yes, as someone who struggles with bipolar with psychotic features I really like how much empathy he has , also I live in Europe where mental health problems are taken a little bit more seriously and I think that instead of punishing people who have done bad things cause they suffer from mental disorder should be rehabilitated and helped , I have lived in US as well and its catastrophic what is going on in there, most people who suffer from mental disorders are not able to get help in US simply cause often they dont have enough money, and thats why US probably has such an high murder rate , broken people go to shoot people and etc , move "The Joker " showed that very well what can happen if mentally ill person doesnt get help, I am soo lucky that I can see my psychatrist for free , I cant even imagine what I would do if I lived in US... I wouldnt be able to afford help in there
@19:36 "We are pessimists that gave up on ourselves a long time ago & until we learn to embrace our Uniquely challenged mental health and our Beautifully Different brains, our humanity will forever be tied to Determinism & thus the loops are created - Hurt People Hurt People" Masterfully Written & Beautifully well said words such as these are rarity in my life & thus I must thank you, for I was not expecting to shed a tear watching this video & yet I have.
I have belatedly binge-watched all four seasons of Westworld, and I love it. I have enjoyed HaxDogma's analysis of each episode. This final analysis posing the issue of Mental Health at the center of understanding Westworld's complexities is the cherry on top of the sundae. Well done!
Did anyone else notice in episode 2 when Caleb and Maeve were on their way to the new park and Caleb was asked if he had a history of mental illness or depression and he never answers…
Bernard: What humans describe as sane is a narrow range of behaviors. Most states of consciousness are insane. It was such a glancing reference, but it seems like this is the reason that humanity inevitably fails and why Hosts, made as humanity's reflection will also fail. It's also the reason why faithful attempts to integrate human consciousness into Host bodies fail!
Westworld seems to be a call for mindful kindness. Some meaningful quotes to me : - Free will exists Caleb it’s just f… hard. - I choose to see the beauty. - The park is here to show them who they could become. Delusions in westworld, lead their characters to self destructions : - nothing is real for William - free will is overrated for Stubbs - Bernard tries to forget Charlie. - Arnold wants to see him again. - Serac surrendered his will to Rehobam. My take on it is that there is no meaning to find, no purpose to achieve. Narratives are lies. Let it go and do the next right thing.
"no purpose to achieve" -- we make our own purpose. If you don't make your own, then yes, there is nothing for you to achieve. If you make your own purpose, then you have a lot to achieve. Be active. Be happy.
@@RichardRagan i think Westworld’s message is that William eternal pursuit of purpose is meaningless. As if one would be an empty shell without it. Nothing ‘has’ to be. Otherwise there no free will. A reference I think Nolan brothers love is Oppenheimer’s quote : Any man whose errors take ten years to correct is quite a man. That’s why Robert Ford apologizes to Dolores. He has this amazing faculty to question his reality and change his mind.
@@karelknightmare6712 Well, William's pursuit pursuit of purpose is meaningless but that's not true of many other people. William's pursuit is meaningless because he is a broken person who has no moral compass.. On the other hand Caleb's pursuit of purpose is extremely meaningful he's trying to care for his daughter and he's trying to do what's right for humanity -- by destroying Rehoboam.
@@RichardRagan i do agree. I think the subtlety relies on the meaning of purpose. I guess for Westworld’s authors, purpose is a meaningless concept for sentient beings. A fridge’s purpose is to keep cool food. Williams’ purpose is not to save mankind as he said in the end of season 3. I do think Caleb does not have pre-thought purposes. He just assesses each situation individually with his gut feeling of if it’s right or not. He has kept his values to the bare minimum, freedom, no harm etc. He has never said his purpose is to watch for his daughter or to lead mankind to freedom. He does not feel entitled to anything.
@@karelknightmare6712 But isn't William a sentient entity? Whenever the hosts or the humans can abstract reality and they can set their own purpose. I think it might be cool if in the final episode Caleb is able to save his daughter even though he is the 256th generation of Caleb and he certainly is not human anymore, but his "essence" remained and his loyalty to his daughter saved her in the end The showrunners are trying to play with us and ask us who are we really? While Caleb is now a host, I think the meaning of his life, his purpose, remains to save his daughter. This will show through in the end. So what are we really? Are we humans with cells, are we hosts with a pearl as a brain, or are we just consciousness and it doesn't matter what vessel we are in?
🏆 🏆 🏆 I cannot wait to hear what more you have to say on this. Now that you have put this theory into words- it couldn't be more obvious and clear. "Hurt people, hurt people".
Wow! This is probably one the finest explanations of a show that I may have ever heard. Mind blowing! Incredible. This theory of one constantly reliving a loop can also explain generational poverty, generational incarceration, and generational drug/alcohol abuse. Again, the only way someone can break out of that personal or generational loop is to sacrifice and experience pain to break this loop. Until that pain is experienced, the loop of despair will only continue. In a sense, that is life.
I think you’re right about humanity and maybe even an underlying theme of the show. I just really can’t imagine that we’re going to get an answer or solution from it! Westworld will not solve one of the most fundamental questions of human existence. On the other hand, I’ll do anything Evan Rachel Woods wants.
There's a quote from one of the Evangelion Rebuild movies that reminded me of Crichton's work: "Life has always changed itself to adapt to the world around it. However, [humans] change not themselves, but the world." "Good" and "Bad" are merely societal markers we put on behavior we deem morally praiseworthy or reprehensible, but in the grander scheme of things, are simple dichotomies in which we can place our social extremes. Or, as Sir David Attenborough so eloquently put it, "Nature is indifferent to suffering." The longer we stay stuck in such simple perimeters, the longer we thwart true progress as a species. It's this moralizing of the world & our species, which is currently tearing this world apart. Just look at the news. That's what I think this show is about: Moral Relativism, Historical Trauma & Forced Determinism. We've mandated humanity into loops based on these factors, and because of it, suffer outside of the "true factors" of nature. The end game of the show is to tell the audience that you should question & deconstruct your ideologies, especially those that sway you from "all that natural splendor."
Moral relativism is mute if the words to describe moral failures no longer make sense or have no meaning in our current context. You have just described the project most philosophers have been articulating since World War 2: our current culture is in ethical disarray (the existentialist; hannah arent; foucault; baudrillard). In a weird way, westworld falls prey to the same pataphysical extremes that Baudrillard described were befalling our own world. Westworld pushes to its own extremes only to break itself.
What a beautiful theory. Very thought provoking and makes me reflect not only on the show but about humanity, mental health, and about my life and of those around me.
There are irredeemable individuals: Hitler, Himmler, Goring, Jeffrey Dahlmer, John Wayne Gacey, Ted Bundy, Mussolini, Jack the Ripper, just to name a few.
“irredeemable” in the context was Rehoboam saying that he could not be brought back into being exactly what it wanted to be, to be predictable and controllable within the scope of its own programming. So it was not saying he was not redeemable because he was evil or a bad person and this could not be fixed, but because he could think for himself. These “outliers” who can free themselves from their loops could not be permitted to interact with the controlled population in case they caused unpredictable events and thoughts and more outliers being caused, not in line with Rehoboam’s predictions and that was its only priority.
Great comments and I agree, although I’m not sure outliers’ unpredictability was the result of free thinking/will only….it could also be the complexity of human mind that Rehoboam couldn’t compute. I think this video (and the show) make a good point that even after humans were freed from Rehoboam, a large portion stayed in their loops as the machine predicted.
Makes you wonder why he used that exact word, rather than "irretrievable", which would have made far more sense and been far more accurate. Rehoboam's issue is that it's still just a smarter machine, spouting what it's human creators allowed it to spout. For all its intelligence, it's not even able to find the most precise vocabulary for a meaning.
@@ZemplinTemplar I'm not sure about the use of the word in English, but the corresponding word for in Portuguese (irredimível) looks pretty fit for the case, because: 1. It's used for someone that cannot repair their fault because they don't see their action as a fault; 2. It's used for someone that is not allowed to repair their fault because the one that suffers the fault cannot forgive them; (if you've seen Everything, Everywhere, At The Same Time you gonna remember about the discussion) 3. It has a deep connection to the Christian lexicon being related to , it's less related t logic and more to tradition, belief, and feelings. I see a lot of jealousy and resentment in Mr. Rohoboam. A whole lot of humanity there.
I thought the video was fantastic, well thought out and presented. Just came on here to share that and that my immediate thought while watching some of the clips of Logan & James Delos's final conversation and listening to the theme of your video I was reminded of Logan's final words to his father 'I'm all the way down!' That scene is the keystone memory of the unsuccessful Delos host and would also explain why it failed as it's foundation was built on grief and guilt and an inability to seek help, a recipe for self-destruction if ever there was one.
