Westworld S2 (show spoilers as it airs)

Several possibilities come to mind:

Dolores could have read Emily’s book while she strolled through the human library; it is not likely with our present knowledge that she would have bothered to do so on her own but those two might have a history: Emily was William’s daughter, and while she told us that she preferred the Raj-simulation, she likely accompanied her dad to Westworld as well, she might even have started there.

A meeting with Dolores in Westworld is not unlikely - and if it happened, it would have been significant, since young Emily would have likely already known her from the real world.

Is it possible that her reaction had an impact on Dolores, maybe even re-awoke her once again?

She was, after all, one of Ford’s primary test subjects to find out what triggers a self-conscious AI; he would not have missed the opportunity.

It is also possible that a back-up exists of all human data. What company would fail to secure its core data? [Yes, less likely given Delos’ interest in a copy of that data - and Ford’s interest in keeping it from them.]

Ford or Bernard might have also created back-ups of key-individuals and hit them elsewhere - Ford might still be elsewhere as well, maybe even with those back-ups.

Bernard could also have been the key to recreate Emily from memory - if he ever read her book (he did visit the library repeatedly).

Less likely but also not impossible is the option that the data was recovered by Delos; as we know, no digital data is deleted as long as it is not overwritten or the medium is destroyed.

Of course, the post-credit-scene could also reveal that William is trapped within a variant of Roko’s basilisk.

It was a nice touch to store the human essence in books and put them all into a library. Among other references, it evokes the destruction of the Great Library of Alexandria. IIRC, one of Westworld’s creators reiterated the notion that this event erased our memory of our origins.

And while this is factually not quite true, it’s a fitting metaphor for the events in Westworld, particularly in light of the post-credit-scene.

Nice catch…Hopkins refers to said Library. “The event of its destruction has overshadowed everything else about it.”

For a hot second when Bernard said “I’ve killed you all” and they were doing satellite stuff…I thought they were pulling a Snake Pliskin and EMPing the world. THAT would be an interesting way to start season 3.

Lee’s character development was the most surprising of all. I loved him going on with his speech while committing suicide by QA (who were trying really hard not to have to kill him).

Good point; it may be frustrating, but it doe put the viewer in a Host’s point of view.

BTW, did anyone else notice this Escher print on the wall in Arnold/Bernard’s house near the end? Very apropos: Drawing Hands - Wikipedia

I want to clarify one point from a previous post. When I say that Bernard might have remembered Emily, I didn’t speak of the Bernard who is shot by Dolores and is reconstructed from her memory.

It’s more than a bit of a stretch to assume that this remembered Bernard had memories beyond the ones instilled by Dolores who should not know what Bernard remembers from the library.

Instead, we can’t dismiss the possibility that more than one Bernard was/is active simultanously.

In episode 7, Halores purposefully leads the Delos contingent to several Bernard suits, which made me wonder: Why make more than one, unless you use more than one?

We have no evidence so far for a multitude of Bernards running around but the possibility is an established story-line about digital personalities that has not yet been truly explored: What if the same host becomes many by copy?

Are the copies truly identical, and do they have the potential to become truly different personalities, which would prove or, failing to do so, disprove the point discussed by Bernard and “Ford” that the hosts are, in contrast to humans, free?
Also, I wanted to point out that the names in Westworld are mostly carefully chosen.

Maeve means “intoxicating”; she is a goddess of song, which fits with her ability to influece other hosts. In numerology, her qualities are that of a determined leader.

Emily in numerology has a desire fro travel and adventure; the meaning of the name is not just the well-known “industrious” but it can also mean “rival”.

Dolores, of course, means sorrow. In numerology, her qualitites are philosophical and spiritual, she seeks the truth.

Bernard originally means “strong, brave as a bear”. In numerology, he is a visionary but also has leader qualities.

And, of course, William is a strong-willed warrior. Interestingly, his name shows the same qualities in numerology as Dolores; even their names match their journey in season one and beyond.

Becoming even very different personalities would imply nothing about Free Will so much as it would about Chaos Theory (assuming a large nonlinear system).

The exact same Bernard[sub]0[/sub] could become a very different Bernard[sub]n[/sub] and/or get to one of several more common end states (attractor basins) by very different paths based on even the most minuscule differences in starting conditions.

Such occurring would tell us nothing more about Free Will yea or nay.
Have n exact copies of the same perfectly smooth ball bearing and attempt as well as you can to place them at the exact same spot on the top of a dome above a plain for multiple trials. Does the fact that each exact copy very likely ends up taking different paths and coming to rest in a different location imply that each ball has Free Will?

