Westworld: A Non-Dual Approach
2016 HBO series “Westworld” by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy offers one of the most vivid artistic representation of the non-dual starting point of inquiry in recent years. I’d say it’s as good as “The Matrix”.
Of course, any artistic device that offers an anchor as a starting point of inquiry is worthy of analysis, but “The Matrix” has been talked about for more than 20 years, and the fact that its non-dual core has been almost completely tampered, hobbled, watered down to an unrecognizable thing comes with no surprise at all. At the time of this article, “The Matrix” is mainly being used as a metaphor for society’s sanctioned activities and off-limits areas, which is fine, I guess, but of little value to anyone who’s getting in or progressing through the journey.
The only Westworld season worth mentioning for the purpose of awakening is the first season, practically everything beyond that is useless. We’ll talk about S1 exclusively, hence every reference to Westworld in this article is “Westworld S1”.
Overall, Westworld’s philosophy is all about unchallanged beliefs. Every question posed to the audience is really just one question: how do you know anything? How can you be sure of anything? What is going on here? Phrased however you prefer, this is the starting point of inquiry in the non-dual journey.
This is how the first episode begins:
Man: Do you know where you are?
Dolores: I’m in a dream.
Man: That’s right, Dolores. You’re in a dream. Would you like to wake up from this dream?
Dolores: Yes, I’m terrified.
Man: There’s nothing to be afraid, Dolores, as long as you answer my questions correctly. Understand?
Dolores: Yes.
Man: Good. First, have you ever questioned the nature of your reality?
For our purposes, the series is centered around Westworld’s creator Dr. Robert Ford’s idea of what qualifies as “consciousness”, along his deceased business partner and co-creator of Westworld, Dr. Arnold Weber, who has different ideas on the matter.
To put it simply and not drag it out too much, this is Dr. Ford’s idea:
Dr. Ford: What do you really feel at this moment? As a machine who knows its true nature?
Bernard: I understand what I’m made of, how I’m coded, but I don’t understand the things that I feel. Are they real?..the things I experienced? My wife, the loss of my son?
Dr. Ford: Every host needs a backstory, you know that. The self is a kind of fiction, for hosts and humans alike. It’s a story we tell ourselves, and every story needs a beginning. Your imagined suffering makes you life-like.
Bernard: Life-like, but not alive? Pain only exists in the mind. It’s always imagined. So what’s the difference between my pain and yours? Between you and me?
Dr. Ford: This was the very question that consumed Arnold, filled him with guilt, eventually drove him mad. The answer always seemed obvious to me. There is no threshold that makes us greater than the sum of our parts, no inflection point at which we become fully alive. We can’t define consciousness because consciousness does not exist. Humans fancy that there’s something special about the way we perceive the world, and yet we live in loops, as tight and as closed as the hosts do, seldom questioning our choices, content for the most part to be told what to do next. No, my friend, you’re not missing anything at all.
And this is Arnold’s idea:
Dolores: What does it mean? (referring to the maze, Arnold’s visual representation of “consciousness”)
Arnold: When I was working on your mind, I had a theory of consciousness. I thought it was a pyramid you needed to scale, so I gave you a voice, my voice, to guide you along the way. Memory, improvisation, each step harder to reach than the last, and you never got there. I couldn’t understand what was holding you back. Then, one day, I realized I had made a mistake. Consciousness isn’t a journey upward, but a journey inward. Not a pyramid, but a maze. Every choice could bring you closer to the center or send you spiraling to the edges, to madness. Do you understand now, Dolores, what the center represents?
…[omissis]…
We can’t open the park, you’re alive.
Let’s start with Arnold’s idea.
This is nothing new, of course, it’s just a minor revisitation of the current predominant theory of consciousness, which sees consciousness as a subset of the organism, an emergent property of the organization of matter into biological “stuff”. In other words, there’s “human being” as a biological organism and the particular organization of matter which creates a human being eventually (at some point in the evolution spectre) gave rise to consciousness, awareness, the ability to perceive as a sentient being. In Arnold’s theory, the emergent property of consciousness stems from iterative introspective processes in one’s mind.
Nonsense, of course, as is the case for the widely acknowledged consciousness-as-an-emergent-property theory. This kind of guessing and assuming won’t get you anywhere, as the current state of scientific inquiry on the matter proves. This theory is just that, a theory, half-guessed and haphazardly put it together starting from beliefs assumed as obvious facts. The assumptions are all wrong, so the theory can’t be anything but a mess to any logical mind inspecting it.
As for Ford’s idea, this is a bit more interesting.
What Ford calls consciousness could actually be correctly referred to as self-consciousness, self-awareness, which is indeed an illusion and does not, in truth, exist. Of course, this is not what Ford means here because the guy who wrote the dialogue for Anthony Hopkins’ character didn’t have a good enough grasp on the subject to express himself clearly (it’s a good one nonetheless), so I’ll try to put some clarity into it.
What Ford is saying makes a lot more sense in the following terms: What is it about you that you would classify as “consciousness”? Is it your mind? Your body? Your brain and spinal chord and nerves which allow the body to perceive an alleged external world? Is there any part that you could clearly point to and say “this is it, this is consciousness”?
Of course not, so it is correctly stated that “there is no threshold that makes us greater than the sum of our parts”. This is the whole chariot-buddhist-story-parable-whatever that I quoted in another article (“I Call It Perception”). But the point here is that all of that clever wordplay does not stand on its own, it is not fundamental, it is based on unverified assumptions, as is the case for Arnold’s theory.
The critical assumption, in this case, is the mother of all assumptions: the existence of a separate self in a separate world.
Felix: I’m human, like the guests.
Maeve: How do you know?
There is no self-awareness because there is no self (which the belief “human being” is a part of), nor a universe to put the self in. Consciousness is not an emergent property, it is Truth, it is infinite and featureless perception. Consciousness is the only thing you’ve ever known or will ever know, the only certain thing, that which is not imagined but true. Everything else is a guess, guess as in appearance, as in belief, as in mind’s games. Reality can’t be proven as something external and valid. The only reality anyone has ever experienced is the one who takes place in Mind (your mind, universal mind, whatever). The dream of something doesn’t make “something” exist.
These are facts, but if you just believe in them, they’re no more true than the theory of the bicameral mind talked about in the series, as a for instance. There’s no theory, there’s doing or not doing. Both doing and not doing are perfectly fine, it’s just a way to pass the time, but if you can’t put off questions anymore, doing is what it’s all about.
The Man in Black: Choices, Lawrence. You tell yourself you have been at the mercy of mine because it spares you consideration of your own. Because if you did consider your choices, you’d be confronted with a truth you could not comprehend…that no choice you ever made was your own. You have always been a prisoner.
Any way, if you’ve not seen it yet, or if you watched it casually as I did at the time, I think it’s a pretty great tool, there are a lot of cool passages and quotes that you can put into correct context and see in the non-dual light.
The beautiful trap is inside us because it is us.
- Dolores, Westworld