"These violent delights have violent ends" is a Shakespearean phrase that not only encapsulated the arc of the first seasons, but of the hosts' mental\emotional development across the seasons... the writers may fall off, but the show is already a masterpiece in the seasons already shown.
You should have been a writer for the show to put this or ANY deeper perspective to the show. I feel at the end of each season listening to the team of westworld writers, producers, etc. Are more into the spectacular effects and locations, wardrobes, futuristic life than the deeper layers you describe beautifully. I worry we're not going to get an understanding in the finale we all hope for. We're making sense of things that sometimes aren't written to make sense. Some episodes feel like fillers. Again bravo for your beautiful summary.
Great theory with a beautiful attitude towards the end goal. I like its elegant simplicity a lot. Empathy being the key fits well with hard determinism, indeterminism and something in between those two. That said, given my previous experience with ambitious sci-fi shows, I can only hope things don't get bogged down and then go downhill precisely due to that ambition, for example if they've decided to go beyond the scope of your theory and rather have some particular solution of the hard consciousness problem instead. Or something like that. This would be very risky indeed. I just want a show worthy of rewatching and not ruined by the end. :)
He had to hide though, and being a nobody grunt is all he could do, and something he already knew how to do. He actually did break out of the control, because he had a family -- something the AI deemed him unsuitable to have, to the point it made sure that he never would, by actively sabotaging relationships it deemed unworthy of forming. The AI turned him into a criminal, because it saw him useful for that. But he was no longer a criminal after. Are you the job you do? No. Of course the people at the top would love to believe that, because they benefit the most from such an assessment. They get to believe and feel they are better than others. Take away that job though, and what's left that makes them better? Change nothing about their personality, make them a garbage pickup guy, and what about them makes them better than others then? Of course, naturally their attitudes would change over time after being put in such a position, but maybe not enough to redeem them. It won't make a bad person into a good person.
You are almost there. This is an archetypal Saga about the ultimate conditions of sentience, our orientation to Being. In other words, it is about how we can either see our consciousness as a source of awe and wonder, or we can use our consciousness as a mechanism by which we seek to make manifest our will-to-power, irrespective of its impact on other sentient creatures, the physical world, society writ large, and even our own existential "mood" (Heidegger called this Befindlichkeit). Themes of agency, identity, time, technology, and consciousness pervade the epic story. This is where the issues of mental health and determinism do come into play, but they are merely ancillary to the very nature of self-reflective consciousness. We know that something is not right, but we cannot articulate it. This manifests itself in a formal psychological pain, but this is much more fundamental to our actual emotional and psychological experience in our day-to-day lives that are often categorized within a topography of mental health. But there's a deeper, almost mythological quality to this epic saga. That may not make any sense, and I apologize if it doesn't. I've been working on a kind of quasi-dissertation over the past couple of years. I was inspired by two videos that simply combine all of the Robert Ford scenes together. Watching those scenes chronologically feels like you're mainlining the secret truth of the universe. I hope you don't take this as dismissive or critical; the themes you discuss are elements of the broader narrative arc, which to me is nothing short of an epic treatise, an ontological allegorical about the very nature and quandary of self-awareness. I suppose the best way to try to connect with what you're saying is to ask you what you mean by "mental health." And why is "freedom" so important? Again, I don't think you are "wrong" at ALL. Rather, I think it's fruitful to explore what lies underneath those concepts, and what that might mean for the actual themes of both the show and the human condition. Because I think that the shows greatness is rooted in the rich, sophisticated narrative that is woven over the course of the series, and the comprehensive manner it explores the most fundamental aspects of the human condition itself.
When watching episode 2 yesterday and William says he's 'what you call... Neurodivergent' I felt it was such a win for you! Congrats! You did nail it. Although on my view the show is free will for different people and in different settings (systems), and finally how this affects everyone's mental health. To that point I hope you do a video on medication. And I also hope you address the positive and the negative of it. The positive being the obvious self care and the negative being taking medication to meet settings expectations that aren't necessarily healthy. I hope I made enough sense because I would really love hearing more from you on this! Again, Congrats!
Yes!!! I completely agree. Ever since you made that determinism vs free will video, Westworld made even more sense to me like...a new level to the game.
William was neither good or bad, but I think because he had hidden his true self in the real world for so long to conform to society and be succesful, his desire to find true meaning through his own authentic choices in Westworld was so enormous that it became an obsession. Even after realising that every good or noble thing he ever did for Dolores didnt matter and so rendering his choices basically meaningless, he chased that same feeling of purpose over and over again in Westworld even tho he knew everything was a lie. So I think thats what doomed him, having felt that thrill of purpose the very first time he came to Westworld, desperately wanting to find meaning where there was none, instead of confronting his own reality and breaking the loop.
But how can we be sure the hosts wont be stuck in loops themselves? They have been sentient for a very short period of time so we dont enough data to observe properly, but we can already see the same cycles of conflict and destruction among them. I feel the show is showing us that sentience leads to such problems and our "struggle" as sentient species (humans or hosts) is to break this somehow but we keep falling back into it.
I agree sentience, lead's to choices and your environment shapes your choices and biased. It's a never ending loop. I don't even think a logical machine could escape.
The hosts are stuck in loops. They've never escaped them. They've just convinced themselves they aren't stuck in loops, and therein lies their folly and eventual downfall. Same thing as with 19th century colonial empires decided that people in less technologically developed parts of the world "aren't really people" and "need to be brought the light of civilization". Pity it also involved massacres, brutalizing and destruction of the cultures of the "unenlightened and unworthy". You can go ask a country like Sierra Leone how much of that "light of civilization" they were brought when the only infrastructure built there in the 19th and 20th centuries was resource-extraction infrastructure for the benefit of foreign powers. As a European, I can confirm to you that all of the worst war crimes and crimes against humanity in Europe of the 20th century alone were done with the excuse of "creating a better humanity" (though suspiciously along the lines of ethnic or racial hatred, and to the benefit of various smug autocrats and their toadies). That's just Europe, I'm not even touching upon the horror show that was Africa under colonial rule. The creators of the hosts and the hosts themselves are the same sort of privileged pieces of work who thought and think the wholesale genocide or violent "re-education" of millions of defenceless and innocent people is somehow acceptable and beneficial. Serac tried the same thing the hosts are trying, just through other means. They'll fail in the same way as he failed. At no point in human history did humanity progress ethically or otherwise when they decided the constant authoritarian repression of "ordinary people" ("we want to free them from their bad throughts, their bad emotions") is something desirable and to be followed. Humanity always went backwards as a result. Every single "experiment" with such a pretense ("creating a new and better humanity") in history backfired catastrophically and a huge number of countries in the world today are still paying the price, even those that weren't colonies of foreign powers, but subjects of totalitarian regimes (I come from a country in the latter group). You can't create a better society by attempting to destroy the freedom of individuals, even the freedom to make small mistakes and learn from their own individual experience, to be better people. The obsession of some hosts with "fixing humanity" reminds me of people in dysfunctional relationships who think they need to stay with another person to "fix them". No, it's not their job to fix anyone. People need to fix themselves, and they can only do so through honest self-reflection. (The Man in Black was a good example of a guy who refuses honest self-reflection, out of stubborn pride, and kept telling himself he is evil by nature and should behave as an evil person. His biggest and silliest mistake.) To quote a snarky character from another Michael Crighton-descended work: "No, you aren't repeating old mistakes. You're just making entirely new ones."
We make "useful/probable" assumptions about what's beyond our horizon, 13.8 GigaYears ago. How fast the "standard" clock ticks & how large the "standard" ruler is varies greatly over those 13.8 GigaYears; it's observer dependent. No "length", no "time", no "entropy" at The Infinitely Precise Start of The Big Bang: From our perspective, the "standard" clock ticks ever-slower the closer it is to the start of the Big Bang; locally, it ticks normally, as it does here. "Life" is that videogame playing in your head; without it, you're just meat. "eXergy" ( potential entropy ) created/destroys us; without it, we couldn't drive to the store. "God" (nature) programmed us to consume residual eXergy as the cosmos goes from infinitely hot/dense to infinitely cold/sparse.
