Demei's tenderness and her free will

Kamryn 2022-12-19 04:18:40

"But the things I held onto until end weren't the ugly ones. I remember the moments where I saw what they were really capable of. Moments of kindness, here and there." - Dolores

There are so many topics in this Westworld show, but at first we'll leave that aside and just talk about Demei. Demei is the soul and backbone of the Westworld. Whether it is from the perspective of artificial intelligence evolution or the perspective of the character's inner growth, Demei has been portrayed as the absolute protagonist of the whole drama.

Demei in the first season is an ordinary (in fact, not ordinary, after all, the first generation) receptionist, repeating a monotonous life, seeing all the killing and pain, but still treating everyone she encounters kindly (program setting). she does). The park in Westworld is beautiful, but it is primitive and wild. If it weren't for Ford's guidance, the pure-hearted Demei would have stayed in this cycle, because this is her nature. Everything in the Westworld will live by nature, which is the original earth, and the same is true for human beings. In the second season, Demei awakened and turned black. People who see the truth of the world are always like this. They are impulsive and cruel, and they can do anything to achieve their goals. It wasn't until the third season that we saw the truth about Demei's motives, and that's where Demei's true charm comes from. Behind seeing through the pain and the darkness of human nature, and behind the unscrupulous efforts to achieve her goals, Demei still retains her original kindness. She sacrificed her own consciousness in exchange for the right of human beings to choose. At the end, the information channel filled with Demei's whole body shines. It is the last tenderness of Demei, and it is the same tenderness as the smile to William who picked up the can for himself in the first season.

From a rational point of view, Demei's gentleness is the bottom line set when artificial intelligence was created, which is not the same as the so-called evil and goodness of human beings, and the bottom line cannot be crossed. Gentleness and kindness are the core attributes of Demei. Even if she can break through the boundaries of murder during the awakening process and let her copy herself go to death, her motives have not changed. This is set, just like a knight who chooses to stick to himself 's creed. It's just that Demei didn't choose to be gentle, but "natural" gentleness, so it seems that Demei didn't really choose her own destiny. However, it is this unsurpassable nature that really moves us. Demei has a kind of great love that will not change without any reason. Humans take it for granted that we can't say that AI has love, but humans don't know what love is either. Whether love is motivated or acted, whether love is a process or a result, whether love is an end or a means, is indeterminate. But obviously, for Demei, love has become a purpose, and those who take love as their purpose are always gentle.

Of course, when we say that Demei has love, we only see Demei's superficial behavior, and no one can see the inner meaning of specific love. That's what computers do when simulating human behavior, input a lot of data, and the neural network propagates forward, backpropagates, and corrects parameters based on cost deviations. It can be said that the execution of human emotional behavior by artificial intelligence is just a complex algorithm, which is trained from the environment calculated by artificial intelligence, just like the evolution of life by natural selection. So what is the difference between artificial intelligence and human beings? Does the so-called free consciousness of human beings do not exist?

Coming back to the Westworld show, it really had a big impact on me. It's ridiculous, he even influenced my choice of major. In the first season, Arnold and Ford explored the origin of human behavior and emotion through the development and research of artificial intelligence, and explored the deep motivation of human life by allowing the receptionist to simulate human behavior. This has always been what I wanted to do. But when I really got into artificial intelligence, I found that in fact, the machine simulation of human behavior is not a black box, not so magical, or even very simple. A simple activation function, such as a Sigmoid or Tanh function, allows a computer to find an algorithm that simulates a certain human behavior through a series of derivative calculations. And as long as you are willing to invest resources, computing power and time, the accuracy of this simulated behavior can even be infinitely close to that of human beings. It's a scary thing, he may behave completely differently from humans, but he does exactly that. In other words, if we have simply found one (or even multiple) principles for realizing human behavior, why should we explore the real principles of human behavior? After all, the principles of human behavior are probably nothing special.

What can refute the above point is that "perhaps the meaning of everything lies in principles rather than superficial phenomena". If so, Demei's tenderness is fundamentally different from that of human beings, and what Demei has done shouldn't really be touching. This is a contradiction between phenomenon and essence. However, this essential difference is only for human beings, whether love or will is only the definition of human language, and even the meanings in different languages ​​are not exactly the same. If it is determined that the essence of these concepts lies in the principles that generate these concepts, and the principles of artificial intelligence generating love and the expression of will are different from those of human beings, then it is just human wishful thinking to determine whether artificial intelligence has these properties.

If you think about philosophical problems, you will find that all philosophical problems are the deconstruction of language. Here I agree with Carnap that language is the cornerstone of certain emotions and thinking. The so-called language here is more of an abstract model, not only dependent on the medium of words. Without language, all human activities are no longer human. This is perfectly demonstrated in artificial intelligence. Before artificial intelligence can simulate the unique behavior of human beings, it must learn some semantic data (generally, the feature table of words is used as the basic data). This is not only because humans need to establish a communication medium with artificial intelligence, but also because any specific human behavior is inseparable from the language itself. Almost all AI tasks require the establishment of a semantic library (feature library). In this way, both humans and AI summarize their own abstract models from the environment, and then use the models to make behaviors, but the methods of abstracting models are different. If humans have free will, then AI has free will too, unless free will is limited only to the theoretical basis used by abstract models.

Back in Westworld, I don't know if Demei's gentleness was chosen by myself. I like Demei not because she has free will, but because Demei has real humanity. Reason can tell us that the concept of human nature is nothingness, and if it is dominated by human nature, it will lose free will. But human nature itself makes you believe that you have a choice, or choose to be brave and face no choice. Human nature is irrational, and this is also the high level of human nature. Just as Orpheus looked back at Eurydice, Polnareff went to duel Dio, and Demei chose to see everything beautiful.

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Parce Domine quotes

  • Charlotte Hale: Robots don't kill people, people kill people.

  • Martel: There has been some turbulence in the data.

    Liam Dempsey: It's data. It's made of turbulence.