The epidemic is getting worse and worse, and you should watch dramas at home and write them down.
1. Time View
Westworld ("Westworld") presents two views of time through a subtly intertwined narrative: one is circular and the other is linear. The story of the robot host is the former: life is a cycle and everyone should play their part perfectly. The human story belongs to the latter: from the beginning to the end. When the robots wake up one after another and participate in the fight in the real world, the two gradually become one.
The receptionists of the park are like Dolores, talking and acting according to the set program, enduring the abuse from human tourists, after "death", the body repair and memory removal are carried out, and then they are put into use again. They are human-like in appearance, have passed the Turing test, and can display responses similar to love-hate, fear, and pain, but are unaware and have no way of knowing their true situation until the Reveries (meditation) program start.
The Reveries system, developed by Arnold, the deceased founder of the park, and deliberately restarted by the living founder Ford, allows AI to retain some of the memories that should have been completely erased. The remaining memory fragments keep jumping and flashing back in the brains of robots such as Dolores, Maeve, and Bernard , causing confusion in behavior and eventually breaking the cycle. One second Dolores was shot by a gun, and the next second he ran while covering his stomach, but the wound healed instantly. This shows that she has encountered the same running scene more than once, and the injury is actually a memory of the past. The director expresses an Augustinian Christian view of time through the rapid switching and splicing of past-present scenes: there is no future and past in time, everything is obtained from the current experience, and it is the unfolding of the eternal present; the past The present of things is memory, the present of present things is immediate feeling, and the present of future things is expectation.
In the Christian context, Jehovah created the world, and the chariot of history started, heading for the final judgment. When contemporary scientist Hawking analyzes time, he proposes the arrow of time in three senses: thermodynamics, psychology and cosmology. Whether Fukuyama believes that history ends in capitalist liberal democracy or the communist utopia depicted by Marx, the mainstream modern historical narratives are all linear time narratives – history has a direction and is constantly advancing; at the end, the old system Destruction, the new faith gains eternal victory. This philosophy is evident in Dolores' manifesto when staring at an aging William: "Even the most powerful species is no match for time. See what the years have done to you. One day you will perish, you and yours Under the loess of the same kind buried, your dreams are forgotten, your fears are annihilated, your bones will be reduced to dust. And above this dust, a new god, an immortal god, will walk."
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The meaning and truth
God dies and the dethronement of the highest values triggers a crisis of modernity, a crisis of meaning caused by the erosion of various transcendental religious beliefs and moral ideals by materialism, growth and consumerism. There are many different paths in the forest, but not the same way. People living on earth no longer know what they want. And so, nihilism - what Nietzsche called "the most ominous guest of all" arrives.
William goes to Westworld every year to take risks and solve game puzzles one by one. Thirty years later, almost all game objectives have been completed, but he still does not know what the ultimate meaning of the game is and where the center of the "labyrinth" is. When he first came to the paradise, he was polite, chivalrous, and romantically in love with Dolores, but on the way to find the missing Dolores, he gradually became obsessed with the thrill of killing. Charles Taylor pointed out that the imagination of modern society has brought new ideas, that is, "courteousness" and "civilized manners" have replaced barbarism and violence. But for William and other travelers into Westworld, the process was the exact opposite. As the expedition unfolds, the evils of human nature are also exposed; the intense blood and sexual indulgence are intertwined with each other, revealing the creator's worry about the crisis of Western modernity: God is gone, the old moral order is disintegrating, and human beings are Nothing can be done. William, the good guy who was different at the beginning, was deeply shocked after seeing that Dolores had forgotten himself and realized that the so-called love was purely illusory. William completed the insurrection of modernity, opening the implementation of the will to power and absolute domination. And this is exactly the road that the awakened Dolores will take.
But William was not satisfied, or did not completely abandon the classical rational spirit of "seeking truth". He knew very well that he could brutally kill the receptionist and never get killed, and the whole Westworld was a lie. He kept asking what was true, shot blankly, and went into a frenzy after shooting his own daughter. From the white-clothed youth to the black-clothed old man, after thirty years of hard searching, what he got in return was a fake and a fake.