We don’t know when that scene takes place. It could be thousands of years in the future, and the Earth’s robot overlords recreated her with some yet-undiscovered technology

Good point, DSeid. Chaos theory as well as quantum indeterminacy lead to a randomness that adds unpredictability to processes and their outcome without saying anything about the existence of free will at all.

But we are not talking about just a physical system. We are talking about a system that shows a quality not reducible to pure physics: self-consciousness.

Whether this quality is an emerging quality of specific organizations of matter capable of computation or something different, it is not just governed by physical laws.

What emerges from physics is psyche. Which is able to develop motivations, conduct deliberations, imagine goals and apply shifting values to objects, entities and constructs that are discovered and invented by the psyche itself.

And all of this is communicated among psyches to create another emerging quality: culture.

Free will is, from this pov, born in the interaction between psyche and culture.

We don’t, for example, rely on flipping a coin each time we make a decision to give it the appearance of free will. This kind of freedom only leads to randomness. But this is not what happens when a decision is being made. The world would be quite a different place if that were true.

No, if we look at free will, it is neither perfectly described by determinism nor indeterminism.

Physics is the foundation, but psyche and culture create and shape what we call free will.

And this is why I think Westworld has done a better job of dealing with this difficult issue than it gets credit.

In Westworld, though, aren’t they arguing against free will? They’ve distilled human behavior into 10,247 lines of code.

That code (in the books, presumably) governs behavior, though. There’s nothing that’s captured the memories; short of starting a new simulation at birth, I’m not sure how they could have captured the guests (or Delos, or William), unless they are also capturing memories.

Well here you get into where multiple GD threads have gone before and will go again. Is information and is processing not governed by physical laws? Or is information and stuff really the same thing? Is consciousness not governed by physical laws? Is consciousness and the “decisions” made by consciousness another very macroscopic way of describing what is happening, just like one could describe the flow of a river by discussing the movement of each molecule or in terms of the fluid dynamics? What exactly is Free Will? Does it exist, is it a delusion, and if so is it a necessary one?

Not sure I’d have the energy to go there! They have been very long threads!

But in WWverse humans have delusions of Free Will and woke hosts might actually have Free Will. Because? Not sure they have dealt with the subject so well. Honestly I suspect a few college kids getting high have dealt with it more deeply than they have.

How much free will do humans enjoy in real life? Many humans seek out a mate, get married, and raise kids. Do they really choose to do it, or are they just following a program?

Note that even simple automata may incorporate randomness to achieve a goal, so that some degree of unpredictability on the micro level says nothing about the level of consciousness of the system.

I thought it was 10,000 different distinct “people”.

“You only live as long as the last person who remembers you”.

In the case of Bernard and the “Logan” avatar for the Cradle system, their only “memories” before their creation are extrapolated from what other hosts witnessed them do.

I thought Man in Black William told his daughter that they used devices in the cowboy hats to scan the guests’ brain?

It’s not clear how much memories really matter anyway. Hosts don’t remember anything when they get killed in the park and sent back into circulation. Bernard spent half the show not knowing who or what or when he was.

Much of the show seems to revolve around the essence of who and what a person is can be distilled down to a general “backstory”, few “cornerstone” memories, a couple “primary drivers” that define behavior, and various programmed responses and mannerisms to test “fidelity”.

Nah, they said it was every visitor who ever visited the park, possibly a million? The cowboy hats scan their brains, memories and all. Now, it is a fascinating question, possibly outside the scope of science fiction, of what is the true information content of a human mind, but in the show it doesn’t really matter as they have essentially unlimited storage capacity and high-speed data transfer. They did emphasize that the host minds take up a lot more space, and are correspondingly more complex, than human minds.

And THAT at least is an interesting concept. How much of what we “remember” is extrapolated created (possibly accurately recreated, possibly more fictional than that) on the fly made up filler from a few “cornerstone memories” using our primary drivers and our inherent tendency to respond to certain sorts of things in certain ways as our basic temperament and personality? Creating a presumed signal out what otherwise is mostly noise, as we do in perception in general where our brains complete pictures all the time out of noisy inputs?

Wife and I didn’t realize there were post-credit scenes. Could we get a summary of key info revealed in them…especially the last one.

TIA!

It was just one, MiB walking into an old deserted forge in ruins and being greeted by Emily who then leads him to a room like the one James Delos was in, asks him if he knows where he is, tells him hes been there lots of times and then begins questioning him for “fidelity”.

You can watch it on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dU9VqYBekhs

Bumped.

Any fan of Westworld should see Ex Machina: Ex Machina (2014) - IMDb

A cool, creepy, near-future sf thriller that could almost be set in the same universe. Highly recommended.

Yeah, it’s good. And a hell of an ending.