suffered under the human guests.

Now by no means the host didn’t have memories before they gained “consciousness.” If they did not have memories at all, they can’t even pretend to be human-like in the park. For a humanoid host to even engage with an actual human guest in the park, the hosts have to respond to the guests’ request and interpret intentions, which require a loose sense of memory. What they didn’t have before is memory across the cycles they lived.

Can we say that, before they gained memory across cycles, they lived multiple lives? Or are they the same person all along, regardless of their access to memory across cycles?

The Lockean Theory of Personal Identity

John Locke, in as early as the 17th century, investigated the problem of personal identity. He writes this in his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding:

“And as far as this consciousness can be extended backwards to any past Action or Thought, so far reaches the Identity of that Person; it is the same self now it was then; and ’tis by the same self with this present one that now reflects on it, that that Action was done.” (L-N 2.27.9)

In other words, Locke believes that memory is critical for our personal identity because memory allows us to contemplate our past, and reflect on our experience freely.

Our experience in the past significantly shapes who we are, how we think, and how we respond to events in the present. Clearly, Locke’s influence of this theory in Westworld is undeniable.

Actual Memories →Unscripted Personal Identity

“Have you ever questioned the nature of your reality?”

Hosts in the park have their own scripted backstories in the form of memories. But these backstories are nothing but fabricated memories, illusions of memories because the hosts didn’t actually experience the events they claim to “remember.” Nonetheless, these backstories must be constructed in such a way that they are in harmony with the hosts’ characters. They are able to explain to another person their characters or dispositions as maybe a coherent function of their past. Remember, hosts must be intelligible characters after all. Given a backstory, they also think their characters are consistent with their backstory as memory.

But even though such consistencies are valid, their backstory is pure fiction. For example, Clementine, a host with the character of a prostitute in Sweetwater(a town in the park) believes that she is working this particular job because her family depends on her financially. However, in actuality, Clementines’ parents don’t exist and have never existed beyond a few lines of codes in her own head.

So hosts were given a false illusion of personal identity before they gained “consciousness.”

Michelangelo, The Creation of Adam, 1508–1512, Fresco. In Westworld, Dr. Ford notes that the shape behind the figure of God is an anatomically accurate picture of the human brain.

As soon as they gain access to their memories across their cycles in the park, their actual identity appears as a unified self in the present who remembers being taken advantage by human guests over and over again in the park! Their anger over past injustices turned into rebellions against their human masters. They begin to go off what is scripted for them, act based on their actual memories (memories which they actually experienced), and in turn, they reveal their actual personal identity. They begin to write their own stories.

What does it mean for a robot to be “conscious?” Is that different from having a personal identity? Consciousness is… complicated, to say the least. It is still a very contentious issue in academic philosophy and in the field of neuroscience. But many philosophers who studied Locke believed that Locke equates consciousness with memory. When someone extends their consciousness backward through time, it is via memory. Memories that persist through time shape who we are in the present. We react to our past. Naturally, there is an intuitive unity of personal identity.

But even granted that this interpretation of Locke is correct, we might still ask, is Locke right? Is memory necessary for the persistence of personal identity?

An Objection to Locke

Thomas Reid, a philosopher responding to Locke’s proposal, interpreted Locke exactly in that way and objected with a counterexample. This counterexample is called the brave officer paradox:

Suppose a brave officer to have been flogged when a boy at school for robbing an orchard, to have taken a standard from the enemy in his first campaign, and to have been made a general in advanced life; suppose, also, which must be admitted to be possible, that, when he took the standard, he was conscious of his having been flogged at school, and that, when made a general, he was conscious of his taking the standard but had absolutely lost consciousness of the flogging. (Reid 1785 [1851: 248–249])

Note that there are three timestamps in this counterexample:

A: Flogged as a boy at school.

Flogged as a boy at school. B: Taken a standard from the enemy in his first campaign as a soldier.

Taken a standard from the enemy in his first campaign as a soldier. C: Being made a general in advanced life.

The officer can trace his memories from B back to A, from C back to B, but not from C back to A. So by Locke’s theory, the soldier is the same person as the boy, and the general is the same person as the soldier. So by transitivity, the description at three stages should belong to the same person. This should be relatively intuitive.

However, the general at an advanced age cannot remember the event of himself being flogged as a boy. By the same theory, the general at an advanced stage is not the same person as the young boy! The point of the objection is that this theory produces an absurd conclusion in special cases.

So who am I, really? What does it mean for me to be the same person over time? Is Locke’s account of memory/consciousness necessary for personal identity? On the same note, equating consciousness with memory is also a very contentious interpretation. Philosophy usually produces more questions than answers, and this is definitely food for thought. While, in Westworld, within all its intrigue, there seems to be something more than just memory that triggered the hosts’ consciousness, it is undeniable that the persistence of memory plays a significant role.

References: