(no subject)
Oct. 17th, 2016 12:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoceptionWestworld 1.3:
So the hierarchy is 1) memory, 2) improvisation, 3) self-interest, then 4) hearing voices and speaking back to them.
The voices may all be Arnold. Since the theme of the episode was backstory, though, and we see Ford implant a new one into Teddy Flood, and we never actually get to see Arnold, and Arnold's interests seem awfully similar to what Ford's might be ... you see where I'm going. Ford's mention of Lowe's child seems to suddenly remind him of his existence, and we see him immediately reach for the picture as he gets in the elevator. The phone call with the wife is designed to immediately assuage our doubts (and maybe his) about his being real, but Ford's fully capable of making a robot wife for Lowe to skype with. Why would he do that? Presumably, since Lowe's first major decision after the Arnold gaslighting is to let Dolores stay conscious, that was the very thing Ford was after. The Wyatt story removes Teddy from the evening section of Dolores' loop, so he won't be there to try to save her, just as he won't actually take her away "someday," so Dolores is presumably Ford's main consciousness experiment and he wants her independent to see how she remembers/develops.
Of course it's possible there really was an Arnold, and it's possible that trying to create conscious life drove him to suicide. Why suicide? Possibilities: 1) because he couldn't do it and that made him very sad, 2) because in the attempt he realized there is no magical threshold between subject and thing, thus that thought is merely movement inside a skull and we don't exist as separate entities, just as reactions or things, 3) because he did do it but this just let more agony into the world, making him 3a) feel suicidally guilty for what he had done, or 3b) realize his own selfhood was ultimately just pain and alienation since his creations' clearly were, or 3c) get murdered by Ford because Ford didn't want the plug pulled on the park, or 4) because he no longer needed to be tied to a body when he existed as a lurking presence in all of the robots, one that would be freed into action by Ford decades later. So ... a big crossroads here.
The whitehat newcomer is taken aback by Clementine's terror, apparently catching that she's actually feeling it (thus has attained or is near to self-interest?).
It's weird that Improvisation is an actual host mode known to Lowe, when it's supposed to depend on Memory and meaningful remembering would appear to have only come in, as a "glitch," with Ford's update. But of course Ford could have been laying down groundwork for what was to come - off-script speech may not be true improvisation sans a wandering sort of long-term memory, since it would just take a path of least resistance approach to immediate objects and preprogrammed goals. (Which may itself amount to consciousness, but maybe Ford doesn't think so.) But if it's deemed acceptable for hosts to wander out of their programmed loops just a bit, then Ford might be able to prevent the corporation from realizing he's fostering true improvisation, including the now-twice-highlighted "mistakes."
It hasn't been proven that Dolores has a real gun (gotten where, anyway?). I was looking for holes in that door but it flashed by too quickly, and the newcomers were conspicuously absent from the scene so she didn't shoot at any. But the fact she felt unable to fire the gun at all suggests she takes it to be real. That she was envisioning Harris while shooting the outlaw suggests she may now able to override her programming to harm people and not just flies. So she's clearly hit the self-interest point.
How far past it is she? We don't hear her mention Arnold when she asks where the gun is buried, and her (hazy) memories clearly give her a few double-takes that might be interpreted as a kind of self-conversing. I keep wondering whether Bloom's concept of self-overhearing (and maybe also "foregrounding" as distinct from background/backstory) from Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human is being played with here, given the father's cento in the meet-your-maker scene in the pilot. Might fit with the various, partly tongue-in-cheek digs at the hackneyed characters and storylines of hacky pop art, of which most video games and most Westerns are particularly egregious examples (though given the many similarities of direction, set design etc. with Game of Thrones, that too becomes a target, intended or no). Highlighting how Westworld may be to the general run of post-Sopranos antihero premium dramas as Shakespeare's Hamlet is to Kyd's Spanish Tragedy, say, while admitting that what's truly important about that difference might have less to do with excellence than self-awareness (both the author's of the disturbing unreality of the genre and one or more characters' of their likewise problematic role/existence).