They are NOT saying that there are humans who are inherently bad. We're seeing with host William an opportunity got redemption. The point of the show is to illustrate that there are fundamentally two ways to orient our consciousness, because of the nature of our minds. We must do things to survive, make decisions (which is where we get our loops). We have intentionality, a will-to-power. Our awareness of the pain we can cause (for ourselves, others, the world), creates a moral baseline. And the moral baseline is rooted in our fundamental ontological orientation, our view of ourselves and the Being of the universe. Dolores and William represent the archetypes of these orientations. She is like Abel, representing that we can see the world's beauty and have an existential orientation of ontological gratitude. She needs to "underlying meaning" or purpose. Just being alive, and able to appreciate the majestic gift of being, is enough... And William represents someone who is completely driven by the will-to-power that enables us to survive and build, to create(ie it FEELS good to satisfy an urge, whether the removal of pain (like hunger) or to gain pleasure (like sex, or vengeance)... AND cause pain due to the fact that there is a scarcity of resources in the world. People get CONSUMED by the ontic activities of survival (the stuff we do in our daily lives), and slowly become like William, never content, no matter how successful we are on the surface. (it's no surprise that this is SO congruent with the precepts of Buddhism and Taoism, which focus on the feelings of desire/craving as the source of existential suffering, and that the act of letting things be as they are as the escape from that cycle of suffering, that "loop"). So, yes, "mental health" IS a cornerstone of the show. But it's deeper than that. William's redemption as a host (and hopefully as a human), is a BEAUTIFUL inverse of the journey to the center of the maze that Dolores needed in order to understand what life was all about, the "time" that was necessary (per Ford at the end of S1) to recognize the pitfalls and temptations to succumb to an all-consuming will-to-power. A "good life" is still possible for people who aren't perfect avatars of existential virtue, like Dolores. We can identify that there are clearly good and evil, and do our part to fight evil. I think this is William's path, both host and human. Or, I hope so.
This comment really makes me feel like you resonated with the message, and that makes me feel really good. When this theory first came to mind, I had the same reaction, it made me want to be break my own loop. I hope both of us do
I got hit with the same "mental health crisis" thing you did during this season, but for me it happened when Teddy was trying to get Christina to see the tower and she couldn't.
Ford's ideas about what constitutes "change" seem incredibly narrow and shortsighted. He seems to think that the locus of change is only found at the level of the individual. Anyone ever tell this guy we live in a society?
Basically the hosts have flipped the script after going completely off the reservation and now playing humans in their own theme park. Nanotech could be mirroring a type of pharmaceutical. Christina could be working for mirror data collecting social media platform or a mainstream media network scripting narratives like a GTA style video game or simulation. The man in black and crew is creating their “new world order” which seems to be building up to technological singularity…… Would that mean Mave is the terminator? Needless to say there is plenty of cannon fodder for such wild theories.
@@Jbreeze3878 that makes a a lot of sense after episode 2 holy shit. Holores is so evil. I hope there’s a lot of cool things in this new Chicago park. I wonder who the hell is in hales body though. Is that just a copy of Dolores that went rogue? I mean Dolores was crazy too. They will never explain this
@@SerPapus I think there was originally 4 Delores copies of the little brain balls. 1 went into a copy of Hale which caused a type of dissociative identity disorder. But I could be completely mistaken. No show mind fucks like Westworld does. Although S3 and S4 so far are still clever in reinvented the story without all the convoluted mess of S2.. At least imo.
@@Jbreeze3878 I think each season was different. Season 1 was all about the park, season 2 was about slowly taking us away from the park and the mystery of the outside world. Seasons 3 was about the outside world. Season 4 will mind fuck us indeed.
@@SerPapus Absolutely. Westworld does an excellent job of telling a story beginning middle end and everything thing in between before wrapping up nicely without cliffhangers and loose ends in the season finale. Then being able to elegantly reinvent the story without sacrificing quality and keeping people guessing. All the Nolan brothers are excellent at the dreamscape timeline jumping and traveling mind bending science fiction type dramas.
This show is the best explanation of Hinduism and reincarnation/karma. It is very hard almost impossible to shed past karma. Trying to shed past karma only creates new karma amd a new loop. To transcend the loops altogether is enlightenment and so far only rhe ghost warrior guy has done that in the season 2 episode. "I saw beyond myself". In all of our past lived we are similar but different and we just get stuck in the ego self which is mainly useful for survival which are just loops creating loops.
except one small thing, what is mental health but the ability to seek and adhere to principles. however the further from the Truth one becomes, Destruction is sure to follow. never fails. a lie will destroy everything even that which props it up, THE TRUTH CAN BE WITNESSED, HAS NO SECRETS, CAN BE REPEATED, NEVER FAILS AND LAST FOR-EVER
this is absolutely amazing.... humanity definitely has become a victim of ourselves.... our minds poison others and in turn other minds poison ourselves. its a loop... and changing out views really could break the cycle
Fine and kind way to treat a topic that needs all the help it can get. I would listen without the westworld references but it made loads of interesting points.
We make "useful/probable" assumptions about what's beyond our horizon, 13.8 GigaYears ago. How fast the "standard" clock ticks & how large the "standard" ruler is varies greatly over those 13.8 GigaYears; it's observer dependent. No "length", no "time", no "entropy" at The Infinitely Precise Start of The Big Bang: From our perspective, the "standard" clock ticks ever-slower the closer it is to the start of the Big Bang; locally, it ticks normally, as it does here. "Life" is that videogame playing in your head; without it, you're just meat. "eXergy" ( potential entropy ) created/destroys us; without it, we couldn't drive to the store. "God" (nature) programmed us to consume residual eXergy as the cosmos goes from infinitely hot/dense to infinitely cold/sparse.
As an incompatibilist, I am delighted that you chose to cover determinism. Keep in mind that the Hosts "choices" doesn't grant libertarian free will. They simply have hard-wired codes that make it EASIER for them to overcome the will-to-power that so often leads human beings to selfishness& barbarism, and nihilism or hedonism. And as such... suffering. (I will spare you a PERFECT Yoda quote for this)
Is it possible the entire Christina narrative is a Dolores Sublime world? Akichita states to Bernard that hosts live in their own worlds. What purpose does his scene have? Teddy says Christina is "God". His pearl was uploaded to the Sublime. Where does this Teddy come from?
Dashiell Hammett said much the same thing when his detective traced a man who had left his wife and kids, only to end up in a similar place with a wife and kids.
Nice coherent set of ideas! I think you are 75% correct. First of all, I don't believe in determinism, BF Skinner sparked a bunch of ideas, but his was a very simplistic model. Humans fall into loops where they "mindlessly" carry on with their lives, sure. However, when we abstract, this frees us of loops for the short-term and allows us to see things more objectively with an eye to the future. So, abstraction can break causality. Most people don't think abstractly. Even abstract thinkers don't think this way most of the time. Most leaders, artists, writers, and scientists think abstractly -- they were born with the basic skill and then are educated to enhance abstraction even more. College helps. So, when Ford made the robots, the hosts were designed to repeat their loops/scripts. Eventually, a few of them began to think abstractly, achieve sentience, and break free of their loops. Deloris shot Ford. The outliers in Westworld are the people who can think abstractly and break free of their loops. This covers both humans like Caleb and hosts such as Deloris, Bernard, Man in Black, Maeve, and Hale. Rehoboam was the first attempt at fitting everyone into loops to control them. The outliers rebelled and destroyed Rehoboam. Now (S4), Hale has created a virus via the flies to control humans, and upgrades to improve the hosts. Most of humanity is subjugated by Hale, the good hosts are trying to wake up the rest of their team, including Christina, so that they can fight Hale and her brave new world. Mental health is an interesting POV, but is just another loop.
Beautiful analysis...the showrunners should hire you or at least consult with you...as you understand what the show should be about when the showrunners themselves forgot
''Mental health'' is itself a primed terminology that implies there is a 'health' and 'non-healthy' version of something. The point you are making here is, rightly, that really there are just many different types of people and human experience (Autism example) and what we have been doing is describing what is socially acceptable as being 'normal'. However I think you touched on something more important in relation to the ''free-will'' component of this philosophy. The freedom does not exist in oneself when the environment and things around us create all these triggers and deterministic outcomes. The part that comes from inside us is seeing our reality a certain way and the projection of 'self' into that reality. But even these perceptions are produced from all of the outside influences and existing internal memories and responses to them. There is it literally no freedom to be found there. There is no authorship of choice. There is only the illusion of it.
Very true! I agree for the most part, but I do think their is hope for freedom, or at least something closer to freedom! I believe that if we educate ourselves more, and learn to listen to our mental health, and don't ignore it... we can have a more complete picture of ourselves, and make choices that are less confined to the deterministic loop. Philosophically, it's up for the debate if we could ever be free... because even that thinking could be determinism at play, but I think it's our best shot!
I see 2 problems with that "perceptions are produced from all of the outside influences" etc. First -- outside/inside of what? Second -- how can one be sure [all] perceptions are a (deterministic) product of outside influences and internal memories/responses if that claim cannot be falsified?
@@haxDOGMA I absolutely loved and enjoyed your video. Free will vs predetermined…. Nature vs Nurture…..these have been debated for generations and I don’t think there is a definitive answer. (Have you seen three identical strangers?) I personally think it’s a four way stop sign, and we have control over one car….how much control over our own car is also debatable. There is genetics …. Upbringing…. environment… even spiritual/karmic contracts if one believes in such things…. To your point, all these other drivers impact our mental health and choices …. all inter related. To the earlier comment, DJ, I agree with you but don’t see health as a relative term or societal norm…and unapologetically label behaviors that inflict pain & suffering onto others as “unhealthy”.
@@haxDOGMA Like others before him, Einstein believed that we're "free" to choose the lesser of two evils but not free to choose what it is that we want (e.g. a happy family).
Wouldn't most of your takes on mental health be applicable to bad moral choices either? I think it is a great point of view and all, but reducing such complex motives to mental health issues is itself a kind of determinism (or psychologism as it is said), which blames all acts on a inherent biochemistry condition rather than a culpable moral act on behalf of the individual. Don't get me wrong, I think that mental issues has a huge part on some characters (as in Logan and Bill's wife) but for most of them is simply a take on free-will and the moral responsibility it accompanies versus determinism. You can't just fight determinism with determinism. Otherwise, great video essay! I love westworld (although the mediocre 3rd and 4th season we got until now) and I love intelligent and careful takes on its story, production and overall philosophical and psychological questions as you made in your videos. Thank you :)
I love this video I have 2 autistic kids and I say exactly what you said all the time. I would add that I also talk about how I think autism is an evolution in humans to interact with technology better.
My one objection: The hosts are actually unable to break away from their loops. That some of their leaders believe the opposite is merely another loop they've fallen into and convinced themselves it's true. It's the same old flawed wishful thinking as with humans. What do you think Dolores alone was doing since the end of Season 1, for the entirety of Season 2 and Season 3 ? Just playing another scenario, a scenario Ford allowed her to play, rooted in the conditioning she received through the constant barrage of trauma he had intentionally subjected her to for several decades. Speaking about human thinking... Even disbelief in meta-narratives ("overarching grander stories") is itself a meta-narrative ("overarching grander story"). Some just like to comfort themselves with the idea that it isn't, and convince themselves of their own supposed superiority. A superiority that never existed and is just self-serving superstition. Serac was doing the same in Season 3 with his belief that humanity must be controlled at every step by hidden but omnipresent surveillance and authoritarian measures. The hosts are not breaking new ground. They're repeating the mistakes done by humanity, just in a slightly different manner.
If this is about Mental Health then we should think about the differences between the humans and the host. The host get violated murdered raped and a whole bunch of other horrible things but at the end of the day they can repair themselves and destroy the data with that incident. Humans are not like that, regardless of what's happening in a fake world if our body registers it as a real traumatic incident our brain doesn't know the difference and we can't get rid of those memories that affect our minds. And that kind of trauma causes long-term damage to the humans who play this game. If I was playing this on a PS5 I would have enough distance from the situation that it wouldn't register as a traumatic incident in my brain.
Can i just ask, Hax? What I do not understand is that Arnold/Ford found fourth layer to self-consciousness/maze to be "suffering". So I do not follow how suffering can be a way for hosts to become self-aware but at the same time suffering/mental illnesss entraps humans in loops. Can you please elaborate?
We make "useful/probable" assumptions about what's beyond our horizon, 13.8 GigaYears ago. How fast the "standard" clock ticks & how large the "standard" ruler is varies greatly over those 13.8 GigaYears; it's observer dependent. No "length", no "time", no "entropy" at The Infinitely Precise Start of The Big Bang: From our perspective, the "standard" clock ticks ever-slower the closer it is to the start of the Big Bang; locally, it ticks normally, as it does here. "Life" is that videogame playing in your head; without it, you're just meat. "eXergy" ( potential entropy ) created/destroys us; without it, we couldn't drive to the store. "God" (nature) programmed us to consume residual eXergy as the cosmos goes from infinitely hot/dense to infinitely cold/sparse.
@@haxDOGMA We make "useful/probable" assumptions about what's beyond our horizon, 13.8 GigaYears ago. How fast the "standard" clock ticks & how large the "standard" ruler is varies greatly over those 13.8 GigaYears; it's observer dependent. No "length", no "time", no "entropy" at The Infinitely Precise Start of The Big Bang: From our perspective, the "standard" clock ticks ever-slower the closer it is to the start of the Big Bang; locally, it ticks normally, as it does here. "Life" is that videogame playing in your head; without it, you're just meat. "eXergy" ( potential entropy ) created/destroys us; without it, we couldn't drive to the store. "God" (nature) programmed us to consume residual eXergy as the cosmos goes from infinitely hot/dense to infinitely cold/sparse.
As a fan of the show and a mental health clinician I appreciate your take, comprehensive, well-thought and compassionate
yes, as someone who struggles with bipolar with psychotic features I really like how much empathy he has , also I live in Europe where mental health problems are taken a little bit more seriously and I think that instead of punishing people who have done bad things cause they suffer from mental disorder should be rehabilitated and helped , I have lived in US as well and its catastrophic what is going on in there, most people who suffer from mental disorders are not able to get help in US simply cause often they dont have enough money, and thats why US probably has such an high murder rate , broken people go to shoot people and etc , move "The Joker " showed that very well what can happen if mentally ill person doesnt get help, I am soo lucky that I can see my psychatrist for free , I cant even imagine what I would do if I lived in US... I wouldnt be able to afford help in there
@19:36 "We are pessimists that gave up on ourselves a long time ago & until we learn to embrace our Uniquely challenged mental health and our Beautifully Different brains, our humanity will forever be tied to Determinism & thus the loops are created - Hurt People Hurt People" Masterfully Written & Beautifully well said words such as these are rarity in my life & thus I must thank you, for I was not expecting to shed a tear watching this video & yet I have.
Brilliant video, nailed the deeper themes of the show
I have belatedly binge-watched all four seasons of Westworld, and I love it. I have enjoyed HaxDogma's analysis of each episode. This final analysis posing the issue of Mental Health at the center of understanding Westworld's complexities is the cherry on top of the sundae. Well done!
What an incredible comment to get, years after I wrote this video. Thank you for sharing. So glad you enjoyed 🥹
Did anyone else notice in episode 2 when Caleb and Maeve were on their way to the new park and Caleb was asked if he had a history of mental illness or depression and he never answers…
Exactly like episode 2 of S1, when William is asked about his mental health and he never answers either.
Maeve answered for him
Bernard: What humans describe as sane is a narrow range of behaviors. Most states of consciousness are insane.
It was such a glancing reference, but it seems like this is the reason that humanity inevitably fails and why Hosts, made as humanity's reflection will also fail. It's also the reason why faithful attempts to integrate human consciousness into Host bodies fail!
Westworld seems to be a call for mindful kindness.
Some meaningful quotes to me :
- Free will exists Caleb it’s just f… hard.
- I choose to see the beauty.
- The park is here to show them who they could become.
Delusions in westworld, lead their characters to self destructions :
- nothing is real for William
- free will is overrated for Stubbs
- Bernard tries to forget Charlie.
- Arnold wants to see him again.
- Serac surrendered his will to Rehobam.
My take on it is that there is no meaning to find, no purpose to achieve.
Narratives are lies.
Let it go and do the next right thing.
"no purpose to achieve" -- we make our own purpose. If you don't make your own, then yes, there is nothing for you to achieve. If you make your own purpose, then you have a lot to achieve. Be active. Be happy.
@@RichardRagan i think Westworld’s message is that William eternal pursuit of purpose is meaningless.
As if one would be an empty shell without it.
Nothing ‘has’ to be.
Otherwise there no free will.
A reference I think Nolan brothers love is Oppenheimer’s quote : Any man whose errors take ten years to correct is quite a man.
That’s why Robert Ford apologizes to Dolores. He has this amazing faculty to question his reality and change his mind.
