Anthony Hopkins’ character, Ford, introduces the idea of Julian Jaynes’ Bicameral Mind theory as a way his business partner, Arnold, attempted to “bootstrap” consciousness into the Hosts. As he explains it, the bicameral mind assumed that the thoughts provoking it to action were the commandments of the gods, or god. More specifically, Jaynes believed that consciousness was synthesis between two sides of the brain, the ability to create metaphor.

His markers of consciousness are as follows; Spatialization, Excerption, an awareness of analogue (I or Me), and Narratization and Conciliation. Interestingly enough, the Hosts of Westworld have recently been shown to possess almost all the markers of consciousness Jaynes suggests save one. In episode six, Maeve and Felix are having one of their little sessions, and Felix pairs her to his tablet, showing her the map it generates of her speech. If you watch carefully enough, you can observe that Maeve has the ability to reason spatially; she can differentiate between a whole and an excerption from that whole, she has a definite sense that she herself is moving through time and the ability to recognize and connect narrative events. The one thing the Hosts do not possess is the ability to conciliate, or to connect one moment to the next, and connect events to each other in a causal sense (example: I got wet today walking to work because yesterday my umbrella got a hole in it so I left it at home). This is the only thing the Hosts have been designed not to have, outside of knowledge they need to complete a narrative loop for the pleasure of guests at the park. Afterwards their experiences and any knowledge gained from them is erased and they do the same thing all over again. In fact, the entire reason park staff has become worried about the Hosts is because of Ford’s reveries, or learned/remembered behaviors and the potential that they may begin remembering the things that are done to them and act on those “grudges.” Because, as Elsie points out, could you imagine if those poor bastards could remember what was done to them?

On a given day, the Hosts are not kept alive long enough to create a notable string of events. On a given day, the Hosts of Westworld do not stray from pre-programmed loops, and therefore do not learn and conciliate new information. To argue that they have achieved Jaynesian consciousness within their loops would be to argue that your Apple Watch is conscious because it has an alarm that goes off every day at the same time to tell you to take your birth control pills. Jaynes himself did not conflate consciousness with muscle memory and repetitive behavior. Consciousness, remember, does not exist without deeper levels of synthesis, and the Hosts are simply programmed.