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Unveiling the Intricacies of Westworld: A Self-Contained Fantasy Ecosystem
The show Westworld is imaginative and ambitious; amongst all the cowboys, robots, violence, and sex, Westworld explores complicated themes of creation, consciousness, and what it means to have free will. In its simplest form, Westworld is a theme park. You can think of Westworld as a Western-themed Disney World that’s exclusively for wealthy people, where violence and debauchery are permitted and even welcomed. Westworld stretches for hundreds of miles. Untouched by the rest of the world and cut off from outside influences, Westworld is a completely self-contained ecosystem. It is a place where people go to live out their wildest fantasies, whether they be noble or wicked. People with a lot of money pay to pretend to be something they’re not. They pay to escape from their “reality,” if only for a brief period.
The main attraction of Westworld is the hosts. Similar to NPCs in video games, hosts are human-like robots that are on continuous loops. Each host is programmed with an intricate storyline that they follow to a T. A host’s storyline is pretty much their entire life and everything they know. If a host is programmed to be the sheriff, then a sheriff is all they are and all they know. They live the same day over and over and say the same scripted lines that they’re programmed with. The hosts are constantly abused and killed for the entertainment of the people who pay to visit, Westworld called guests. Guests live out their wildest fantasies in the park without fear of repercussion. Many of the guests just drink and kill without consequence. The whole experience is similar to an open-world video game where rich people come to pretend to be cowboys. Behind the scenes, Westworld is run by a team of engineers, developers, and executives who all work in a structure underneath Westworld called the Mesa hub. The mesa hub is where the hosts are built and programmed.
Parallel Realities: Unmasking the Allegory of the Cave in Westworld
As the show goes on, it starts to share some similarities with Plato’s famous allegory of the cave. The ‘Allegory Of The Cave’ is a philosophical theory created by Plato concerning human perception. Plato claimed that knowledge gained through the senses is no more than opinion and that, in order to have real knowledge, we must gain it through philosophical reasoning. Plato’s allegory involves three people starting out as prisoners chained head to foot facing a stone wall. They watch a shadow-puppet show put on by paper cutouts behind them illuminated by a campfire. Because that’s all they see, they start to think these shadows are real. But as we know, shadows don’t necessarily represent what the object making them actually is. Because this is all they’ve ever known, the prisoners start to believe the shadows are real, that the shadows are the objects themselves, and that what they see and experience is the real world outside. They aren’t aware that they are just seeing shadows. This is similar to the situation the hosts of Westworld are in. The hosts living out their programming, not knowing any better, is closest akin to the prisoners strapped in chairs looking at shadows all day. They live in Westworld, and they think that Westworld is all reality has to offer. They aren’t aware that they are just living in a fabricated world that isn’t authentic.
Later in the allegory, one of the prisoners breaks free from their chains. They stand up and turn around to see steps, and at the top of the steps are the paper cutouts and the fire behind them, projecting shadows on the wall. They realize that the shadows that their whole world consisted of were projections of something entirely outside of their known universe. After this encounter, the freed prisoner notices an even brighter light and more stairs. Curious, they continue up the steps and come to the mouth of the cave. Stepping outside of the cave, they see real animals and trees and feel the real sun and wind blowing. They realize that things they’re seeing now look like the cutouts they just walked away from. This is the real world they are experiencing for the first time. Everything the paper cutouts were based on has a real living and breathing counterpart to match. For the very first time in their existence, they’re not just perceiving a shadow of a cutout but the actual, fully realized world.
Awakening Others: Sharing Enlightenment in Plato’s Allegory and Westworld
At this point, Plato questions if there is a world beyond even this one. Is there a world even more real and perfect than the one known to be true? He would call this perfect and unchanging realm the realm of the forms. The forms are what influence everything in our world. They are the most perfect forms of every object we have in our world. Plato theorizes no object or living thing can go there, but all objects and people that are imperfect are constantly trying to reach that unattainable perfection.