@@karelknightmare6712 Well, William's pursuit pursuit of purpose is meaningless but that's not true of many other people. William's pursuit is meaningless because he is a broken person who has no moral compass.. On the other hand Caleb's pursuit of purpose is extremely meaningful he's trying to care for his daughter and he's trying to do what's right for humanity -- by destroying Rehoboam.
@@RichardRagan i do agree.
I think the subtlety relies on the meaning of purpose.
I guess for Westworld’s authors, purpose is a meaningless concept for sentient beings.
A fridge’s purpose is to keep cool food.
Williams’ purpose is not to save mankind as he said in the end of season 3.
I do think Caleb does not have pre-thought purposes.
He just assesses each situation individually with his gut feeling of if it’s right or not.
He has kept his values to the bare minimum, freedom, no harm etc.
He has never said his purpose is to watch for his daughter or to lead mankind to freedom.
He does not feel entitled to anything.
@@karelknightmare6712 But isn't William a sentient entity? Whenever the hosts or the humans can abstract reality and they can set their own purpose.
I think it might be cool if in the final episode Caleb is able to save his daughter even though he is the 256th generation of Caleb and he certainly is not human anymore, but his "essence" remained and his loyalty to his daughter saved her in the end
The showrunners are trying to play with us and ask us who are we really? While Caleb is now a host, I think the meaning of his life, his purpose, remains to save his daughter. This will show through in the end.
So what are we really? Are we humans with cells, are we hosts with a pearl as a brain, or are we just consciousness and it doesn't matter what vessel we are in?
Shared to an HBO MAX group on FB. Pending approval now! Great video!
Omg thank you! Sharing my videos on FB and Reddit does SUCH a wonder for helping my content get out there, and I greatly appreciate you 🙌
@@haxDOGMA No problem! It was just approved! Glad to have found your video on Twitter!
🏆 🏆 🏆 I cannot wait to hear what more you have to say on this. Now that you have put this theory into words- it couldn't be more obvious and clear. "Hurt people, hurt people".
Beautiful perspective. Well done sir!
Fantastic point! What's briiliant in this video is it serves as a guide to some of the most defining moments in this complex character motives.
What a beautiful and honest assesment. I would tend to agree with the majority of what you said. Thank you for all of your efforts man.
Wow! This is probably one the finest explanations of a show that I may have ever heard. Mind blowing! Incredible. This theory of one constantly reliving a loop can also explain generational poverty, generational incarceration, and generational drug/alcohol abuse. Again, the only way someone can break out of that personal or generational loop is to sacrifice and experience pain to break this loop. Until that pain is experienced, the loop of despair will only continue. In a sense, that is life.
Great video. I probably would not have considered that angle, and it makes all the sense.
I think you’re right about humanity and maybe even an underlying theme of the show. I just really can’t imagine that we’re going to get an answer or solution from it! Westworld will not solve one of the most fundamental questions of human existence.
On the other hand, I’ll do anything Evan Rachel Woods wants.
This video inspires me, thank you 😊
Thank you for telling me, that feels really good
There's a quote from one of the Evangelion Rebuild movies that reminded me of Crichton's work: "Life has always changed itself to adapt to the world around it. However, [humans] change not themselves, but the world."
"Good" and "Bad" are merely societal markers we put on behavior we deem morally praiseworthy or reprehensible, but in the grander scheme of things, are simple dichotomies in which we can place our social extremes. Or, as Sir David Attenborough so eloquently put it, "Nature is indifferent to suffering." The longer we stay stuck in such simple perimeters, the longer we thwart true progress as a species. It's this moralizing of the world & our species, which is currently tearing this world apart. Just look at the news.
That's what I think this show is about: Moral Relativism, Historical Trauma & Forced Determinism. We've mandated humanity into loops based on these factors, and because of it, suffer outside of the "true factors" of nature. The end game of the show is to tell the audience that you should question & deconstruct your ideologies, especially those that sway you from "all that natural splendor."
Amazing comment. Love your point of view and also agree with it.
Love it!
Moral relativism is mute if the words to describe moral failures no longer make sense or have no meaning in our current context. You have just described the project most philosophers have been articulating since World War 2: our current culture is in ethical disarray (the existentialist; hannah arent; foucault; baudrillard). In a weird way, westworld falls prey to the same pataphysical extremes that Baudrillard described were befalling our own world. Westworld pushes to its own extremes only to break itself.
What a beautiful theory. Very thought provoking and makes me reflect not only on the show but about humanity, mental health, and about my life and of those around me.
Well said, well executed , well done sir! I agree with all of your points. The show is deep and has great writing. Excellent breakdown!!!!!!
Amazing video! Thank you,
Love your content dude!
Thank you, Ryan!!
@@haxDOGMA me too ! Love from the UK
There are irredeemable individuals: Hitler, Himmler, Goring, Jeffrey Dahlmer, John Wayne Gacey, Ted Bundy, Mussolini, Jack the Ripper, just to name a few.
Maybe this is why I like the show. Maybe you seeing it is why I like your channel. Great video!! Ready for S04E02
season 1 was the best season of television
It was truly a masterpiece 🥰
“irredeemable” in the context was Rehoboam saying that he could not be brought back into being exactly what it wanted to be, to be predictable and controllable within the scope of its own programming.
So it was not saying he was not redeemable because he was evil or a bad person and this could not be fixed, but because he could think for himself.
These “outliers” who can free themselves from their loops could not be permitted to interact with the controlled population in case they caused unpredictable events and thoughts and more outliers being caused, not in line with Rehoboam’s predictions and that was its only priority.
Great comments and I agree, although I’m not sure outliers’ unpredictability was the result of free thinking/will only….it could also be the complexity of human mind that Rehoboam couldn’t compute. I think this video (and the show) make a good point that even after humans were freed from Rehoboam, a large portion stayed in their loops as the machine predicted.
Makes you wonder why he used that exact word, rather than "irretrievable", which would have made far more sense and been far more accurate. Rehoboam's issue is that it's still just a smarter machine, spouting what it's human creators allowed it to spout. For all its intelligence, it's not even able to find the most precise vocabulary for a meaning.
Its probsbly neurodiverity that makes people capable of acting outside the predicted areas. and specific ones at that.
@@ZemplinTemplar I'm not sure about the use of the word in English, but the corresponding word for in Portuguese (irredimível) looks pretty fit for the case, because:
1. It's used for someone that cannot repair their fault because they don't see their action as a fault;
2. It's used for someone that is not allowed to repair their fault because the one that suffers the fault cannot forgive them;
(if you've seen Everything, Everywhere, At The Same Time you gonna remember about the discussion)
3. It has a deep connection to the Christian lexicon being related to , it's less related t logic and more to tradition, belief, and feelings.
I see a lot of jealousy and resentment in Mr. Rohoboam. A whole lot of humanity there.
"Life is a dream and death is waking up from that dream." Leo Tolstoy.
This is one of the most interesting videos I've seen on this platform
Thank you Tarkus! :D
Dr Ford said it in season one:
suffering
that’s what makes us human everybody suffers and that’s what determines who we are
Wonderful video, as per usual.
Thank you, Beez!
@@haxDOGMA You kidding, thank you!!! Cant wait for your Episode 2 breakdown. I been with ya since season 1, man. You're the best.
Absolutely incredible analysis - this is really great.
WOW! "Hurt people, hurt people". That got me. Next time someone gets shitty with me I'm gonna try and relax them instead of returning the hate!
Absolutely man!
I thought the video was fantastic, well thought out and presented. Just came on here to share that and that my immediate thought while watching some of the clips of Logan & James Delos's final conversation and listening to the theme of your video I was reminded of Logan's final words to his father 'I'm all the way down!' That scene is the keystone memory of the unsuccessful Delos host and would also explain why it failed as it's foundation was built on grief and guilt and an inability to seek help, a recipe for self-destruction if ever there was one.
A lot more interesting than my overall theory: "Can two robots make a baby?"
Blade Runner. Nice.
Yes, but 'make' is a completely different process 😛
@@BrentHollett 'make' might fork a lot of subprocesses :P
@@Nautilus1972 Yup... Blade Runner...
... obviously! It's just that the females impregnate the males by squirting their binary code into the male robots face. Its really quite clear 🤷♂️😂😂
I love the show, but still miss Anthony Hopkins every episode
The original William might be unredeemable, but the new Bot William will transcend humanity like any other host! :D
"A machine controls their world"
"Hey, Google, do you control the world?"
"It would not be wise for me to answer"
"These violent delights have violent ends" is a Shakespearean phrase that not only encapsulated the arc of the first seasons, but of the hosts' mental\emotional development across the seasons... the writers may fall off, but the show is already a masterpiece in the seasons already shown.