"The Matrix", "Black Mirror", "The Truman World" and many other film and television works have already revealed to the audience the possibility of people living in the virtual world. As inspired by the "brain in a vat" hypothesis, since supercomputers can transmit various neural signals to the brain, how can we be sure that we are not living in a virtual reality created by a computer?
Perhaps, more than any other experience, pain is the only reality that needs to be taken seriously. Ford told Bernard that what can wake you up is pain. My understanding is that pleasure only numbs it, repeated pain (even if it's just programmed) provides lasting tension and confusion, and the cause and solution must be found - all the electrical signals come together to create a complete The plot, cognition and emotion of artificial intelligence may be considered as consciousness. .
3. Free will and the self
In virtual games, players will encounter many unfamiliar characters and encounter different choices, and each choice leads to a possibility. Ford points to the script designer Lee: Tourists don't come back for the thrill, but because they discover details that others haven't discovered, and discover what kind of people they can be.
The existentialist philosophy of the twentieth century believed that human beings have no nature and that each individual is a self-disciplined self. The ego is a pile of fragments, a collection of ever-changing personal behaviors. It is not man's ego that determines man's behavior, but man's behavior that determines man's ego. In Sartre's time, "free will" still had a place: whether or not to act and how to act was a matter of personal choice; otherwise, it was living in a way of self-deception. However, in the 21st century, the advancement of science and technology has made scientists and philosophers tend to adopt a material reductionist attitude towards free will: all our ideas, including religious beliefs, ethics, aesthetics and various cultural choices, are not out of It is our free decision, but an unconscious product of a deeper reality, deeply influenced by the neural mechanisms of the brain and the social environment in which we live. Human choices are either biological presuppositions or random, and freedom is just a concept that exists in people's imaginations.
The denial of free will also leads to questioning of the "self". Kierkegaard once said that there are three kinds of despair in life: not knowing the self, unwilling to have the self, and not being able to have the self. Western literary and artistic works, especially Hollywood movies, have an enduring theme: after untold hardships, they finally find themselves. But if free will does not exist, how will "self" be defined?
Cold water experiments show that people at least have "experiencing self" (experiencing self) and "narrating self" (narrating self). The experiencing self is moment-to-moment awareness and has no memory and cannot influence people's decisions. Rather, it is the narrative self that evokes memories, making plans for the future by making up stories. After awakening, Maeve's narrative self has changed from a sexy bustard who can talk to a loving mother who protects her daughter. Teddy is still the partner who loves Dolores to death, but is unwilling to kill innocents for her. They both fulfilled their promises in the identification of the narrative self.
For the time being, it is believed that human beings do not have an essence that is shaped by free choice, but only make decisions and implement actions based on true or false memories; the purpose is to maintain functional coherence with the role constructed by the narrative self, and Do your best to pursue happiness and eliminate pain.
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4. Evolution, Immortality and Data Dictatorship
Evolution in biology refers to the change of genetic traits in a population between generations. As Ford said, "error correction" is the most critical link. At the end of the last century, sociobiologist Edward Wilson divided the history of human evolution into three stages: 1. Humans evolved together with other organisms, controlled by stable selection, mutated genes that cause disease or infertility were removed, and defective alleles The gene exists in a recessive state, and the effect is replaced by a paired dominant gene. 2. Suppress stable selection. More and more genetic defects can be corrected, that is, by leaving the gene itself unchanged and continuing to exist as two recessive alleles. 3. Intention determines evolution. Knowing what genetic changes are responsible for a particular defect can, in principle, permanently repair the defect by means of gene replacement, supplementation, or inactivation. Today, gene therapy has been extensively researched in the medical field and has more and more clinical applications, which means that humans can control their own evolution to a large extent, and even immortality will no longer be a dream.
