An Analysis of the Westworld Maze

Published December 9, 2016 · Updated July 6, 2022

I’m a friend of George, whose email you read out for episode 8 telegraph. We’ve been discussing the maze reveals in episode 10 and I thought I’d share my musings.

I think the maze allegory is an elegant, and fascinating theory of consciousness. It feels like a new event is dropped into narrative loops to force the AI to make a decision, and any decision will fork a new dynamic decision tree. The way they traverse that tree is the maze. I agree with your assertion that all hosts are in the maze insofar as they are all in a basic narrative that gets disrupted by Ford, e.g. throwing moral dilemmas into the mix or tweaking with their programming to enable memories.

I suppose there are two ways of changing the outcome of a decision, change the choices or change the decision mechanism. Ford has been playing with both these variables with the hosts to help the navigate to the centre of the maze.

The more a host chooses a tree that points to consciousness, the more tests he presents them with, which results in a few select hosts evolving their decision making processes to better navigate Fords challenges. Their existence is a continuation of tests, like a maze, until they realise that the only test is whether to take the test or not. Consciousness as an objective property is a myth, realising this paradoxically is the most sentient behaviour you can display.

I’m yet to reconcile this with reasoning for Dolores’ murder of Ford, although her realisation of the maze in my mind would logically lead to her to want to freely roaming Delos like Maeve (whose decisions seem much more realistic and in line with my maze analysis) she chooses to kill Ford, and then a bunch of guests. How this sows her sentience I don’t know.

Something to think about for the next 18 months I suppose.

Regards

Phil from Chester, UK

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