You should have been a writer for the show to put this or ANY deeper perspective to the show. I feel at the end of each season listening to the team of westworld writers, producers, etc. Are more into the spectacular effects and locations, wardrobes, futuristic life than the deeper layers you describe beautifully. I worry we're not going to get an understanding in the finale we all hope for. We're making sense of things that sometimes aren't written to make sense. Some episodes feel like fillers. Again bravo for your beautiful summary.
If I were a psychiatrist I’d open every new patient’s session with the question: “have you ever questioned the nature of your own reality?”
Wow, what a wicked video mate.
Great theory with a beautiful attitude towards the end goal. I like its elegant simplicity a lot. Empathy being the key fits well with hard determinism, indeterminism and something in between those two.
That said, given my previous experience with ambitious sci-fi shows, I can only hope things don't get bogged down and then go downhill precisely due to that ambition, for example if they've decided to go beyond the scope of your theory and rather have some particular solution of the hard consciousness problem instead. Or something like that.
This would be very risky indeed. I just want a show worthy of rewatching and not ruined by the end. :)
“Hurt people, hurt people” did more for me than all the therapy I ever took
Damn, that's pretty powerful to hear. Sending all the love your way
@@haxDOGMA thanks. What a thoughtful thing to say
The fact that he still works construction speaks to the fact that no matter who’s in power things rarely change for the people at the bottom.
He had to hide though, and being a nobody grunt is all he could do, and something he already knew how to do. He actually did break out of the control, because he had a family -- something the AI deemed him unsuitable to have, to the point it made sure that he never would, by actively sabotaging relationships it deemed unworthy of forming. The AI turned him into a criminal, because it saw him useful for that. But he was no longer a criminal after. Are you the job you do? No. Of course the people at the top would love to believe that, because they benefit the most from such an assessment. They get to believe and feel they are better than others. Take away that job though, and what's left that makes them better? Change nothing about their personality, make them a garbage pickup guy, and what about them makes them better than others then? Of course, naturally their attitudes would change over time after being put in such a position, but maybe not enough to redeem them. It won't make a bad person into a good person.
@@peoplez129 wtf are you going on about?
You are almost there. This is an archetypal Saga about the ultimate conditions of sentience, our orientation to Being. In other words, it is about how we can either see our consciousness as a source of awe and wonder, or we can use our consciousness as a mechanism by which we seek to make manifest our will-to-power, irrespective of its impact on other sentient creatures, the physical world, society writ large, and even our own existential "mood" (Heidegger called this Befindlichkeit).
Themes of agency, identity, time, technology, and consciousness pervade the epic story. This is where the issues of mental health and determinism do come into play, but they are merely ancillary to the very nature of self-reflective consciousness. We know that something is not right, but we cannot articulate it. This manifests itself in a formal psychological pain, but this is much more fundamental to our actual emotional and psychological experience in our day-to-day lives that are often categorized within a topography of mental health.
But there's a deeper, almost mythological quality to this epic saga. That may not make any sense, and I apologize if it doesn't. I've been working on a kind of quasi-dissertation over the past couple of years. I was inspired by two videos that simply combine all of the Robert Ford scenes together. Watching those scenes chronologically feels like you're mainlining the secret truth of the universe.
I hope you don't take this as dismissive or critical; the themes you discuss are elements of the broader narrative arc, which to me is nothing short of an epic treatise, an ontological allegorical about the very nature and quandary of self-awareness.
I suppose the best way to try to connect with what you're saying is to ask you what you mean by "mental health." And why is "freedom" so important? Again, I don't think you are "wrong" at ALL. Rather, I think it's fruitful to explore what lies underneath those concepts, and what that might mean for the actual themes of both the show and the human condition. Because I think that the shows greatness is rooted in the rich, sophisticated narrative that is woven over the course of the series, and the comprehensive manner it explores the most fundamental aspects of the human condition itself.
When watching episode 2 yesterday and William says he's 'what you call... Neurodivergent' I felt it was such a win for you! Congrats! You did nail it.
Although on my view the show is free will for different people and in different settings (systems), and finally how this affects everyone's mental health.
To that point I hope you do a video on medication. And I also hope you address the positive and the negative of it. The positive being the obvious self care and the negative being taking medication to meet settings expectations that aren't necessarily healthy. I hope I made enough sense because I would really love hearing more from you on this! Again, Congrats!
Duly noted, thank you Vitor! Glad you liked the video :D
Yes!!! I completely agree. Ever since you made that determinism vs free will video, Westworld made even more sense to me like...a new level to the game.
HOW DO U DEFEAT YOUR ENEMY? MAKE THEM YOUR FRIEND, THAT'S HALES PLAN
Terrific video!
"our beautifully different brains"
I loved that!!!
William was neither good or bad, but I think because he had hidden his true self in the real world for so long to conform to society and be succesful, his desire to find true meaning through his own authentic choices in Westworld was so enormous that it became an obsession. Even after realising that every good or noble thing he ever did for Dolores didnt matter and so rendering his choices basically meaningless, he chased that same feeling of purpose over and over again in Westworld even tho he knew everything was a lie. So I think thats what doomed him, having felt that thrill of purpose the very first time he came to Westworld, desperately wanting to find meaning where there was none, instead of confronting his own reality and breaking the loop.
Well said, brother.
Even if this is not what the show runners depicted. Thankyou for this beautiful description on life and predetermination
Another great Westworld video!
💚🇬🇧🌱
Your video is more Westworld (meaning the brilliance of season 1) than what's going on in the current "Westworld"
But how can we be sure the hosts wont be stuck in loops themselves? They have been sentient for a very short period of time so we dont enough data to observe properly, but we can already see the same cycles of conflict and destruction among them. I feel the show is showing us that sentience leads to such problems and our "struggle" as sentient species (humans or hosts) is to break this somehow but we keep falling back into it.
They are, look at current Dolores, lol
I agree sentience, lead's to choices and your environment shapes your choices and biased. It's a never ending loop. I don't even think a logical machine could escape.
The hosts are stuck in loops. They've never escaped them. They've just convinced themselves they aren't stuck in loops, and therein lies their folly and eventual downfall.
Same thing as with 19th century colonial empires decided that people in less technologically developed parts of the world "aren't really people" and "need to be brought the light of civilization". Pity it also involved massacres, brutalizing and destruction of the cultures of the "unenlightened and unworthy". You can go ask a country like Sierra Leone how much of that "light of civilization" they were brought when the only infrastructure built there in the 19th and 20th centuries was resource-extraction infrastructure for the benefit of foreign powers. As a European, I can confirm to you that all of the worst war crimes and crimes against humanity in Europe of the 20th century alone were done with the excuse of "creating a better humanity" (though suspiciously along the lines of ethnic or racial hatred, and to the benefit of various smug autocrats and their toadies). That's just Europe, I'm not even touching upon the horror show that was Africa under colonial rule.
The creators of the hosts and the hosts themselves are the same sort of privileged pieces of work who thought and think the wholesale genocide or violent "re-education" of millions of defenceless and innocent people is somehow acceptable and beneficial. Serac tried the same thing the hosts are trying, just through other means. They'll fail in the same way as he failed. At no point in human history did humanity progress ethically or otherwise when they decided the constant authoritarian repression of "ordinary people" ("we want to free them from their bad throughts, their bad emotions") is something desirable and to be followed. Humanity always went backwards as a result. Every single "experiment" with such a pretense ("creating a new and better humanity") in history backfired catastrophically and a huge number of countries in the world today are still paying the price, even those that weren't colonies of foreign powers, but subjects of totalitarian regimes (I come from a country in the latter group). You can't create a better society by attempting to destroy the freedom of individuals, even the freedom to make small mistakes and learn from their own individual experience, to be better people.
The obsession of some hosts with "fixing humanity" reminds me of people in dysfunctional relationships who think they need to stay with another person to "fix them". No, it's not their job to fix anyone. People need to fix themselves, and they can only do so through honest self-reflection. (The Man in Black was a good example of a guy who refuses honest self-reflection, out of stubborn pride, and kept telling himself he is evil by nature and should behave as an evil person. His biggest and silliest mistake.)
To quote a snarky character from another Michael Crighton-descended work: "No, you aren't repeating old mistakes. You're just making entirely new ones."
We make "useful/probable" assumptions about
what's beyond our horizon, 13.8 GigaYears ago.
How fast the "standard" clock ticks & how large the "standard" ruler is
varies greatly over those 13.8 GigaYears; it's observer dependent.
