Film and television works—Film has only been born for more than a hundred years, and TV dramas are less than 50 years old. From a macro art history perspective, it is an elementary art that is sprouting and starting. Like most art genres, the themes of movies (TV dramas) are mostly centered on Man-centered development, usually tells about themes such as religion, morality, happiness, love, life and death, freedom, etc. This is also called the "humanistic theme", which is also a common theme and content in our movies and TV series. Later, there is a narrative. The masters of study further summarized the themes of all people’s literature into the prototypes of narrative events such as expulsion, prohibition, betrayal, victory, marriage, etc., called "motifs" (quoted from "Story Morphology"), love and curiosity for stories It is inherited from the depths of human blood, so to this day, we are still obsessed with various stories expressed in various works of art.
The tradition of storytelling
This is the first aspect that "Western World" reveals to us. What is a story anyway? Why are people so passionate about stories?
Today we can learn stories from works of art such as novels, movies, dramas, etc. In the era set by "Westworld", people can experience the story in a new way: participating in the Westworld theme park, through and robots (host ) Interaction, to experience the potential line story. It can be said that this kind of experience is a way different from the Seven Art. It is closer to the game and maintains a considerable degree of authenticity. The play tradition of drama is not stuck in a rigid script. It is no exaggeration to say that it is a new art form.
So why do people never forget the story and linger about Westworld Park? In fact, we can get a glimpse of one of the protagonists, William, who constantly returns to the western world, constantly looking for the center of the maze, constantly looking for answers, etc., which shows that the story can make people involuntarily think of himself. Unable to freely bring the character plot of the story to oneself, so as to obtain extra life experience. This mode of breaking away from real life and entering a fictitious identity is exactly what people can experience in dreams, but dreams are unreliable. Sex, people cannot feel the dream in a clear situation, so there is a story, and then there is a model of West World Park: allowing you to feel the dream clearly and get out of reality.
Secondly, after such a pleasant experience of dreams, it is a new understanding and discovery of oneself. This is also the second stage of William's contact. This kind of story is mostly in games and movies. In real life, we can’t do whatever we want. It’s impossible to go into the sky, and the story just compensates for some of our innate defects. Wandering in the ocean of the story, the strong sense of substitution allows people to experience the feeling of doing whatever they want. Then, after doing whatever you want, it is The thinking of "why should I do these things on earth" is the thinking about the purpose and the result. The thinking about the result is the thinking about death. Just as everyone of us knows that a person is mortal and nothing can escape destruction. So what is death? The consciousness of death arouses people's thinking. If it is determined that the result is death, then why are there so many people living in the world happily and contentedly? This is the view of life and death.
The first question that a conscious human thinks about is what is the past, what is the future, what is alive, and what is death. If you don’t think about death, there is no point in living. When but how to think about death? The first is to observe the death of the surrounding creatures. A small grass comes to the winter solstice and died ten months later. A bird broke out of its shell, flew into the blue sky, copulated and reproduced, and died in the last few years. Animals and plants, even humans themselves, the process of human existence is to constantly witness the demise of others and reflect on their own meaning. After observing other creatures, we put our own thinking into it, that is, the beginning of writing the story. The first people who had an understanding of life wrote the story and passed it on to future generations. This is how we pass on the wisdom of our ancestors step by step. To the heart.
Inner voice
In "Western World", we will not once see the robot protagonists hear their inner voice, follow the voice, what is the inner voice? The explanation given in the film is that this is a model written by Arnold in advance-let the host hear his own program.
That is to let the program know why it wants to execute this line of code. It is not the programmer who prescribes the program, but the line of code that starts the program itself. In a disguised way, it means to execute oneself. Arnold calls it self consciousness.
Few movies or literary works explore the origin of consciousness and consciousness. More precisely, movies or novels are derivatives of consciousness. How can you? How about using derivatives to explore the nature of the source? Of course, this is just an unwritten rule. It is also a derivative of human consciousness—philosophy. It treats the exploration of consciousness, the essence of consciousness, and the origin of consciousness as our own work. In history, many famous philosophers have made conclusions about consciousness, and we are familiar with them. Mr. Marx, the origin of consciousness is matter, matter is the first nature, consciousness is the second nature, and Mr. Plato advocates the kingdom of ideas, and consciousness is a bridge between the kingdom of ideas and human beings. Leaving aside the theory of the philosophers, let’s start with the theory of consciousness in "Western World". Of course, this is not a complete denial of the above philosophical theories. It is only an analysis of another theory and does not exclude the above philosophical theories.
Most of the theories about the origin of consciousness in "Western World" come from the book "The Breakdown of the Dichotomous Mind and the Origin of Consciousness"
This is a book originated from Freud's psychoanalytic theory. Of course, it does not completely copy the theory of psychoanalysis, but summarizes and innovates on the basis of psychoanalysis.
First of all, the book proposes that the basis of consciousness is memory. As in the film, first let the robot host retain the memory, and then they will process the memory. Among them, painful memories are especially important. Modern medicine also shows that pain can make people secret a special kind of memory. The stimulant endorphin (endorphin), which can deepen the human brain, in other words can make people remember more clearly, this is also related to the animal’s tendency to avoid harm, pain makes people (animals) remember, so Avoid it next time. In addition to making people remember more clearly, pain can also make brain nerves more frequent and promote associations, which is what we often call "metaphors" and "metaphors."
Metaphors and metonymy are one of the underlying basic functions of the human brain, and they are also an important pillar of consciousness. In fact, when humans are dreaming, metaphors and metonymy are shown as displacement and condensation, such as when you worry about your body. At times, the dream will show in the form of dreaming of a house collapsed, dreaming of a snake ridden, etc., because in people’s lives "the body has broken down" and "the house has broken down" have a vertical similarity, this is a dream In the metaphor, there is also a metaphor for the same reason, poisonous snakes and diseases are not good food, and they have horizontal similarity, we often compare diseases to poisonous snakes, because they are all entangled in the victim's body, this is Metonymy. Metaphor and metonymy are the two pillars of human consciousness. They are the starting point of human thinking and the starting point of countless artistic techniques. For example, in poetry, we see the cry of a bird as a metaphor for inner joy, and the birth of the sun as a metaphor. The future is bright and so on. The emergence of metaphors is that people begin to think abstractly, and they begin to express concepts that cannot be directly embodied in a reproducible way.
Hidden behind abstract thinking is consciousness, that is, we begin to think for the sake of thinking. Thinking "thinking itself" is
just like what Arnold said. Consciousness and the consciousness system are not a simple pyramid-like system from the bottom up, although We can try to understand it this way, but the essence is that the consciousness system is more like a labyrinth in which we humans have to explore for thousands of years. Maybe we humans will never get the answer, maybe only our creations can calmly think about ourselves.
——The so-called "mystery of the authorities, bystanders clear"
View more about Westworld reviews
