This article is written for all of you who do not know that you are clones, replicators, or androids.
The second season of "Westworld" continues the timeline at the end of the first season, with the receptionists fully awakened and the Dolores bloodbathed in paradise.
But what moved me was that Maeve already knew that her fate was arranged, and her daughter was only one of the countless arranged roles, but she resolutely embarked on an unknown path to find her daughter.
While Maeve is an android, this detail makes her that capitalized person.
Westworld has big ambitions, and that ambition builds on the most important foundation that has propelled Western sci-fi over the years — what I call the first push of current sci-fi: who I am.
Half of Westworld's episodes begin with a close-up of Dolores' face. In the first episode, she sat naked in the lab. After that, there was the beginning of her waking up on the operating table with only one head left, and the beginning of her waking up slowly in bed in the early morning.
This is one of the details of Westworld that strikes me the most.
I travel a lot for a while. Sometimes a city is changed every day, or even a city every half a day. With this high frequency of movement, I occasionally wake up in the morning without knowing where I am. Pulling back the curtains of the hotel, the identical featureless high-rises outside the window told me that I could be anywhere. In fact, I quite enjoy the feeling of completely losing the geographic coordinates, which will give me the illusion of complete freedom. This feeling doesn't last long, it only takes a minute or two, and when my memory returns to normal, I may remember a lot of bad things: that difficult customer still has to make a cheeky visit, and if this trip is in vain, to be criticized...
Of course, there may be good things to remember after the memory is restored, but the chances are not high...
After watching "Westworld", I suddenly felt that maybe one day, when I wake up in the morning, if I am lucky, I will open the window and find that I am in a huge laboratory. On the cold operating table, a mess of wires was exposed under the neck.
Such a tomorrow would certainly be bad. But Maeve also gave me the confidence that even if we know everything in our lives is designed, we're going to make it happen.
If there is really only one head left when I wake up, I will also quickly find a body to connect it. I owe Kong Batian's manuscript not yet finished.
"There is only one kind of heroism in life: that is to love life after knowing the truth of life." This sentence of Romain Rolland really seems to be said to androids.
In "Blade Runner 2049", the clone agent K, played by Commander Gao, slowly discovers that he may be a real person, which may have ignited a fire in his boring life, but when he learns that he may be a real person After all, he was still the "fake" who was discriminated against, and he still continued to fulfill his mission with the same life: to find Harrison Ford, who thought he was his father, and send him to his biological daughter.
There is a line to K in "2049": Oh, do you think it's you (the first baby born from a replica of a human womb)? you are wrong! We all wish it was ourselves!
Yes, there were so many better replicants standing opposite K at that time, why should he be the chosen one?
Think about how amazing life is: we have the most complex brain, the most sophisticated eyeball, and the most noble soul in the universe that have evolved over hundreds of millions of years, and then outperformed hundreds of millions of sperm to find the only egg ... Hundreds of millions, that's probably the pinnacle of our lives. In the long and mediocre life that followed, we were at most competing with dozens of classmates in the class, and hundreds of people in the company. We already felt extremely stressed, and we would suffer from depression as soon as Monday arrived. You have to flee Beishangguang at every turn, and become a single dog in a city with millions of school-age women... Thinking about the glory of a genuine human being who has to leave hundreds of millions of competitors behind, don't you really have any doubts? Is it possible that you are a replicator?
Maybe, all your memories are implanted, and every day you open your eyes, you are living an arranged life like Dolores.
I remember being very close to death twice, once swimming in the Yangtze River, and once falling asleep while driving. When I was a child, I grew up on the edge of the Yangtze River in Hubei. I soaked in the Yangtze River every summer. Once, I wanted to swim to the center of the river on a whim, but I lost my energy halfway through the swim and almost drowned on the way back. The last time I fell asleep while driving was almost 20 years ago, on a country road, I suddenly got tired and fell asleep for 2 seconds in a weird way... In the years that followed, I thought more than once that maybe that swim My feet didn't touch the bottom of the river at the last second, and maybe I didn't wake up after only 2 seconds of sleep during that drive. This is only what I realize, there are so many dangers lurking around us, and watching social news every day will have the blessing of the rest of my life.
My life has countless opportunities to end prematurely. In fact, it is a miracle that we are still alive. Did you really get rescued when you entered the emergency room in the middle of the night? The flower pot that fell from the upstairs was really only 1 cm away from your head? That car really didn't hit you that day?
Perhaps, the current "you" is just a clone generated by copying the previous memory into this body for some purpose.
Who am I, is an old philosophical question. The first person to realize this was Zhuangzi, who wrote "Xiaoyaoyou". He told a story in Zhuang Zhou's dream of a butterfly: Zhuang Zhou dreamed of a butterfly in the past, a lifelike butterfly. I do not know Zhou also. Suddenly feel, then Ququ Ran Zhou also. I don't know that Zhou Zhimeng is a butterfly and? Butterfly Dream is Zhou Yu? Zhou and Butterfly must be divided. This is called materialization.
From this point of view, the earliest artificial intelligence is a butterfly. The ancient Chinese are really romantic. Liang Zhu died and turned into a butterfly. Zhuang Zhou suspected that he had turned into a butterfly. There is a hotel brand in Yunnan, which is actually called Mengdiezhuang.
At that time, Zhuangzi could only think of the concept of "materialization". Then after more than 2,000 years, a sci-fi movie finally visualized this concept: The Matrix.
Then after another 20 years, "Westworld" turned out, with higher ambitions and a bigger pattern. In the past 20 years, sci-fi films such as "Moon", "Inception", "Blade Runner", "Black Mirror", "Copy" and so on have been born one after another. What am I doing?” is a philosophical question that has been passed down for more than 2,000 years.
In fact, "Westworld" is not an original, it is adapted from the science fiction film of the same name in the 1970s. 40 years later, we can clearly see the change in the driving force of science fiction in the same work: in the old version of "Westworld", the awakening of robots was due to accidental mistakes, and the film strives to present only visual spectacles. 40 years later, the awakening of androids' self-awareness is because they began to think "who am I", and even on a technical level, "Westworld" provides a set of logically self-consistent principles for the awakening of androids. With this principle, like the Marvel Universe, "Westworld" has its own worldview and has the ability to build its own universe. It is no different from that movie 40 years ago. And the heights that science fiction works can reach today are also unattainable by the science fiction of the past.
Science fiction has finally developed from the positioning of "for children" to the most reflective art height today.
Although the sequelae of watching "Westworld" is that I will sometimes suspect that I am an android, but I will continue to watch it, hoping that it will not end up unfinished, and will not compromise. There are still a lot of theme parks in "Westworld" that haven't appeared, a lot of pits to be filled, and a lot of actresses who don't have a dew point (such as Musk's ex-wife), I really want to see how it can transform the art of science fiction to what extent.
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