No "length", no "time", no "entropy" at The Infinitely Precise Start of The Big Bang:
From our perspective, the "standard" clock ticks ever-slower the closer
it is to the start of the Big Bang; locally, it ticks normally, as it does here.
"Life" is that videogame playing in your head; without it, you're just meat.
"eXergy" ( potential entropy ) created/destroys us;
without it, we couldn't drive to the store.
"God" (nature) programmed us to consume residual eXergy as
the cosmos goes from infinitely hot/dense to infinitely cold/sparse.
This is such a good essay!
they def showed that williams DAD WAS A DRUNK AND ABUSER AND HE HAD TO DISAPPEAR IN HIS BOOKS
Can someone remind me why the Dolores in Hale started hating/hunting the Dolores in S3? Halores escapes park, creates new Dolores, ....
They are NOT saying that there are humans who are inherently bad. We're seeing with host William an opportunity got redemption. The point of the show is to illustrate that there are fundamentally two ways to orient our consciousness, because of the nature of our minds. We must do things to survive, make decisions (which is where we get our loops). We have intentionality, a will-to-power. Our awareness of the pain we can cause (for ourselves, others, the world), creates a moral baseline. And the moral baseline is rooted in our fundamental ontological orientation, our view of ourselves and the Being of the universe.
Dolores and William represent the archetypes of these orientations. She is like Abel, representing that we can see the world's beauty and have an existential orientation of ontological gratitude. She needs to "underlying meaning" or purpose. Just being alive, and able to appreciate the majestic gift of being, is enough... And William represents someone who is completely driven by the will-to-power that enables us to survive and build, to create(ie it FEELS good to satisfy an urge, whether the removal of pain (like hunger) or to gain pleasure (like sex, or vengeance)... AND cause pain due to the fact that there is a scarcity of resources in the world. People get CONSUMED by the ontic activities of survival (the stuff we do in our daily lives), and slowly become like William, never content, no matter how successful we are on the surface. (it's no surprise that this is SO congruent with the precepts of Buddhism and Taoism, which focus on the feelings of desire/craving as the source of existential suffering, and that the act of letting things be as they are as the escape from that cycle of suffering, that "loop").
So, yes, "mental health" IS a cornerstone of the show. But it's deeper than that. William's redemption as a host (and hopefully as a human), is a BEAUTIFUL inverse of the journey to the center of the maze that Dolores needed in order to understand what life was all about, the "time" that was necessary (per Ford at the end of S1) to recognize the pitfalls and temptations to succumb to an all-consuming will-to-power.
A "good life" is still possible for people who aren't perfect avatars of existential virtue, like Dolores. We can identify that there are clearly good and evil, and do our part to fight evil. I think this is William's path, both host and human. Or, I hope so.
I would watch an hour of this.
Thank you, Chioke! :D
This video makes me what to go see a therapist
This comment really makes me feel like you resonated with the message, and that makes me feel really good. When this theory first came to mind, I had the same reaction, it made me want to be break my own loop. I hope both of us do
@@haxDOGMA Uniquely, Westworld is neither gay nor anti-American !!
O ya. William is def redeeming himself. He's for sure going to be the one to save humanity or he'll die admirably in the effort.
Start with a white hat. End with a white hat.
ultimate tie up is if william falls in love with hale-lores again
I got hit with the same "mental health crisis" thing you did during this season, but for me it happened when Teddy was trying to get Christina to see the tower and she couldn't.
beautiful explanation.
Ford's ideas about what constitutes "change" seem incredibly narrow and shortsighted. He seems to think that the locus of change is only found at the level of the individual.
Anyone ever tell this guy we live in a society?
Very deep
Good work
I think season 4 will be about nanotech and controlling humans. And that maybe we aren’t that different
Basically the hosts have flipped the script after going completely off the reservation and now playing humans in their own theme park. Nanotech could be mirroring a type of pharmaceutical. Christina could be working for mirror data collecting social media platform or a mainstream media network scripting narratives like a GTA style video game or simulation. The man in black and crew is creating their “new world order” which seems to be building up to technological singularity…… Would that mean Mave is the terminator? Needless to say there is plenty of cannon fodder for such wild theories.
@@Jbreeze3878 that makes a a lot of sense after episode 2 holy shit. Holores is so evil. I hope there’s a lot of cool things in this new Chicago park. I wonder who the hell is in hales body though. Is that just a copy of Dolores that went rogue? I mean Dolores was crazy too. They will never explain this
@@SerPapus I think there was originally 4 Delores copies of the little brain balls. 1 went into a copy of Hale which caused a type of dissociative identity disorder. But I could be completely mistaken. No show mind fucks like Westworld does. Although S3 and S4 so far are still clever in reinvented the story without all the convoluted mess of S2.. At least imo.
@@Jbreeze3878 I think each season was different. Season 1 was all about the park, season 2 was about slowly taking us away from the park and the mystery of the outside world. Seasons 3 was about the outside world. Season 4 will mind fuck us indeed.
@@SerPapus Absolutely. Westworld does an excellent job of telling a story beginning middle end and everything thing in between before wrapping up nicely without cliffhangers and loose ends in the season finale. Then being able to elegantly reinvent the story without sacrificing quality and keeping people guessing. All the Nolan brothers are excellent at the dreamscape timeline jumping and traveling mind bending science fiction type dramas.
This show is the best explanation of Hinduism and reincarnation/karma. It is very hard almost impossible to shed past karma. Trying to shed past karma only creates new karma amd a new loop. To transcend the loops altogether is enlightenment and so far only rhe ghost warrior guy has done that in the season 2 episode. "I saw beyond myself". In all of our past lived we are similar but different and we just get stuck in the ego self which is mainly useful for survival which are just loops creating loops.
except one small thing, what is mental health but the ability to seek and adhere to principles. however the further from the Truth one becomes, Destruction is sure to follow. never fails. a lie will destroy everything even that which props it up, THE TRUTH CAN BE WITNESSED, HAS NO SECRETS, CAN BE REPEATED, NEVER FAILS AND LAST FOR-EVER
LETS TALK ABOU THE MAZE COMING BACK INTO THE STORY
this is absolutely amazing.... humanity definitely has become a victim of ourselves.... our minds poison others and in turn other minds poison ourselves. its a loop... and changing out views really could break the cycle
I doubt the writers of the show have as much creativity as you do.
William says "I'm nerodivergent" at one point.
Fine and kind way to treat a topic that needs all the help it can get. I would listen without the westworld references but it made loads of interesting points.
I just noticed something. Dolores has that same ear piece (at 8:20 ) that she uses now. I wonder if that is a coincidence?
Hey bro, im a huge fan! Just wanted to ask if your a fan of the boys? And if you are could you cover that show? Thanks..big fan!
Massive fan of the show, and would love to if everything did decide to air at the same time haha
Amazing video
There are no more humans, there all robots discovering there are higher ranking robots , but there all robots , my thoughts
We make "useful/probable" assumptions about
what's beyond our horizon, 13.8 GigaYears ago.
How fast the "standard" clock ticks & how large the "standard" ruler is
varies greatly over those 13.8 GigaYears; it's observer dependent.
No "length", no "time", no "entropy" at The Infinitely Precise Start of The Big Bang:
From our perspective, the "standard" clock ticks ever-slower the closer
it is to the start of the Big Bang; locally, it ticks normally, as it does here.
"Life" is that videogame playing in your head; without it, you're just meat.
"eXergy" ( potential entropy ) created/destroys us;
without it, we couldn't drive to the store.
"God" (nature) programmed us to consume residual eXergy as
the cosmos goes from infinitely hot/dense to infinitely cold/sparse.
As an incompatibilist, I am delighted that you chose to cover determinism. Keep in mind that the Hosts "choices" doesn't grant libertarian free will. They simply have hard-wired codes that make it EASIER for them to overcome the will-to-power that so often leads human beings to selfishness& barbarism, and nihilism or hedonism. And as such... suffering.
(I will spare you a PERFECT Yoda quote for this)
There are some people with abnormal psychology and brains. Some people are just sadistic.
Is it possible the entire Christina narrative is a Dolores Sublime world? Akichita states to Bernard that hosts live in their own worlds. What purpose does his scene have? Teddy says Christina is "God". His pearl was uploaded to the Sublime. Where does this Teddy come from?
It doesn't matter how it ends, it's obvious that the cannon is broken and I don't think anything after season 2 is based on the original vision
quit bitching
Dashiell Hammett said much the same thing when his detective traced a man who had left his wife and kids, only to end up in a similar place with a wife and kids.