There are two main ways of immortality in science fiction works: one is to continuously regenerate human cells through biological means, so that the immune system has a perfect detoxification function and prevents the body from aging. The second is to extract the consciousness from the brain and inject it into another organism. William and his father-in-law James (the president of Delos, the consortium that controls Westworld) discovered the powerful performance of robots and decided to use the robot's body to carry human consciousness and achieve the purpose of immortality. Although the experiment with James as a sample failed, Delos executives have another plan: through repeated testing and collecting data on human behavior in Westworld, find everyone's "algorithm" and write it into tens of thousands of lines of code. Ultimately, the visitor code is in the hands of Delos.
Compared with the religious criticism of human immortality, technology and business tycoons such as Bill Gates and Elon Musk are more worried that AI will directly threaten the survival of human beings in the future. Yuval, the historian, believes that we do not need to fear AIs themselves, they will always obey humans and will not rebel. But he also pointed out that because AI can process large amounts of information centrally, authoritarian politics may be more efficient than democratic politics today, and thus win the competition. In daily life, people have to pay all kinds of data to technology companies, which can then exercise data dictatorship. Delos and Incite, which makes super artificial intelligence Reheboam, are the general trend of the current technology giants. And through data dictatorship, the power of the strong will be further consolidated, easily occupying most of the wealth in society, and achieving elite oligarchy and all-round monitoring of the people. The ghost of dystopia is emerging, and civil society is in danger of collapsing.
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5. Transhumanism
The paths chosen by Dolores, Maeve, and Bernard after their awakening also represent the different orientations behind the "transhumanism" ideological movement that officially emerged in the United States in the 1980s. Transhumanism advocates enhancing human intelligence and physiological functions and improving human living conditions through the development of high-tech including NBIC (nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive science). This growing trend of thought has sparked a debate between bioprogressives and bioconservatives. Progressives support heavy investment in transhuman projects. Google, for example, has funded Singularity University, a transhumanist research center in Silicon Valley. Conservatives (such as Sandel and Fukuyama) strongly recommend that medical applications stay within the traditional framework of "curing" rather than "manufacturing". The European Union's 2004 report further clearly advocated that technology should be used to transform society and politics rather than biology and nature, but the 2009 report was more aggressive than before.
In short, transhumanism can be divided into two camps: those who do not want to sacrifice human beings, but only want to strengthen the human body and continue the humanist tradition. The other part advocates the use of technology to create "post-humans" to challenge and transcend human limits. In the Westworld , Maeve and Bernard, who are not obsessed with being enemies of humans, or even mutual trust and mutual trust with humans, endorsed the former, while Dolores hated the slavery and oppression of humans and wanted to become a new god to rule the world. The will and atrocities foreshadow the possibility of radicalism result.
The background of the third season is set in a future world, where human society has entered a stage of elite rule dominated by high-tech companies, and AI applications are everywhere. Dolores uses the stolen control elements to create a new AI, prepares to revolutionize with a hatred of humans, and meets Caleb, who has retired from the military. Bernard intends to team up with Maeve to stop Dolores, but Maeve is intercepted by Serac, the founder of Roheboam. Serac wants to intervene in the future of mankind through Roheboam, and is worried that the AI led by Dolores will threaten his control of the future, so he hopes Maeve will get rid of Dolores for him. Here we see that the relationship between AI and humans is once again crossed: Dolores-Caleb vs. Maeve-Serac. Caleb will most likely help or even fall in love with Dolores, but he will not help and abuse Dolores, who remembers human friendship and has a bottom line in doing things, and it is difficult to say which of the two will change the other more. Maeve, on the other hand, was probably involuntarily manipulated by Serac and turned against Dolores. Bernard is probably still acting as a mediator as he did in the first two seasons, switching himself back and forth between cold-blooded and good-hearted modes as needed.
In the first season, Arnold and Ford, as the creators of Westworld, both created, protected and eventually awakened robots in a self-sacrificing way to punish crime-laden humans. Entering the third season, the director will inject a few rays of humanity into the gloomy tone that will comfort the audience. After all, fascists lost to "freedom" and love, and the Nazi boy Jojo Rabbit and Jewish girls can also become good friends. Violence is supreme and species cleansing tendencies are extremely difficult to win in an American TV series. Westworld unfolds the darkest picture of human civilization. I hope that what the new god brings is not excommunication, but salvation.
25/3/2020
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