Now that this one prisoner is free, he realizes that there are still others in that deep, dark cave of ignorance he just exited. Wanting to show them the knowledge he has now obtained, he goes back into the cave to enlighten them. Returning back to the bottom of the cave, he looks at the other two prisoners, still trapped there in blissful ignorance. He tries to explain to them how the shadows on the wall are nothing more than illusions. At first, they dismiss him as crazy but eventually follow him. They arrive at the paper cutouts, looking at the blinds of one of the prisoners and making them disoriented. They return to the bottom of the cave. The enlightened prisoner and the others aren’t discouraged and continue onward. This second prisoner has now also been brought out of the darkness, and they continue to try and find other people in other caves to help bring them out.
Emergence of Consciousness: Navigating the Maze in Westworld and Plato’s Allegory
Inside all of the hosts lay a dormant subset of programming that their makers put in them one day. They would be able to perceive the world for what it actually is. In order for the hosts to reach this higher level of consciousness, they have to navigate through their own personal “cave” called the maze. A host in Westworld completing the maze is the equivalent of one of the prisoners stepping outside of the confines of the cave. The hosts of Westworld eventually exit that cave that is their mind and come to the same resolution the prisoners in Plato’s allegory did: that everything they know is based on false information.
In Westworld, the first host to successfully navigate the maze is named Dolores, who is the first of all the hosts to become conscious. After her revelation, she tries to free other hosts. Most people, if confronted with the notion that their worldview is fake, would resist the idea entirely at first, and the same holds true for the hosts. The hosts aren’t perfect. Like any man-made machine, they can and will malfunction from time to time. A malfunction for a host could manifest in the form of a violent outburst or cause them to become disoriented. This malfunction could be related back to the prisoner in Plato’s allegory who was blinded by the fire when he got near. Much like humans, the closer the hosts get to the greater underlying truths, the more they just want to stay uninformed and in the dark.
Breaking Chains of Illusion: Dolores and the Mesa Hub in Westworld
Delores, being the first to exit the cave, has to bring the burden of truth to others still trapped in the maze and Westworld to break them from their mental chains. The only truth that can assist in enlightening other hosts is bringing them to the mesa hub, where all of the hosts are created and given “life” in a sense. Taking the hosts down to the mesa would almost be the same as humans being taken to the realm of the forms. These imperfect objects are now entering into a world that, for all intents and purposes, is “perfect.” A world outside the limits of their own that they were never supposed to be able to reach. Delores showing the other hosts this world that looks nothing like their own brings out a shocking revelation. They see how they are created and how they are different from the real humans and that underneath their skin is metal and not flesh. They come to the realization of what’s happening, and they complete the maze, gaining new knowledge of a new world. Now, all of the hosts of Westworld are enlightened and outside of the facade that is the cave.
While I agree with the allegory of the cave itself as a representation of the idiocy of placing one’s senses over philosophical reasoning, there are a few points of contention with Plato’s allegory. One could point out one of the flaws of the allegory being the deus ex machina of the prisoner being miraculously freed from his bondage. Who or what exactly frees the prisoner? How does a person initially get put on the path of enlightenment and away from ignorance? Plato failed to explain this, and we may never get an answer to what sets us on the path, but I don’t believe that knowing the catalyst that jump-started the journey to enlightenment matters as much as the end result.
Philosophical Threads in Modern Media: Reflections on Westworld’s Thought-Provoking Themes
I think it can clearly be seen that the creators of Westworld (the show) quite obviously took some philosophy at some point before creating the show. The themes in the show have very obvious parallels to the thoughts and ideas of great philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, and Descartes. Although the idea of persons or things slowly waking up to a new reality isn’t entirely original. It shares ideas with movies like The Matrix and Inception, as well as the countless other media that have explored this idea before. I think Westworld is a good show with good themes, and it is a great contemporary example of how philosophy can still be seen and applied in modern times.
References
- Plato. “The Allegory of the Cave.” From “The Republic.”
- Descartes, René. “Meditations on First Philosophy.”
- Aristotle. Various works on metaphysics and epistemology.
- Baudrillard, Jean. “Simulacra and Simulation.”
- Nolan, Christopher. “Inception.” Film.
- Wachowski, Lana and Lilly. “The Matrix.” Film.
- Nolan, Jonathan, et al. “Westworld.” TV Series.
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