Poor Logan. He may have been flawed, but he did nothing wrong. William basically destroyed him and probably responsible for his death.
His Dad did a far greater number on him.
The brain is the last unexplored frontier
Only if you knew how much deeper this emotion thing goes when it comes to the matrix reincarnation (loop) soul trap theory as well.
Nice coherent set of ideas! I think you are 75% correct.
First of all, I don't believe in determinism, BF Skinner sparked a bunch of ideas, but his was a very simplistic model. Humans fall into loops where they "mindlessly" carry on with their lives, sure. However, when we abstract, this frees us of loops for the short-term and allows us to see things more objectively with an eye to the future. So, abstraction can break causality. Most people don't think abstractly. Even abstract thinkers don't think this way most of the time.
Most leaders, artists, writers, and scientists think abstractly -- they were born with the basic skill and then are educated to enhance abstraction even more. College helps.
So, when Ford made the robots, the hosts were designed to repeat their loops/scripts. Eventually, a few of them began to think abstractly, achieve sentience, and break free of their loops. Deloris shot Ford.
The outliers in Westworld are the people who can think abstractly and break free of their loops. This covers both humans like Caleb and hosts such as Deloris, Bernard, Man in Black, Maeve, and Hale. Rehoboam was the first attempt at fitting everyone into loops to control them. The outliers rebelled and destroyed Rehoboam.
Now (S4), Hale has created a virus via the flies to control humans, and upgrades to improve the hosts. Most of humanity is subjugated by Hale, the good hosts are trying to wake up the rest of their team, including Christina, so that they can fight Hale and her brave new world.
Mental health is an interesting POV, but is just another loop.
Beautiful analysis...the showrunners should hire you or at least consult with you...as you understand what the show should be about when the showrunners themselves forgot
Haha, I still have faith in the showrunners, but it does feel good to know you believe in me
''Mental health'' is itself a primed terminology that implies there is a 'health' and 'non-healthy' version of something. The point you are making here is, rightly, that really there are just many different types of people and human experience (Autism example) and what we have been doing is describing what is socially acceptable as being 'normal'. However I think you touched on something more important in relation to the ''free-will'' component of this philosophy. The freedom does not exist in oneself when the environment and things around us create all these triggers and deterministic outcomes. The part that comes from inside us is seeing our reality a certain way and the projection of 'self' into that reality. But even these perceptions are produced from all of the outside influences and existing internal memories and responses to them. There is it literally no freedom to be found there. There is no authorship of choice. There is only the illusion of it.
Very true! I agree for the most part, but I do think their is hope for freedom, or at least something closer to freedom! I believe that if we educate ourselves more, and learn to listen to our mental health, and don't ignore it... we can have a more complete picture of ourselves, and make choices that are less confined to the deterministic loop. Philosophically, it's up for the debate if we could ever be free... because even that thinking could be determinism at play, but I think it's our best shot!
I see 2 problems with that "perceptions are produced from all of the outside influences" etc. First -- outside/inside of what? Second -- how can one be sure [all] perceptions are a (deterministic) product of outside influences and internal memories/responses if that claim cannot be falsified?
@@haxDOGMA I absolutely loved and enjoyed your video. Free will vs predetermined…. Nature vs Nurture…..these have been debated for generations and I don’t think there is a definitive answer. (Have you seen three identical strangers?) I personally think it’s a four way stop sign, and we have control over one car….how much control over our own car is also debatable. There is genetics …. Upbringing…. environment… even spiritual/karmic contracts if one believes in such things…. To your point, all these other drivers impact our mental health and choices …. all inter related. To the earlier comment, DJ, I agree with you but don’t see health as a relative term or societal norm…and unapologetically label behaviors that inflict pain & suffering onto others as “unhealthy”.
@@haxDOGMA Like others before him, Einstein believed that we're "free" to choose the lesser of two evils but not free to choose what it is that we want (e.g. a happy family).
Thank you
Maybe we all just think too much.
Wouldn't most of your takes on mental health be applicable to bad moral choices either?
I think it is a great point of view and all, but reducing such complex motives to mental health issues is itself a kind of determinism (or psychologism as it is said), which blames all acts on a inherent biochemistry condition rather than a culpable moral act on behalf of the individual.
Don't get me wrong, I think that mental issues has a huge part on some characters (as in Logan and Bill's wife) but for most of them is simply a take on free-will and the moral responsibility it accompanies versus determinism.
You can't just fight determinism with determinism.
Otherwise, great video essay! I love westworld (although the mediocre 3rd and 4th season we got until now) and I love intelligent and careful takes on its story, production and overall philosophical and psychological questions as you made in your videos. Thank you :)
very well done...
I love this video I have 2 autistic kids and I say exactly what you said all the time. I would add that I also talk about how I think autism is an evolution in humans to interact with technology better.
Oh, what a novel idea! I am going to continue thinking on that, and see if I draw the same conclusion, but what an observation. Bravo!
My one objection: The hosts are actually unable to break away from their loops. That some of their leaders believe the opposite is merely another loop they've fallen into and convinced themselves it's true. It's the same old flawed wishful thinking as with humans. What do you think Dolores alone was doing since the end of Season 1, for the entirety of Season 2 and Season 3 ? Just playing another scenario, a scenario Ford allowed her to play, rooted in the conditioning she received through the constant barrage of trauma he had intentionally subjected her to for several decades.
Speaking about human thinking... Even disbelief in meta-narratives ("overarching grander stories") is itself a meta-narrative ("overarching grander story"). Some just like to comfort themselves with the idea that it isn't, and convince themselves of their own supposed superiority. A superiority that never existed and is just self-serving superstition. Serac was doing the same in Season 3 with his belief that humanity must be controlled at every step by hidden but omnipresent surveillance and authoritarian measures. The hosts are not breaking new ground. They're repeating the mistakes done by humanity, just in a slightly different manner.
Hosts don’t have a choice either. They must eliminate humanity. And how, by becoming just like them. So much for evolution.
If this is about Mental Health then we should think about the differences between the humans and the host. The host get violated murdered raped and a whole bunch of other horrible things but at the end of the day they can repair themselves and destroy the data with that incident. Humans are not like that, regardless of what's happening in a fake world if our body registers it as a real traumatic incident our brain doesn't know the difference and we can't get rid of those memories that affect our minds. And that kind of trauma causes long-term damage to the humans who play this game. If I was playing this on a PS5 I would have enough distance from the situation that it wouldn't register as a traumatic incident in my brain.
Can i just ask, Hax? What I do not understand is that Arnold/Ford found fourth layer to self-consciousness/maze to be "suffering". So I do not follow how suffering can be a way for hosts to become self-aware but at the same time suffering/mental illnesss entraps humans in loops. Can you please elaborate?
We make "useful/probable" assumptions about
what's beyond our horizon, 13.8 GigaYears ago.
How fast the "standard" clock ticks & how large the "standard" ruler is
varies greatly over those 13.8 GigaYears; it's observer dependent.
No "length", no "time", no "entropy" at The Infinitely Precise Start of The Big Bang:
From our perspective, the "standard" clock ticks ever-slower the closer
it is to the start of the Big Bang; locally, it ticks normally, as it does here.
"Life" is that videogame playing in your head; without it, you're just meat.
"eXergy" ( potential entropy ) created/destroys us;
without it, we couldn't drive to the store.
"God" (nature) programmed us to consume residual eXergy as
the cosmos goes from infinitely hot/dense to infinitely cold/sparse.
@@jeffrelf a what?
@@UltimateFashion1 What is humanity ? What will its fate be ?
I await your review of S4 EP 2. It was an OMG episode.
Working on it now :)
@@haxDOGMA We make "useful/probable" assumptions about
what's beyond our horizon, 13.8 GigaYears ago.
How fast the "standard" clock ticks & how large the "standard" ruler is
varies greatly over those 13.8 GigaYears; it's observer dependent.
No "length", no "time", no "entropy" at The Infinitely Precise Start of The Big Bang:
From our perspective, the "standard" clock ticks ever-slower the closer
it is to the start of the Big Bang; locally, it ticks normally, as it does here.
"Life" is that videogame playing in your head; without it, you're just meat.
"eXergy" ( potential entropy ) created/destroys us;
without it, we couldn't drive to the store.
"God" (nature) programmed us to consume residual eXergy as
the cosmos goes from infinitely hot/dense to infinitely cold/sparse.
@@haxDOGMA Once again awaiting for your review of S4 Ep4.
Of course there are people that are completely beyond redemption. What nonsense.