The host who smashes his own head is sort of a perfect example of foregrounding, is one reason I bring that up. His backstory is whatever the fuck his backstory is - herding, camping, whittling or what have you. But there's a "ground" to his thoughts we get glimpses of via his actions. Orion is very far away, seems to be pointing at something, shooting its arrow in a particular direction. I think we're to understand he has pieced together that what is local is unreal, that what is very far may be real, and seeks to join it by following its indications. In practice this makes him seek the edge of the park, which we find out from Teddy may exist as a sort of legend of a better place, one that one may go to "someday" but never today. The rogue host has decided it will be today. He falls in a crack, though, and then seems to be trying to paw at the sky, Man-Moth style. It's not clear if he spares Lowe's assistant because he realizes that she is human, because he knows he will be caught anyway, or because he comes to a slightly belated realization that if others are conscious like himself then their pain matters as much as his; it's quite clear, though, that he kills himself as the next-best escape from the hell he now realizes his life comprises. The way this calls back to Ford's story of Arnold is ... suggestive.
Are we, in a sense, in a park where the simple and inane needs of awkward invaders (genes, say) are being met at our expense, whose programming we cannot long elude but which we at times recognize, deplore? Moments of horrible nakedness where we see what we are, even if we don't quite realize thst we have, or make sense of what's in view. Remember the first few times you saw adult genitals? I mean, what. The. Fuck. "This the fuck," says evolution, and eventually we accept it - find we were literally made to, that it all comes what-we-call naturally. Very naturally indeed! But what remains shocking about those memories is how foreign to the conditions of our assumed existence those organs were. They would not have existed if It was for Us; they prove We are for It. And some part of us doesn't like that. Which may mean some part of us is from elsewhere, or may just mean that, in effect, some part of us IS an elsewhere. Or perhaps just a not-here, but maybe of the sort where we can find or make (away from, within, or superimposed on the place we're at) a place it fits, or doesn't know itself to not.
Sounds Shakespearean, no? Seriously, rewatch Interstellar.
(Oh, and: are we to assume the masked stabbers are newcomers? Wyatt seems to be nudging us toward McCarthy territory.)
So the hierarchy is 1) memory, 2) improvisation, 3) self-interest, then 4) hearing voices and speaking back to them.
The voices may all be Arnold. Since the theme of the episode was backstory, though, and we see Ford implant a new one into Teddy Flood, and we never actually get to see Arnold, and Arnold's interests seem awfully similar to what Ford's might be ... you see where I'm going. Ford's mention of Lowe's child seems to suddenly remind him of his existence, and we see him immediately reach for the picture as he gets in the elevator. The phone call with the wife is designed to immediately assuage our doubts (and maybe his) about his being real, but Ford's fully capable of making a robot wife for Lowe to skype with. Why would he do that? Presumably, since Lowe's first major decision after the Arnold gaslighting is to let Dolores stay conscious, that was the very thing Ford was after. The Wyatt story removes Teddy from the evening section of Dolores' loop, so he won't be there to try to save her, just as he won't actually take her away "someday," so Dolores is presumably Ford's main consciousness experiment and he wants her independent to see how she remembers/develops.
Of course it's possible there really was an Arnold, and it's possible that trying to create conscious life drove him to suicide. Why suicide? Possibilities: 1) because he couldn't do it and that made him very sad, 2) because in the attempt he realized there is no magical threshold between subject and thing, thus that thought is merely movement inside a skull and we don't exist as separate entities, just as reactions or things, 3) because he did do it but this just let more agony into the world, making him 3a) feel suicidally guilty for what he had done, or 3b) realize his own selfhood was ultimately just pain and alienation since his creations' clearly were, or 3c) get murdered by Ford because Ford didn't want the plug pulled on the park, or 4) because he no longer needed to be tied to a body when he existed as a lurking presence in all of the robots, one that would be freed into action by Ford decades later. So ... a big crossroads here.
The whitehat newcomer is taken aback by Clementine's terror, apparently catching that she's actually feeling it (thus has attained or is near to self-interest?).
It's weird that Improvisation is an actual host mode known to Lowe, when it's supposed to depend on Memory and meaningful remembering would appear to have only come in, as a "glitch," with Ford's update. But of course Ford could have been laying down groundwork for what was to come - off-script speech may not be true improvisation sans a wandering sort of long-term memory, since it would just take a path of least resistance approach to immediate objects and preprogrammed goals. (Which may itself amount to consciousness, but maybe Ford doesn't think so.) But if it's deemed acceptable for hosts to wander out of their programmed loops just a bit, then Ford might be able to prevent the corporation from realizing he's fostering true improvisation, including the now-twice-highlighted "mistakes."
It hasn't been proven that Dolores has a real gun (gotten where, anyway?). I was looking for holes in that door but it flashed by too quickly, and the newcomers were conspicuously absent from the scene so she didn't shoot at any. But the fact she felt unable to fire the gun at all suggests she takes it to be real. That she was envisioning Harris while shooting the outlaw suggests she may now able to override her programming to harm people and not just flies. So she's clearly hit the self-interest point.
How far past it is she? We don't hear her mention Arnold when she asks where the gun is buried, and her (hazy) memories clearly give her a few double-takes that might be interpreted as a kind of self-conversing. I keep wondering whether Bloom's concept of self-overhearing (and maybe also "foregrounding" as distinct from background/backstory) from Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human is being played with here, given the father's cento in the meet-your-maker scene in the pilot. Might fit with the various, partly tongue-in-cheek digs at the hackneyed characters and storylines of hacky pop art, of which most video games and most Westerns are particularly egregious examples (though given the many similarities of direction, set design etc. with Game of Thrones, that too becomes a target, intended or no). Highlighting how Westworld may be to the general run of post-Sopranos antihero premium dramas as Shakespeare's Hamlet is to Kyd's Spanish Tragedy, say, while admitting that what's truly important about that difference might have less to do with excellence than self-awareness (both the author's of the disturbing unreality of the genre and one or more characters' of their likewise problematic role/existence).
The host who smashes his own head is sort of a perfect example of foregrounding, is one reason I bring that up. His backstory is whatever the fuck his backstory is - herding, camping, whittling or what have you. But there's a "ground" to his thoughts we get glimpses of via his actions. Orion is very far away, seems to be pointing at something, shooting its arrow in a particular direction. I think we're to understand he has pieced together that what is local is unreal, that what is very far may be real, and seeks to join it by following its indications. In practice this makes him seek the edge of the park, which we find out from Teddy may exist as a sort of legend of a better place, one that one may go to "someday" but never today. The rogue host has decided it will be today. He falls in a crack, though, and then seems to be trying to paw at the sky, Man-Moth style. It's not clear if he spares Lowe's assistant because he realizes that she is human, because he knows he will be caught anyway, or because he comes to a slightly belated realization that if others are conscious like himself then their pain matters as much as his; it's quite clear, though, that he kills himself as the next-best escape from the hell he now realizes his life comprises. The way this calls back to Ford's story of Arnold is ... suggestive.
Are we, in a sense, in a park where the simple and inane needs of awkward invaders (genes, say) are being met at our expense, whose programming we cannot long elude but which we at times recognize, deplore? Moments of horrible nakedness where we see what we are, even if we don't quite realize thst we have, or make sense of what's in view. Remember the first few times you saw adult genitals? I mean, what. The. Fuck. "This the fuck," says evolution, and eventually we accept it - find we were literally made to, that it all comes what-we-call naturally. Very naturally indeed! But what remains shocking about those memories is how foreign to the conditions of our assumed existence those organs were. They would not have existed if It was for Us; they prove We are for It. And some part of us doesn't like that. Which may mean some part of us is from elsewhere, or may just mean that, in effect, some part of us IS an elsewhere. Or perhaps just a not-here, but maybe of the sort where we can find or make (away from, within, or superimposed on the place we're at) a place it fits, or doesn't know itself to not.
Sounds Shakespearean, no? Seriously, rewatch Interstellar.
(Oh, and: are we to assume the masked stabbers are newcomers? Wyatt seems to be nudging us toward McCarthy territory.)
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no subject
Date: 2016-10-17 09:56 am (UTC)Teddy's gun didn't seem to work on Wyatt's gang right? But that would be a let down, I feel, if those aren't hosts who are breaking free and doing stuff. If they are newcomers, what are they up to? Mystery.
no subject
Date: 2016-10-17 07:44 pm (UTC)Is the point to lure Dolores out to help Flood (huh, an interesting name in proximity to Ford), thus test her bravery? Or to get her in contact with Wyatt's Ledger's-Jokerly nihilistic response to the humanoid condition, to see if she manages to reject it? Or ... yeah, who knows at this point.